Volume 2, Number 2, July 2006

Constraint Programming News

      <h3 style="text-align: center;" align="center"><span class="GramE"><span lang="EN-US">volume</span></span><span lang="EN-US"> </span><span lang="EN-US">2</span><span lang="EN-US">, number </span><span lang="EN-US">2</span><span lang="EN-US">, </span><span lang="EN-US">Jul,</span><span lang="EN-US"> 200</span><span lang="EN-US">6</span></h3>

Editors:
Jimmy Lee (events, career news)
Eric Monfroy (profiles, publications)
Toby Walsh (news, reports)

Contents

 

News

Welcome to CP News, an initiative of the Association for Constraint Programming.

We aim to provide a comprehensive summary of important news in the area of constraint programming. The newsletter is published quarterly in January, April, July, and October. Please email the relevant editor with any news, event, report or profile you want published. To subscribe, please register here.

Association for Constraint Programming (ACP)

ACP EC news: April 1st, 2006 to June 30, 2006

·        The ACP award for Research Excellence will be given every year. The EC devised a nomination procedure and the composition of the award committee, as follows:

·        Nomination procedure: any ACP member can nominate someone for this award, by sending a nomination package (a nomination form plus two reference forms). These forms can be downloaded from http://slash.math.unipd.it/acp/docs/2006-nomination.txt and
http://slash.math.unipd.it/acp/docs/2006-reference.txt

·        Award committee: to select among the nominees, each year the Award committee will be formed by the president and secretary of the EC, the last two award recipients, and the program chair of the CP conference where the award will be given. Members of the Award committee cannot be nominees, nor they can support a nomination by being a nominator or a reference. For year 2006, since we don't have two award recipients yet, the award committee will consist of the president, vice-president, and secretary of the EC, the 2005 award recipient, and the program chair of CP 2006.

·        For the 2006 Research Award, nominations have to be sent to award06@a4cp.org by July 7, 2006. An open call for nominations was disseminated by different channels. More details can be found at http://slash.math.unipd.it/acp/call-2006.htm

* The following requests for sponsorship have been accepted:

·         1000 euros for supporting the 2006 CSP solver competition, organized by Mark van Dongen and colocated with CP 2006.

·         1000 euros for supporting the Master Class at CP-AI-OR 2006: Modelling   and    Solving   for   Uncertainty    and   Change (http://tidel.mie.utoronto.ca/cpaior/index.php?n=Main.MasterClass).

·         5000 euros for supporting the Doctoral program of CP 2006       (http://www.sciences.univ-nantes.fr/cp06/dpc.html).

·         8 US$ for supporting the CSPLib. This is the cost per year of keeping the domain name (http://www.csplib.org).

* The Application Task Force was launched, lead by Barry O'Sullivan. Its role will be to find suitable means for strengthening the links between academia and industry in the CP community. An informal call for participation in the task force was disseminated by different channels.  People interested in joining this task force should contact Barry O'Sullivan (b.osullivan@cs.ucc.ie).

* The next ACP EC elections will take place soon. A call for candidates will be sent to the ACP mailing list and to the Yahoo CP group in the next few weeks.

Please visit the website of the Association, http://www.a4cp.org/. It explains the purpose of the ACP and its rules, and it provides links to the AC EC elections, the Constraints Journal, the CP conferences, the CP summer school, the Yahoo! discussion group on constraints, and other activities of the ACP.

CP 2006: Call for Participation

CP 2006

Twelfth International Conference on

Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming

September 24-29, 2006

Cité des Congrès - Nantes, France

http://www.sciences.univ-nantes.fr/cp06/

Description

The CP conference is the annual international conference on

constraint programming, and it is concerned with all aspects of

computing with constraints, including: algorithms, applications,

environments, languages, models, and systems. CP 2006 includes a

technical program, where presentations of theoretical and

application papers, as well as invited talks and tutorials, aim

at describing the best results and techniques in the

state-of-the-art of constraint programming. Moreover, CP 2006

continues the tradition of the CP doctoral program, in which PhD

students can present their work, listen to tutorials on career

and ethical issues, and discuss their work with senior

researchers via a mentoring scheme. There will also be a number

of workshops, where researchers will be able to meet in an

informal setting and discuss their most recent ideas with their

peers.

Special events

CP 2006 will open on Sunday 24 September with CP-Tools-06, the

first event in a yearly series addressing CP systems design and

application development. During the conference, the 2006 ACP

award will be given and a plenary half day workshop will be

dedicated to the "next ten years of Constraint Programming".

Conference site

CP 2006 will be held at the Nantes Cité des Congrès. Nantes is a

major center of the European West and the sixth largest town in

France. The city, which is located on the Loire Estuary and 50km

from the Atlantic coast, is famous for enjoying an exceptional

quality of life. Nantes is at the heart of a highly efficient

transportation network (high-speed trains from Paris, airport,

motorways, tramway). The Nantes Cité des Congrès is directly

accessible by shuttle from the airport, by bus from the city

center, and is within ten-minute walking distance from the city

center and the high-speed train station.

