Volume 10, Number 2/3, October 2014

Constraint Programming News

Editors:

Guido Tack, Pedro Meseguer, Pierre Schaus, Roland Yap


CONTENTS

Editorial

This is the combined issue 2 and 3 of CP News for 2014.

In this issue, you find the latest news from the ACP Executive Committee (as usual). Two items to highlight: the results of the ACP EC elections have been published, and the EC is still looking for proposals to host the 2015 ACP Summer School.

The rest of this news letter is focused on a number of new (or "refurbished") activities: an archive of CP-related PhD theses, an archive of all papers published in the CP conference series, and a new look for the CSPLib web site.

As always, if you would like to contribute to the newsletter, or have announcements for our jobs or events listings, please get in touch!

NEWS

Here are the topics from the Q2 and Q3 2014 ACP Executive Committee Reports, available at
http://www.a4cp.org/executive-committee-decisions/2014/07/2014-quarter-2 and
http://www.a4cp.org/executive-committee-decisions/2014/10/2014-quarter-3:

Archiving CP-related PhD theses

The ACP wants to make it easier for the constraint programming community to promote, archive and find the research that is done by PhD students in the field. We are therefore starting a PhD thesis archive on the ACP web server.

As an ACP member, you can submit a PhD thesis for archival on the ACP web site. The minimum information you have to add is the title, author, graduation date, and an abstract of the thesis. Ideally, you would also upload a PDF of the thesis itself, or at least add a link to where the full text is available online. You can also add links to publications that present material from the thesis.

Submissions will be reviewed only superficially for correctness and completeness of the information, and will be included in the archive if the thesis would be considered on-topic for e.g. the CP conference or the Constraints journal.

CP Archive

There is a new section on the ACP web site: the CP Archive. It is a database of all papers published in the CP conference series. The web interface enables you to do a free text search or restrict the results by selecting individual topics.

In addition to a searchable data base, you can also explore some aggregate statistics. This currently includes interactive charts displaying the different topics per year and the authors' countries per year.

CSP Lib

The CSPLib web site recently received a complete makeover. The new editor-in-chief of CSPLib is Christopher Jefferson, and he has taken over maintenance of the web site together with Bilal Syed Hussain.

The system is now based on a public git repository, which makes it much easier to contribute new problems. The licensing has also been clarified, and all content is available under a Creative Commons license. In addition to the problem specifications in English, the library also contains models for several different constraint solvers, as well as corresponding data files.

Please help make this even more useful than it already is by contributing your problem descriptions, models and data files!

A big thank-you to the previous maintainers, Ian Miguel, Brahim Hnich, Ian Gent and Toby Walsh, and the new team!

MiniZinc challenge 2014 results

The MiniZinc challenge was run for the seventh time this year, with 18 solvers competing in four categories. The results were announced at CP2014. Congratulations to the winners:

Category Gold Silver Bronze
Fixed OR-Tools Opturion CPX SICStus Prolog
Free iZplus Opturion CPX Choco
Parallel OR-Tools Opturion CPX Choco
Open OR-Tools Opturion CPX Choco

OTHER NEWS

Have a look at our publications section for the latest articles in the Constraints journal, and find career news and events in their corresponding sections.

The news sections are now also available as RSS feeds. Look out for the RSS icon at the bottom of the lists.