Volume 1, Number 1, April 2005

Contents

• news: CP elections, CP Summer School, CP 2005 and (sneak preview of) CP 2006
• publications: books, PhD theses, special issues, web resources, software
• events: forthcoming conferences and workshops
• career news: Postdoc position with CoCoA Team, Actenum

News

Association of Constraint Programming (ACP)

After consulting various interested parties, the Organizing Committee of the Constraint Programming Conference (otherwise known as the CP OC) has decided to re-form itself as the Association for Constraint Programming (ACP).  The goal of the Association is to promote the field of constraint programming.  The Association is currently finalizing the details of its legal status in France. The Association has adopted the previous statutes of the CP OC, and the CP OC has become the Executive Committee of the ACP.  Each year, the CP community elects two new members to serve on this Executive Committee. The committee has 10 members: 6 elected members, and 4 members drawn from the current and past program and conference chairs. The committee decides the venue of the annual CP conference, program and conference chairs. It also supports activities like the doctoral programme, summer schools, this newsletter, etc.

ACP Executive Committee elections in summer 2005

This year, the elected terms of Christian Bessiere and Toby Walsh end, along with the terms of Francesca Rossi and James Bown as the chairs of CP 2004.  The next election will be held electronically over the summer.  We therefore are calling for nominations for candidates for this election.  Nominations should be sent to the Secretary to the Committee, Toby Walsh <tw@cse.unsw.edu.au> by June 1st. Each candidate should be nominated either by a member of the current CP OC or by any set of three people belonging to the CP community.

Summer School on Constraint Programming

The First International Summer School on Constraint Programming will be held September 11-15, 2005 in Hotel Villa del Mare, Acquafredda di Maratea in Italy. The school is supported by the Association for Constraint Programming and CoLogNet. Early registration is April 30th, 2005. For more details, see here.

Next CP Conferences

CP-2005 will be held in Sitges (near Barcelona) on October 1st to 5th 2005. The conference will be co-located with ICLP. Pedro Meseguer and Javier Larrosa will be local chairs. Peter van Beek will be the program chair.  Michela Milano and Zeynep Kiziltan will chair the Doctoral Programme.  Paper submissions are due May 6th 2005. Doctoral programme submissions are due May 16th 2005.

CP-2006 will be held in Nantes in 2006. Frederic Benhamou will be the program chair.

Publications

Books:

Milano, Michela (Ed.).  Constraint and Integer Programming: Toward a Unified Methodology.  2004, 403 p., Hardcover.  ISBN: 1-4020-7583-9

Bartholomew-Biggs, Michael.  Nonlinear Optimization with Financial Applications 2005, XVII, 261 p. 20 illus., Hardcover.  ISBN: 1-4020-8110-3.

Van Roy, Peter (Ed.).  Multiparadigm Programming in Mozart/Oz: Second International Conference, MOZ 2004, Charleroi, Belgium, October 7-8, 2004, Revised Selected Papers Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol.  3389, 2005, XV, 329 p. Softcover.  ISBN: 3-540-25079-4

PhD theses:

Ines Lynce, PhD (Instituto Superior Tecnico), Propositional Satisfiability: Techniques, Algorithms and Applications, 2005.

Special issues:

Hybrid Metaheuristics. Special issue of the Journal of Mathematical Modelling and Algorithms. Guest editors: Christian Blum, Andrea Roli, and Michael Sampels. To appear in 2005.

Combining Logical Systems. Special issue of Information and Computation. Guest editors: Alessandro Armando and Christophe Ringeissen. Submission deadline: January 22, 2005.

Journal of Heuristics, Special issue on Preferences and Soft Constraints. Guest editors: S. Bistarelli and F. Rossi. Paper submission deadline: February 27th, 2005. Submissions are to be made electronically, by using the Springer online manuscript submission system of the Journal of Heuristics.