Registration and accommodation

We encourage you to register for the conference and make you

hotel reservations.  All relevant information can be found on the

conference's main web page,

        http://www.sciences.univ-nantes.fr/cp06/

Deadline for early registration:        August 15th, 2006

Deadline for accommodation:             August 30th, 2006

We look forward to an exciting and inspiring conference in

Nantes, France.

CP 2006 Organizing Committee

CP 06 workshop on "the next 10 years of Constraint Programming"

We are pleased to announce that the Twelfth International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP06: http://www.sciences.univ-nantes.fr/cp06/) will include a special workshop on "the next 10 years of constraint programming". The goal of this event will be to discuss the following questions:

  -What are the achievements of the field during the last 10 years?

  -What is the perception of CP by users and other research communities?

  -What are the research directions for CP in 2006?

  -What role can CP play within computer science research and industry?

  -What are the strategic research directions likely to be in 2016?

  -What application domains are of interest to us in the future?

The workshop will include a panel of invited speakers from both academia and industry, and will also leave ample time for public discussions. The content of the workshop is largely to be defined and all researchers and practitioners interested in the future of Constraint Programming are invited to share their comments and propose  discussion threads through the Yahoo! group of the Association for Constraint Programming: [2] http://groups.yahoo.com/group/constraints/

  Lucas Bordeaux

  Barry O'Sullivan

  Pascal Van Hentenryck 

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

ICLP 2007: 23rd International Conference on Logic Programming

The International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP) is the premier conference in the field of logic programming.  The Association for Logic Programming (ALP), the body that oversees ICLP and various activities related to research in Logic Programming, is seeking proposals for hosting and organizing of ICLP in 2007. Past 5 ICLPs have been held in Sitges (Spain, 2005), St. Malo (France, 2004), Mumbai (India, 2003), Copenhagen (Denmark, 2002), and Paphos (Cyprus, 2001). ICLP 2006 will be held as part of the Federated Logic Conference in Seattle, WA, USA, in August 2006.

If you are interested in organizing ICLP in 2007, please send email to Gopal Gupta, ALP Conference Coordinator, at gupta@utdallas.edu before June 20, 2007.

More information on what is involved in organizing an ICLP and guidelines on how to write a proposal for organizing an ICLP can be found in ALP's Conference Policy document that can be obtained from:

          http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~dtai/projects/ALP/

CP 2007:

  * Location: Providence, RI, USA

  * Dates: fall 2007.

  * Conference chairs: Meinolf Sellmann and Laurent Michel

  * Program chair: Christian Bessiere

  * Co-located with ICAPS 2007 (International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling)

CONSTRAINTS Journal Accepted Papers

Good news for the Constraints Journal! Constraints is now covered by the Science Citation Index. The Science Citation Index, arguably the most important index for citations, "provides access to current and retrospective bibliographic information, author abstracts, and cited references found in 3,700 of the world's leading scholarly science and technical journals covering more than 100 disciplines."

CONSTRAINTS Journal Accepted Papers

The Constraints Journal publishes 4 times per year. The contents of the current issue and forthcoming papers are listed below. Links to the authors' final versions of these papers (no subscription required) and to the final published versions (subscription required) can be found here.

Forthcoming Papers

    Cardinal: A Finite Sets Constraint Solver

    Francisco Azevedo

    Asynchronous Forward-Checking for DisCSPs

    Amnon Meisels and Roie Zivan

    Design of Financial CDO Squared Transactions Using Constraint Programming

    Pierre Flener, Justin Pearson, Luis G. Reyna, and Olof Sivertsson

Volume 11, Issue 4 (2006)

Special Issue on the Integration of AI and OR Techniques in Constraint Programming for Combinatorial Optimization Problems (CP-AI-OR 2005)

    Introduction to the Special Issue

    Roman Bartak and Michela Milano

    Filtering Algorithms for the NValue Constraint

    Christian Bessiere, Emmanuel Hebrard, Brahim Hnich, Zeynep Kiziltan, and Toby Walsh

    Identifying and Exploiting Problem Structures Using Explanation-Based Constraint Programming

    Hadrien Cambazard and Narendra Jussien

    A Cost-Regular based Hybrid Column Generation Approach

    Sophie Demassey, Gilles Pesant, and Louis-Martin Rousseau

    Multiconsistency and Robustness with Global Constraints

    Khaled Elbassioni and Irit Katriel

    Nondeterministic Control for Hybrid Search

    Pascal Van Hentenryck and Laurent Michel

Publications

Special issue

- Constraints Journal, Special Issue on Local Search Techniques in

  Constraint Satisfaction. 

 

  GUEST EDITORS

 

  Yehuda Naveh, IBM Research, Haifa, Israel

  Andrea Roli, Universita' "G.D'Annunzio", Chieti-Pescara, Italy

 

  IMPORTANT DATES

 

  Tentative partial abstract: April 30, 2006

  Submission of papers: July 14, 2006

  Notification of acceptance: November 2006

  Publication of the Special Issue: early 2007

 

  Special issue homepage:

  http://www.haifa.il.ibm.com/projects/verification/octopus/cj_sls

  Constraints Journal homepage:

  http://ai.uwaterloo.ca/~vanbeek/Constraints/constraints.html

  Guidelines for authors:

  http://ai.uwaterloo.ca/~vanbeek/Constraints/Instructions_for_Authors.html

 

 

- Constraints Journal, Special Issue on Symmetry in Constraint Programming

 

  GUEST EDITORS              

                 

  Ian Gent, University of St Andrews, U.K.

