2025 Quarterly Report 1
In this quarterly report 1, we provide updates on the ACP Executive Committee, the ACP Summer School 2025, and the calls for awards and bids for CP 2027 and ACP Summer School 2026!
ACP.1: Executive Committee Update
The ACP held elections last year to replace four outgoing members of the Executive Committee (EC).
We as a community greatly thank outgoing members David Bergman (president), Tias Guns (secretary), Zeynep Kiziltan (DEI delegate), and Chris Beck (past president).
The new elected members of the Executive Committee are Roland Yap, Nadjib Lazaar (who was already serving as the treasurer of the ACP as a non-voting member), Miquel Bofill, and Roie Zivan. They will serve a term of 4 years starting 2025.
Within the new team, the newly appointed roles of the ACP EC are:
- President - Gilles Pesant
- Secretary - Miquel Bofill
- Treasurer - Nadjib Lazaar
- Conference Coordinator - Hélène Verhaeghe
- Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Delegate - Inês Lynce
- Communications: Roie Zivan
We look forward to continue serving the community, and welcome your input.
ACP.2: Summer School 2025
The ACP Summer School 2025 will be in Benin, Africa. It is organized by CP community members Ratheil Houndji and John Aoga.
The dates are set at 25-29 August 2025.
Registration is open! The Deadline is 23 June 2025.
More information is available on https://school.a4cp.org/summer2025/
ACP.3: Call for Awards
Every year, the Association for Constraint Programming recognizes individual community members who are making outstanding contributions to the field.
This year we have three different awards, for researchers of different seniority:
- The ‘Doctoral Research’ award: for researchers that obtained their PhD in the last 2 calendar years (i.e., official completion in 2023-01-01 to 2024-12-31)
- The ‘Early Career Research’ award: for rising stars that obtained their PhD 2-8 years ago (i.e., 2017-01-01 to 2022-12-31)
- The ‘Research Excellence’ award: for well-established and highly influential researchers
For each award, a nominator has to submit an official nomination for a colleague, and arrange for referees to submit separate reference letters, as described on the nomination forms below. The information required for the nomination and the rules for submission are specific to each award and it is the nominator's responsibility to submit the proper information and have referees submit reference letters.
We welcome nominations from you! Please take a moment to think of someone who would deserve such a wonderful recognition.
- Doctoral Research award nominations: https://forms.gle/kk8Lo9kwAnqkb6sY7
- Early Career Research award nominations: https://forms.gle/RdLfSTgt9ZU1NzzP7
- Research Excellence award nominations: https://forms.gle/fXnfosFYYYQKNevS6
The deadline is 30 May 2025.
ACP.4: Bids for CP 2027
The ACP Executive Committee (EC) holds the annual International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP). Since the ACP plans CP conferences two years in advance, we now solicit bids for CP 2027. If you are interested in organising a future CP conference, then you need to make a proposal to the Conference Coordinator of the EC (helene.verhaeghe@uclouvain.be) by the 15th of June 2025.
The proposal must be made by those volunteering to be Conference Chairs (CC) of the conference and volunteering to be responsible for the budget and local arrangements in the proposed city. Proposals must follow the guidelines at http://www.a4cp.org/events/conference-organisation-policy and should address in brief all the following items:
- Location
- Possible dates
- Local organisers and brief description of previous experience organising similar events
- Conference facilities and hotels (with URLs if available)
- Availability of student accommodation
- Possible social events
- Preliminary budget and financial considerations (e.g. local sponsorship, cost of the conference facilities)
- Travel information
- Support of local and national organisations
- Collocated events that might be held alongside the conference
- Any other information that might be of relevance
The CCs of a CP conference are scientifically acknowledged people in the constraint programming community. A single person can be CC, but the workload is usually best distributed over several people. The EC will select one from the proposals submitted. The EC will independently select a Programme Chair (PC) for the conference to be responsible for the technical program.
ACP.5: Bids for Summer School 2026
The Association for Constraint Programming invites proposals for organizing the ACP Summer School on Constraint Programming in 2026. Since its establishment, the summer school has been a major success with feedback from student attendees being very positive.
The proposed topic of the school can be on general CP or on a specific research subject. A complete list of ACP summer schools can be found here: http://www.a4cp.org/events/summer-schools.
Members of the CP community who are interested in organizing the 2026 Summer School should send a proposal to helene.verhaeghe@uclouvain.be by the 15th of June 2025, covering the following aspects:
- topic of the school
- location (and possible co-locations)
- dates
- organizers
- tentative list of speakers
- provisional budget
Co-location with related summer schools, such as those organised by SAT or ICAPS, will be viewed favorably. We will also take into account location, giving slight preference to locations where ACP believes there is an opportunity to expand the CP community.
ACP.6: Sponsoring
The ACP sponsors a number of activities that promote the use of CP and dissemination of CP research. For example, we sponsor part of the ACP summer school.
In the past quarter we agreed to sponsor two activities:
- ICS 2025: The 18th INFORMS Computing Society Conference, March 14-16, 2025, Toronto, Canada, where three tutorials on CP and successful domains were given by Pierre Schauss, Chris Beck and Willem van Hoeve.
- CPAIOR 2025: The 22nd International Conference on the Integration of Constraint Programming, Artificial Intelligence, and Operations Research, November 10-13, 2025, Melbourne, Australia.