Machine Learning Journal, Special Issue on INDUCTIVE LOGIC PROGRAMMING. Guest editors: Ashwin Srinivasan, Rui Camacho, Ross King.  Paper submission deadline: April 1, 2005.  Instructions for submission can be found at http://www.springeronline.com/sgw/cda/frontpage/0,11855,4-40109-70-35726603-0,00.html.  In addition to submitting the paper following the instructions given in the above URL, please submit it also to ashwin.srinivasan@in.ibm.com and rcamacho@fe.up.pt

Web resources

The Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) web-pages have been moved and updated: http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~dtai/projects/CHR/

Software:

K.U.Leuven CHR stable releases: The K.U.Leuven CHR system is now available in two major open-source Prolog systems: SWI-Prolog and XSB.  http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~toms/Research/CHR/

Koalog announces the release of Koalog Constraint Solver v2.4.  Koalog Constraint Solver (KCS) is a powerful Java library for Constraint Programming.  Visit http://www.koalog.com/php/jcs.php for documentation, code examples, KCS release notes.

Events

ORPA-1, First Operational Research Practice in Africa Conference.  7-8 April 2005, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.

UNIF'2005, The 19th UNIF workshop (collocated with RTA'05 and TLCA'05 as part of RDP'05). April 19--21, 2005, Nara, Japan. Paper submission deadline: January 28, 2005.
RTA'05, The 16th Int. Conf. on Rewriting Techniques and Applications (co-located with TLCA'05 as part of RDP'05). April 19--21, 2005, Nara, Japan.

MTCoord 2005, 1st International Workshop on Methods and Tools for Coordinating Concurrent, Distributed and Mobile Systems (held in conjunction with Coordination'2005).  April 23, 2005, Namur, Belgium.
FLAIRS, Technical Track on Constraint Solving and Programming, 18th International FLAIRS Conference, 2005). May 16-18, 2005, Clearwater Beach, Florida, USA.
FLAIRS, Technical Track on Secure Multiparty Computations and Distributed Constraint Reasoning, International FLAIRS Conference, 2005). May 16-18, 2005, Clearwater Beach, Florida, USA.
CP-AI-OR 2005, International Conference on Integration of AI and OR Techniques in Constraint Programming for Combinatorial Optimization Problems, Prague, Czech Republic. May 30 - June 1, 2005.

Plan Execution: A Reality Check---Bridging the gap between plans and their execution (a workshop held in conjunction with ICAPS-05).  June 5th-10^th 2005, Monterey, California, USA.
CPPS-05, Workshop on Constraint Programming for Planning and Scheduling (to be held alongside ICAPS-05). June 5th-10th 2005, Monterey, California, USA.
VVPS'05, 1st Workshop on Verification and Validation of Model-Based Planning and Scheduling Systems (held in conjunction with ICAPS 2005). June 6, 7 - 2005, Monterey, California, USA. Paper submission deadline: April 18, 2005.

Competition in Knowledge Engineering for Planning (held in conjunction with ICAPS 2005). June 6, 7 - 2005, Monterey, California, USA.
ICAPS 2005, International Conference on Automated Planning & Scheduling, June 5 - 10, 2005, Monterey, California, USA.

SAT-2005, Eighth International Conference on Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing (co-located with 2005 SAT SOLVER COMPETITION and 2005 QBF SOLVER EVALUATION). June 19-23 2005, St Andrews, Scotland. Paper submission deadline: February 20, 2005.

CSCLP 2005, Joint Annual Workshop of ERCIM/CoLogNet on Constraint Solving and Constraint Logic Programming. June 20-22, 2005 Uppsala, Sweden.  Paper submission deadline: May 6, 2005.
TIME 2005, The 12th International Symposium on TEMPORAL REPRESENTATION AND REASONING. June 23-25, 2005, Burlington, Vermont, USA. Paper submission deadline: January 22, 2005.

CLIMA VI, Sixth International Workshop on Computational Logic in Multi-Agent Systems.  June 27-29, 2005, City University, London, UK.  Paper submission deadline: April 16, 2005. 

Tenth Annual AAAI/SIGART Doctoral Consortium (co-located with AAAI 2005).  July 9-10, 2005 Pittsburgh, PA.