  Jean-Francois Puget, ILOG, France.

  Barbara Smith, Cork Constraint Computation Centre, Ireland

 

  IMPORTANT DATES

 

  Expression of interest: end of June, 2006

  Submission of papers: end of September, 2006

  Notification of acceptance: end of December, 2006

  Final versions of accepted papers: end of February, 2007

  Expected publication of the Special Issue: mid-2007

 

  Special issue homepage:

  http://www.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~ipg/symmetry

  Constraints Journal homepage:

  http://ai.uwaterloo.ca/~vanbeek/Constraints/constraints.html

 

Software

- Distributed Scheduling Simulator

 

I just put a Distributed Scheduling Simulator online. It presents 4 distributed backtrack search algorithms which tackle random distributed reconciliation problems occurring in Computer Supported Cooperative Work. It corresponds to a particular kind of distributed scheduling problems where constraints are of two types: 'temporal' (one action performed before another) and 'dependency' (one action requires another).

 

You can download the simulator here.

 

Bests,

Youssef

 

 

 

Events

2006 Special Programme on Logic and Algorithms (6 Workshops). 16 January - 7 July 2006, Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences at Cambridge, UK. http://www.newton.cam.ac.uk/programmes/LAA/ws.html

Special semester on Grobner Bases and Related Methods 2006. February - July, 2006, Linz and Hagenberg, Austria. http://www.ricam.oeaw.ac.at/srs/groeb/

AMAST 2006, 11th International Conference on Algebraic Methodology and Software Technology (co-located with MPC'06). 5-8 July 2006, Kuressaare, Estonia. http://cs.ioc.ee/mpc-amast06/amast/

Calculemus'06, 13th Symposium on the Integration of Symbolic Computation and Mechanized Reasoning 2006 (Co-located with ISSAC 2006). July 7-8, 2006, Genova, Italy. http://www.loria.fr/~ranise/calculemus06

CHR 2006, Third Workshop on Constraint Handling Rules (Co-located with ICALP 2006). July 9, 2006, S. Servolo, Venice, Italy. http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~toms/CHR2006/

ISSAC 2006, International Symposium on Symbolic and Algebraic Computation. July 9 - 12, 2006, Genoa, Italy. http://issac2006.dima.unige.it/

ACM PPDP 2006, 8th ACM-SIGPLAN International Symposium on Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming (co-located with ICALP'06 and LOPSTR'06). July 10-12, 2006, Venice, Italy. http://www.dsi.unive.it/ppdp2006/

The AAAI-06 Workshop on Learning for Search. July 16/17, 2006, Boston, Massachusetts. http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~hutter/aaai06_ws

AAAI-06, Twenty-First National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. July16-20, 2006, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. http://www.aaai.org/Conferences/National/2006/aaai06.html

ISMP 2006, 19th International Symposium on Mathematical Programming. July 30 to August 04, 2006, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. http://www.ismp2006.org

PRICAI'06, The Ninth Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence. 7-11th August, 2006, Guilin, China. http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/pricai06

UNIF'06, 20th Int. Workshop on Unification (A satellite workshop of RTA'6 and FLoC'06). August 11, 2006, Seattle, WA, USA. http://www.iiia.csic.es/~levy/unif06.html

WRS06, The Sixth International Workshop on Reduction Strategies in Rewriting and Programming. August 11, 2006, Seattle, Washington. http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~antoy/wrs06/

SAT 2006, 9th International Conference on Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing. August 12 - 15, Seattle, Washington, USA. http://fmv.jku.at/sat06

WST 2006, Eighth International Workshop on Termination (Part of FLoC 2006). 15-16 August, 2006, Seattle, Washington. http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/wst2006/

CICLOPS 2006, Colloquium on Implementation of Constraint LOgic Programming Systems (in conjunction with ICLP06). August 21, 2006, Seattle, Washington, USA. http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/lldap/CICLOPS06

International Workshop on Preferences and Their Applications in Logic Programming Systems (in conjunction with ICLP06). August 16, 2006, Seattle, Washington, USA. http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/lldap/Prefs06

ALPSWS2006, International Workshop on Applications of Logic Programming in the Semantic Web and Semantic Web Services (co-located with ICLP06). 16 August, 2006, Seattle, Washington, USA. http://www.deri.at/events/workshops/alpsws2006

International Workshop on Preferences and Their Applications in Logic Programming Systems (held in conjunction with ICLP06). August 16, 2006, Seattle, Washington. http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/lldap/Prefs06

ICLP'06 Doctoral Consortium, 22nd International Conference on Logic Programming (Part of Fourth Federated Logic Conference, FLoC 2006). 17-20 August, 2006, Seattle, Washington, USA. http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/~epontell/DC2006

Search and Logic: Answer Set Programming and SAT (A Workshop affiliated with ICLP-06 and FLoC-06). August 16, 2006, Seattle, Washington, USA. http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~SearchAndLogic/

ICLP'06, 22nd International Conference on Logic Programming (Part of Fourth Federated Logic Conference, FLoC 2006). 17-20 August, 2006, Seattle, Washington, USA. http://www.cs.uky.edu/iclp06/

SSPV'06, 2006 Symposium on Satisfiability Solvers and Program Verification (SSPV is a FLoC event). August 10 - 11, 2006, Seattle, USA. http://www.easychair.org/FLoC-06/SSPV.html

FLoC'06, The 2006 Federated Logic Conference. August 10 -- August 22, 2006, Seattle, Washington, USA. http://www.easychair.org/FLoC-06/

IJCAR 2006, Third International Joint Conference on Automated Reasoning. August 16-21, 2006, Seattle, USA. http://ijcar06.uni-koblenz.de/

ECAI 06 workshop on Distributed Constraint Satisfaction Problems. August 28th, 2006, Riva del Garda, Italy. http://liawww.epfl.ch/Events/ECAI06_DISCSP/

Workshop on Modelling and Solving Problems with Constraints 2006 (Co-located with ECAI 2006). 29th August 2006, Riva del Garda, Italy. http://www.cs.ucc.ie/ecai06ws/ecai06ws.html

INFERENCE METHODS BASED ON GRAPHICAL STRUCTURES OF KNOWLEDGE (a one day ECAI workshop). 29th August 2006, Riva del Garda, Italy. http://www.irit.fr/LC/WIGSK06/

Multidisciplinary ECAI-06 Workshop on ADVANCES IN PREFERENCE HANDLING. Aug 28th - Aug 29th, 2006, Riva del Garda, Italy. http://www.mycosima.com/ecai2006-preferences/

ECAI 2006 Workshop on Configuration. August 28 - 29, 2006, Riva del Garda, Italy. http://fmv.jku.at/ecai-config-ws-2006

ECAI 2006, 17th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence. August 28th - September 1st 2006, RIVA DEL GARDA, Italy. http://ecai2006.itc.it/

SAS'06, The 13th International Static Analysis Symposium. 29-31 August 2006, Seoul, Korea. http://ropas.snu.ac.kr/sas06

PATAT 2006, the 6th International Conference on the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling. August 30 - September 1, 2006, Brno, Czech Republic. http://patat06.muni.cz

OR 2006, International Conference Operations Research, special interest section "logistics and transport". September 6th to 8th, 2006, University of Karlsruhe, Germany. http://www.or2006.de

AIMSA 2006, The 12th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence: Methodology, Systems, Applications. 13-15th September, 2006, Varna, Bulgaria. http://aimsa2006.inrialpes.fr

The Fifth International Workshop on Constraint Modelling and Reformulation (in conjunction with CP'06). September 25, 2006, Nantes, France. Paper submission deadline: 14 July. http://www.cs.ucc.ie/cp06/cp06.html

CPSec'06, 2nd International Workshop on Applications of Constraint Satisfaction and Programming to Computer Security (Held in conjunction with CP2006). September 26, 2006, Nantes, France. Paper Submission deadline: July 14th, 2006. http://www.sci.unich.it/~bista/organizing/cpsec/

BeyondFD'06, 2nd International Workshop on Constraint Programming Beyond Finite Integer Domains (in conjunction with CP 2006). September 25, 2006, Nantes, France. Paper Submission deadline: July 17th, 2006. http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cquimper/beyondfd06/

1st International Workshop on Constraint Programming for Graphical Applications (held in conjunction with CP2006). September 25, 2006, Nantes, France. http://www.sciences.univ-nantes.fr/cpga/

The CP 2006 Workshop on the Integration of SAT and CP techniques. September 25, 2006, Nantes, France. Submission deadline: July 3, 2006. http://research.microsoft.com/~youssefh/SAT-CP-Integration-CP2006/

SymCon'06, The Sixth International Workshop on Symmetry in Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CP 2006 Workshop). September 25th 2006, Nantes, France. Submission deadline: Sunday, 2nd July, 2006. http://www.cis.strath.ac.uk/~pg/symcon06/

IntCP 2006, Interval analysis, constraint propagation, applications (a CP2006 Workshop). September 25th, 2006, Nantes, France. Submission deadline: 10 July 2006. http://icwww.epfl.ch/~sam/IntCP06/

CSTVA06, Workshop on Constraints in Software Testing, Verification and Analysis (Co-located with CP'06). September 25-29, 2006, Nantes, France. Submission deadline: July 11, 2006. http://www.irisa.fr/manifestations/2006/CSTVA06/index.htm

LSCS 2006, Third International Workshop on Local Search Techniques in Constraint Satisfaction (in conjunction with CP 2006). September 25, 2006, Nantes, France.

http://www.haifa.il.ibm.com/projects/verification/octopus/lscs06/

WCB06, Workshop on Constraint Based Methods for Bioinformatics (associated to CP 2006). September 25, 2006, Nantes, France. http://www.dimi.uniud.it/dovier/WCB06/

DSCP'05, 2nd International Workshop on Distributed and Speculative Constraint Processing (held in conjunction with CP'06). September 25, 2006, Nantes, France.