AAAI'05, The Twentieth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. July 9-13, 2005, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

IAAI'05, The Seventeenth Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence

Conference.  July 9-13, 2005, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

PPDP05, Seventh ACM-SIGPLAN International Symposium on Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming. 11-13 July 2005, Lisboa, Portugal.

PDMC 2005, 4th International Workshop on PARALLEL AND DISTRIBUTED METHODS IN VERIFICATION.  July 10, 2005 - Lisboa, Portugal.  Paper submission deadline: April 17, 2005. 

IFORS 2005, The IFORS Triennial 2005 Conference of The International Federation of Operational Research Societies.  July 11-15, 2005, Hilton Hawaii Village, Beach Resort & Spa, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA.
MISTA 2005, 2nd Multidisciplinary International Conference on Scheduling : Theory and Applications. 18 - 21 July 2005, New York, USA.

CADE-20, 20th International Conference on Automated Deduction.  July 22 - July 27, 2005, Tallinn, Estonia.
AAMAS 2005, 4th International Joint Conference AAMAS on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems. July 25 - 29, 2005, UtrechtUniversity, The Netherlands.

DALT 2005, the 3rd International Workshop on Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies. July 25, Utrecht, the Netherlands.
SARA'2005, Symposium on Abstraction, Reformulation and Approximation. July 26th to 29th, 2005, Radisson SAS Airth Castle & Hotel, Stirlingshire Scotland, UK.
IJCAI-05 Workshop on Advances in Preference Handling. July 30 to August 1, 2005, Edinburgh, Scotland. Paper submission deadline: March 24, 2005.
The Fifth Workshop on Modelling and Solving Problems with Constraints (to be held at IJCAI 2005). July 30-August 1, 2005, Edinburgh, Scotland. Paper submission deadline: April 23, 2005.
IJCAI 2005 Workshop on Configuration (to be held at IJCAI 2005). July 30-August 1, 2005, Edinburgh, Scotland. Paper submission deadline: March 8, 2005.
IJCAI-05, Nineteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. 30 July-5 August 2005, Edinburgh, Scotland.

FG-MOL 2005, The 10th conference on Formal Grammar and The 9th Meeting on Mathematics of Language (Collocated with the European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information), 5-7 August 2005, Edinburgh, Scotland.
CSL'05, The 14th Annual Conference (and 19th International Workshop) in Computer Science Logic. 22-25 August 2005, University of Oxford, UK. Paper submission deadline: 1 April, 2005.

HM 2005, HYBRID METAHEURISTICS - Second International Workshop.  August 29-31, 2005, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain.  Paper submission deadline: 1 April, 2005. 

AICS05, The 16th Irish conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science.  7th-9th September 2005, Marine Hotel in Ballycastle, Co. Antrim. Paper submission deadline: 13th May 2005. 

First International Summer School on Constraint Programming.  September 11-15, 2005, Hotel Villa del Mare, Acquafredda di Maratea -- Italy.  Early registration: June 30, 2005.  Late registration: July 31, 2005.

FTP'2005, 5th International Workshop on First-Order Theorem Proving. September 14-17, 2005, Koblenz, Germany.  Paper submission deadline: May 27, 2005. 

WCFLP 2005, International Workshop on Curry and Functional Logic Programming (An ACM SIGPLAN sponsored workshop at ICFP 2005).  September 29, 2005, Tallinn, Estonia.  Paper submission deadline: June 5, 2005.
MOZ 2004, Second International Mozart/Oz Conference (MOZ 2004). 7-8 Oct, 2004, Charleroi, Belgium. Paper submission deadline: 16 July, 2004.
FroCoS 2005, 5th International Workshop on Frontiers of Combining Systems. September 19-21, 2005, Vienna, Austria. Paper submission deadline: May 9, 2005.

Call for Applications to Doctoral Programme, Eleventh International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2005). October 1-5 2005, Sitges, Spain.  Applications deadline: May 16, 2005. Email application to: cp-phd2005@deis.unibo.it.

CP 2005, 11th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming.  October 1-5 2005, Sitges, Spain. Co-located with ICLP and an annular eclipse.  Tutorial Proposal submission deadline: May 21, 2005.  Paper submission deadline: May 6, 2005.