http://www.cs.utep.edu/mceberio/Research/Conferences/DSCP06/index.html

Soft 2006, 8th International Workshop on Preferences and Soft Constraints, Special year on Structural decomposition and Tractability (in conjunction with CP 2006). Paper submission deadline: July 16, 2006. http://carlit.toulouse.inra.fr/cgi-bin/awki.cgi/SofT

SECOND INTERNATIONAL CSP SOLVER COMPETITION (HELD IN CONJUNCTION WITH CP'06). http://cpai.ucc.ie/06/Competition.html

CPAI'06, THIRD INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON CONSTRAINT PROPAGATION AND IMPLEMENTATION (Held in conjunction CP'2006). September 25, 2006, Nantes, France. Paper submission deadline: July 9, 2006.

http://cpai.ucc.ie/06/CPAI.html

CP-TOOLS-06, First International Day on Constraint Programming Tools (In conjunction with CP'06). September 24, 2006, Nantes, France. Deadline for submissions: August 6, 2006. http://www.sciences.univ-nantes.fr/cp06/prog.html#cptools

CP 2006, 12th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, Sept 25-29, 2006, Nantes, France.  http://www.sciences.univ-nantes.fr/cp06/

AISC-2006, AI and Symbolic Computation, September 20-22, 2006, Beijing, China. http://www.cc4cm.org/aisc2006/

CSL'06, Annual Conference of the European Association for Computer Science Logic. September 25 -- 29, 2006, Szeged, Hungary. http://www.inf.u-szeged.hu/~csl06/

ADVIS 2006, Fourth Biennial International Conference on Advances in Information Systems, 18-20 October, 2006, Izmir, Turkey. http://web.deu.edu.tr/advis

LPAR-13, The 13th International Conference on Logic for Programming Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning. 13th-17th November, 2006, Phnom Penh, Cambodia. http://www.lix.polytechnique.fr/~hermann/LPAR2006

MICAI 2006, 5th Mexican International Conference on ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. November 13-17, 2006, Mexico. http://www.MICAI.org/2006

AI 2006, the 19th ACS Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. December 4 - 8, 2006, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. http://www.comp.utas.edu.au/ai06/

AI-2006, Twenty-sixth SGAI International Conference on Innovative Techniques and Applications of Artificial Intelligence. http://www.bcs-sgai.org/ai2006/

IJCAI-07, Twentieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. January 6-12, 2007, Hyderabad, India. http://www.ijcai-07.org

PADL'07, Ninth International Symposium on Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages 2007 (Co-located with ACM POPL'07). January 14-15, 2007, Nice, France. Abstract Submission: August 30, 2006. Paper Submission: September 3, 2006 (strict). http://www.informatik.uni-kiel.de/~mh/padl07

VMCAI'07, The Eighth International Conference on Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation. January 14-16, 2007, Nice, France. Submission Deadline: September 8, 2006. http://research.microsoft.com/vmcai07

CP 2007, 13th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (co-located with ICAPS 2007). Fall, 2007, Providence, RI, USA. Conference chairs: Meinolf Sellmann and Laurent Michel. Program chair: Christian Bessiere.

SAC 2007, Track on Constraint Solving and Programming (CSP). The 22nd Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing Seoul, Korea, March 11 - 15, 2007.

http://www.sci.unich.it/~bista/organizing/constraint-sac2007/

 

Career news

- Postdoctoral Research Positions in Flanders

The Flemish research network "Declarative Methods in Informatics" is looking for applicants for postdoctoral positions. The network is supported by the FWO Research Foundation of Flanders.

The network can submit candidacies for Visiting Postdoctoral Fellowships to the FWO. Junior postdoctoral fellowships are for candidates that completed their PhD less than 5 year ago. Senior postdoctoral fellowships are for candidates that obtained a PhD between 5 years and 10 years ago. Junior fellows receive a monthly grant of 1.570 EUR; senior fellows a monthly grant of 2.070 EUR. Grants are free of taxes; social security is covered by FWO.

The fellowships are for periods from 3 to 12 months. At most three months elapse between submission of the application and the decision.

Successful candidates have a good project with a clear added value for the hosting research group and a strong publication list. If interested, get in touch with one of the contact persons.

The partners of the network are:

1. Declarative Languages and Artificial Intelligence of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. 

http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~dtai/

Staff members: Hendrik Blockeel, Maurice Bruynooghe, Bart Demoen, Marc Denecker, Danny De Schreye, Luc De Raedt and Gerda Janssens

Main research areas: Machine Learning, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, and Design, and Analysis and Implementation of Declarative Programming Languages

Contact: Maurice.Bruynooghe@cs.kuleuven.be

2. Advanced Database Research and Modelling of the Universiteit Antwerpen.  http://www.adrem.ua.ac.be/

Staff member: Jan Paredaens

Main research areas: XML Databases and Data Mining

Contact: Jan.Paredaens@ua.ac.be

3. Theoretical Computer Science of the Universiteit Hasselt.

http://www.uhasselt.be/theocomp/

Staff members: Marc Gyssens, Bart Kuijpers, Frank Neven and Jan Van den Bussche

Research topics: Constraint Satisfaction Problems, Data Mining, Data on the Web, Database Theory, Finite Model Theory, Geometrical Data, Object-Oriented Databases, and Temporal Data. 