ICLP'05, Twenty first International Conference on Logic Programming.  2-5 October, 2005, Sitges, Spain. Co-located with CP 2005 and an annular eclipse.  Paper submission deadline: May 6, 2005.

ISCIS'05 The 20th International Symposium on Computer and Information Sciences.  October 26-28, 2005 - Istanbul, Turkey.

ICTAI 2005, 17th IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence.  November 14-16, 2005, Hong Kong.  Paper submission deadline:Jun. 15, 2005. 

MICAI 2005, 4th Mexican International Conference on ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE.  November 14-18, 2005, Monterrey, Mexico.  Paper submission deadline: May 29, 2005 (Abstract May 22). 

LPAR-12, The 12th International Conference on Logic for Programming Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning.  2nd-6th December 2005, Montego Bay, Jamaica.  Paper submission deadline: July 18, 2005.

CP 2006, 12th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, Fall 2006, Nantes, France. Program chair: Frederic Benhamou.

Career news

POSTDOCTORAL POSITION in COMPUTER SCIENCE and INTERVAL MATHEMATICS

University of Nantes, LINA laboratory, CoCoA Team

The appointment will be for one year, starting between September 2005 and December 2005. The CoCoA team will support candidates into applying to fellowships and grants programs. For this purpose, interested candidates should send their application the sooner.

Context

The CoCoA team consists of 15 researchers who aim at solving general first-order formulas over integers and reals, involving non-linear constraints, uncertainty, preferences on the data and efficiency criteria.  The base tools we use are interval analysis, constraint propagation (CP), symbolic computation and  tree-search methods.

Constraint programming provides a declarative and natural way of formulating problems as constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) by stating the requirements (constraints) that must be fulfilled by the solutions. The CoCoA team is especially interested in numerical CSPs which involve constraints over real numbers. Such CSPs appear in industrial applications like conceptual design, computer aided design, robotics and molecular biology, which are the main   applications the CoCoA team is tackling.

Objectives

The postdoctoral fellow will be involved into one of the ongoing research projects of the team, contribute to the development of the ELISA platform for constraint programming and optimization, and pursue researches in one of the following directions (depending on her/his abilities and desires):

-  hybridization of solving/optimization techniques (local/global, numeric/symbolic, ...)

-  design of solving/optimization methods for composite problems (hierarchical conjunctive/disjunctive models, mixed problems)

-  definition of systems and languages for constraint programming and optimization

-  study of a given application field (design, bioinformatics, ...)

Candidate profile

Interested candidates should send an application letter including detailed CV (with a list of publications and a description of research interests) to the contacts below. The candidate must hold a recent PhD (within 5 years) at the appointment time.

Applicants must have sound publications and expertise in one or more of the following areas (in a broad sense):

-  Programming languages and constraint programming

-  Optimization techniques (interval, convex, local, global, ...)

-  Cooperative problem solving

Environment

The city of Nantes is ideally located, only two hours from Paris by TGV (high-speed train, 20 shuttles per day) and about two hours by plane from most European capitals. Gateway to the Brittany ports, just a step away from major tourist sites such as Mont Saint-Michel, the Puy du Fou, the Futuroscope or the "Chateaux de la Loire", Nantes is also only 50km away from the renown coasts of Brittany and beaches of Vendee.

The LINA laboratory offers a friendly working environment and excellent computational facilities.

Contacts

Laurent Granvilliers  or  Christophe Jermann

Laboratoire LINA - University of Nantes

2 rue de la Houssiniere

BP 92208

F-44322 Nantes CEDEX

France

Phone: +33 251 125 851  or  +33 251 125 840

Fax: +33 251 125 812

email: {laurent.granvilliers, christophe.jermann}@univ-nantes.fr

http://www.sciences.univ-nantes.fr/lina/en/research/teams/COCOA/index.html

Actenum Corporation: Research Scientist and Developer Position

Actenum (a CP based company working on scheduling and other areas) started by Bill Havens and others in Vancouver in BC, Canada is looking for a recent PhD (or good MSc) to work on resource scheduling. More details from Bill Havens <havens@actenum.com>.