Contact: jan.vandenbussche@uhasselt.be

4. Web & Information System Engineering of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.  http://wise.vub.ac.be/

Staff members: Olga De Troyer and Geert-Jan Houben. 

Research area: Web query and transformation languages, Web data integration and distribution, adaptation and personalization in Web applications, (Semantic) Web information system architecture.

Contact: gjhouben@vub.ac.be

- Autonomous Systems Research Positions in the Ocean Sciences

One is regular full time (immediate opening); the other is expected to be two years duration, beginning September 2006.

Full-time position: Ph.D. or an advanced degree in computer science, or related field, and minimum five years experience in developing autonomous systems using symbolic AI techniques is required. Bachelor's degree in computer science, or equivalent, and minimum seven years experience in autonomous systems is acceptable.

Two-year position: Same requirements as above, except for years of experience: Ph.D. or advanced degree in computer science, or related field, or bachelor's degree plus three years relevant experience is required.

The following applies to both positions: Must be able to program in C/C++/Java with some familiarity in LISP and functional languages. Proven track record demonstrating software development with deployed/fielded systems, or those fielded based on the individual's efforts in real-world surroundings, is required.

Demonstrated capability in at least one or more of the following topical areas of interest in automated reasoning is desired:

   + Automated Planning/Scheduling and Execution

   + Fault Diagnosis and Recovery/Integrated Vehicle Health Mgmt (IVHM)

   + Constraint Satisfaction and/or Constraint-based Reasoning

   + Mathematical Optimization

   + Model-Based Reasoning

   + Agent Architectures

Must have excellent communication skills and be able to work well with diverse groups of people. These positions will work in an interdisciplinary environment with research and development staff as well as marine operations personnel. Must be willing to go to sea for specified periods.

Some additional information on MBARI can be found at:

http://www.mbari.org/rd/projects/current_projects.html for ongoing projects.

http://www.mbari.org/auv/ for underwater robots

http://www.mbari.org/dmo/vessels.htm for its in-house research vessels

http://www.mbari.org/about/researchers.html for key research personnel

For additional technical details on these positions, please contact Kanna Rajan (Kanna.Rajan@mbari.org).

Address your cover letter to:

          MBARI, Human Resources

          Job Code: Must specify SE-ASR-FT

         (regular, full-time position), or SE-ASR-2 (two-year position)

          

7700 Sandholdt Road
, Moss Landing, CA95039-9644

- Job offer at Artelys (French-speaking)

  See attached file here

- 2 Positions at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI)

  See attached flyer

- Position for an experienced researcher in optimization and operations  research

  SINTEF ICT has an available position for an experienced researcher in

  optimization and operations research. The position is advertised on our

  web pages.  You may download PDF-file at:

  http://www.sintef.no/upload/Konsern/Stillingsannonser/Sta06_29_IKT_Forsker_E.pdf

  Please forward this information to anyone who might be interested.

  Yours sincerely,

  Atle Riise

  Research Manager

- Associate Researcher position (post-doc) at Microsoft Research Cambridge

The Constraint Reasoning Group at Microsoft Research Cambridge is opening a new Associate Researcher position (post-doc). The two year position should start early 2007. We are currently collecting applications for a selective interview process which will take place late 2006 / early 2007.

Only recent PhDs in fields related to Combinatorial Optimization in general (CP, CSP, QBF, SAT/SMT) need to apply. (The PhD will have to be completed before official start.) Second level knowledge in Machine Learning and Adaptive System will also be of interest.

Details

  * Location: Cambridge (UK)   

  * Duration: 2 years   

  * Please send

    * Full CV with pointers to publications   

    * Motivation letter

    * At least two referees

  * Application: must be sent to 'youssefh at microsoft dot * com'

  * More information on the position:

     http://research.microsoft.com/aboutmsr/jobs/cambridgepostdoc.aspx

  * More information on the lab:

     http://research.microsoft.com/aboutmsr/labs/cambridge/default.aspx

Bests,

Youssef Hamadi

- Industrial Scientist Position at Actenum Corp

  See attached file

- PhD Position available in Nantes

Within the NetWMS european project (a STREP) the constraint team (Discrete Constraints) from Nantes (http://www.emn.fr/x-info/ppc/equipe.html) is looking for a candidate for a PhD.  Funding is available for 3 years (the standard duration of a PhD in France) and no teaching is required.  Starting time will be september.  The topic will be about geometrical constraints as described in the subject at the end of the message.

The academic partners of the project are:

   (1) The constraint project from INRIA (http://contraintes.inria.fr/),

   (2) The CEA,

   (3) The Swedish Institute of Computer Science (http://www.sics.se/).

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- SUBJECT -

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Multidimensional non-overlapping constraints

--------------------------------------------------

Within the European project NetWMS the goal is to design and develop a non-overlapping constraint that considers the following aspects:

   (1) Handling non-rectangular shapes.

   (2) Handling objects with 2,3, ..., 5 dimensions.

   (3) Handling additional geometrical constraints.

The constraint and its extensions will be developped in Java and integrated within the constraint programming CHOCO (http://choco.sourceforge.net/).  The project will be done by working together with INRIA and SICS.

-----------------------

- REQUIRED BACKGROUND -

-----------------------

The necessary background is:

   (1) Knowledge in algorithmic geometry (sweep, Minkowski sum, ...)

   (2) Knowledge in constraint programming (filtering algorithms)

   (3) Programming with Java

Nicolas Beldiceanu

LINA, FRE 2729

Ecole des Mines de Nantes

4, rue Alfred Kastler - BP 20722

44307 Nantes Cedex 03 France

Tel. : +33 2 51 85 82 42

Fax  : +33 2 51 85 82 49

Email: Nicolas.Beldiceanu@emn.fr

- Postdoctoral Research Fellow Position at Monash

MonashUniversity is seeking a postdoctoral research fellow to work on a newly funded research project.  The problem is to combine mathematical programming and constraint programming to solve large-scale integrated scheduling problems.  The project is a collaboration between the University and a Melbourne company Constraint Technologies International.

The researcher will work with colleagues at MelbourneUniversity (the MORe group), and at the Victorian NICTA laboratory in Melbourne, working on the Constraint Programming Platform project (G12).

The project is initially funded for 2 years, but constraint programming and optimisation is growing strongly at Melbourne, and subsequent longer term projects are already prepared.

The researcher will be employed as a Research Fellow Level B, and money is available to support removal costs.

Interested parties should contact Prof. Mark Wallace at Mark.Wallace@infotech.monash.edu.au.

-ITA Software of Cambridge, MA, proud sponsor of AAAI-06, is hiring!

ITA Software, founded in 1996 by MIT computer scientists, is now a

250-person company providing search, optimization, transaction and

distribution services to airlines and travel distributors. We're the

search engine behind Orbitz.com, Kayak.com, and a variety of other

travel agencies, as well as many major airlines' web sites and

reservation centers. We maintain several data centers containing

thousands of CPUs and calculate more than 120 billion travel routes

and price 600 trillion trips a day. Not to mention that we have the

only high-performance distributed system for calculating seat

availability, design revolutionary user interfaces, research radical

new ideas in revenue management and semantic web mining, and, more

generally, use the tools of science and engineering to make life

better for anybody who flies.

ITA Software is hiring technical staff aggressively across the board,

from Engineering to Operations to Quality Assurance, from graduates

to Ph.Ds, for positions in our Cambridge, MA office. We look for

exceptional candidates with skills and experience in:

* algorithm design, optimization, operations research, search,

game theory, machine learning and related fields

* reliable and distributed transaction processing

* high performance and large-scale systems and network engineering

* user interface design and implementation

* engineering management

For more details, please visit our information table at AAAI or our

website: http://www.itasoftware.com/careers/ai

See you at the conference!

The Recruiting Team

ITA Software

-Opening for Supply Chain Optimisation Scientist

The Cork Constraint Computation Centre (www.4c.ucc.ie) has an opening for

a scientist in the area of supply chain optimisation. The ideal candidate

would have a Ph.D. in Computer Science or Operations Research, expertise

in constraint programming and/or mathematical programming, demonstrated

ability to publish high quality scientific research and to apply this

research to practical applications, and experience with applications to

supply chain networks or telecommunications networks, or to the design,

manufacture or testing of telecommunications components. This position

will provide opportunities to collaborate with Bell Labs Ireland, as part

of the multi-institutional Centre for Telecommunications Value-chain

Research (www.ctvr.ie). The position will include some administrative

responsibility. Depending on qualifications the appointment could be made

at the Research Fellow level and initially for up to 3 years. Interested

parties should send a CV and the names and contact information (including

e-mail addresses) of 3 references to e.ohanlon@4c.ucc.ie.

-RCUK Academic Fellowships in Exabyte Informatics

The University of Bristol is offering three RCUK Academic Fellowships in

the area of Exabyte Informatics, one available for 2006 and the other

two to begin in 2007. The main responsibility of the Research Fellow is

to advance the state of the art in Exabyte Informatics by carrying out

world-class research on key research topics.

Exabyte Informatics is concerned with methods and techniques for

exploiting the vast amounts of computer-readable data that are now

available and routinely being produced in all areas of human activitiy

including science, commerce, and the home environment. The challenges

posed by the sheer volume of data, as well as the opportunities arising

from ever-increasing computing power and connectivity of devices,

require highly innovative ways of storing, managing, retrieving and

mining data. The Computer Science department has initiated and is

leading this University-wide research theme.

The aim of an RCUK Academic Fellowship is to provide a young researcher

with a more attractive and stable path into academia, by requiring the

host organisation to guarantee the Fellow a permanent academic position

following the end of the 5 year award, subject to successful completion

of a probationary period. We seek to appoint outstanding Research

Fellows to work with leading researchers from the participating

departments. This reinforces the inter-disciplinary nature of the

research and provides the Fellow with an excellent environment to

kick-start his or her academic career. The ideal candidate has a

thorough background in artificial intelligence, machine learning and

data mining, pattern recognition, statistics, algorithms, and discrete

mathematics, and has research experience in at least two of these areas.

The closing date for applications is 9am, 4 August 2006. For further

details including an on-line application form, see the advert on

jobs.ac.uk. Further information can also be obtained from Professor

Peter Flach. When applying, please include a Research Statement

outlining how your past research and future research plans fit in with

the Exabyte Informatics research theme.

Web links:

http://exabyte.bristol.ac.uk

http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk

http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/acfellow/

http://www.jobs.ac.uk/jobfiles/QC361.html

http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~flach/

Profile

CHR at Leuven.

The CHR research group works at the Department of Computer Science at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. It is part of a larger group, known as DLAI -Declarative Languages and Artificial Intelligence. DLAI is headed by Maurice Bruynooghe since a long time. The activities in DLAI are roughly Analysis&Implementation, Knowledge Representation and Machine Learning. All this started by Maurice bringing Prolog from Marseille to Leuven in 1976. Our CHR work is part of Analysis&Implementation and it started four years ago when Tom Schrijvers - at that moment a PhD student with me as supervisor - was asked to do a port of the Christian Holzbaur CHR system (say the SICStus version) to hProlog (our own Prolog system that we use for experimenting with implementation). The aim at that moment was to have an evaluation of the attributed variables in hProlog, but it turned out to be the start of a lot of CHR related activity.

The CHR research group consists at this moment of five active members: Tom Schrijvers (postdoc), Jon Sneyers (second year PhD student), Leslie De Koninck and Peter Van Weert (both first year PhD students), and myself trying to keep up with their pace. Tom's initial porting resulted in a system we named the K.U.Leuven CHR system, and which has been running under SWI-Prolog (the platform we are most concerned with), XSB and hProlog for quite some time now. Recent ports have been made to Ciao Prolog, SICStus Prolog and B-Prolog. Also Yap has it running.  We are constantly improving the system. Performance is very important to users and to us. Tom and Jon work on performance: an analysis framework based on abstract interpretation was developed (but it still needs exploring and tuning). Interesting (for optimization) properties of CHR programs have been identified and analyses have been designed for them. The analysis results allow the compiler to generate more efficient code. To name a few of these properties: observation, functional dependency and groundness. The analyses and optimizations are described in ICLP, PPDP, WCLP and CHR workshop papers. We are obsessed by the principle that every analysis is formally described within the refined semantics (developed by our friends in Melbourne), or an equivalent variant if it, and that optimizations are proved correct. Sometimes this seems like hair splitting, because optimizations often look obviously correct, but it is our experience that such a formal approach usually strengthens the optimization - and bugs are caught as well of course.

Jon has a keen interest in theoretical properties of CHR and his work resulted in the following strong result: minimal host-language CHR (say CHR embedded in a host language with just arithmetic and atomic equality) can implement every algorithm with the optimal space and time complexity (at the same time !).  BTW, it is not just an existence proof ! We didn't stop there: our K.U.Leuven CHR system implements enough optimizations to actually achieve this optimum in practice. These results make CHR currently into the fastest executable specification language.

Leslie worked during his master thesis on a port of CLP(R) to SWI-Prolog, and on extending it to support non-linear constraints over the reals. His system is named INCLP(R): the I stands for the fact that interval extension techniques are used. The current version is available in SWI-Prolog and since it is based on rather novel techniques it outperforms older non-linear solvers easily ... even though it is written entirely in CHR (+ SWI-Prolog). One point being of course that CHR is a good language for writing such complicated algorithms in, and that our CHR implementation itself must be quite good as well :-) Non-linear solvers are not widely used currently, but they are badly needed in many application domains. Leslie's contribution shows that one doesn't need to pay a lot of money for a performant non-linear solver: it comes for free with SWI-Prolog, Leslie's recent interest is in enhancing CHR with search ... might sound weird, but there you go !

Peter implemented a Java version of CHR during his master period: the system is named the JCHR K.U.Leuven system. It is truly a wonderful marriage of CHR and Java: it offers a syntax close to the Prolog embeddings of CHR, yet it has integrated the OO ideas so that a Java developer is not scared away unnecessarily. On top of that, it is mighty efficient: CHR is compiled to Java and it beats the hell out of every other Java based CHR. In fact, JCHR will also be a serious competitor for production rule systems or business rules, once we have put in search and negation: the latter is a very interesting extension of the CHR language in which rules are not only triggered by the appearance of constraints, but also by their disappearance. Peter became recently also interested in embedding JCHR in small devices.

Tom is research wise an octopus. He is involved in every research aspect mentioned above and on top of that he has his pet interests on the side, mainly in collaboration with researchers abroad. He works on type definition reconstruction with Maurice Bruynooghe and John Gallagher in the logic programming setting, and on type inference for generalized algebraic data types with Martin Sulzmann and Peter Stuckey in the functional programming setting. Together with Gregory Duck, he prepares a book for the Springer LNCS series on the efficient implementation of CHR. He is also the principal maintainer and integrator of all our ports. Without him, there wouldn't have been a Leuven CHR team in the first place.

While we have all our private research interests and activities related to CHR, there is also a common goal: to make CHR available in a portable way across Prolog systems. It is not a flashy thing, and believe me, it takes a lot of work. But it is worth doing: I said it before ... CHR is by far the best executable specification language available right now.

As you can see, our CHR group is doing well. To a large extent, we do well thanks to our contacts with outstanding groups all over the world: Tom worked with the XSB group in Stony Brook under supervision of David S. Warren (some loose ends need tying up there). We have close collaboration with the CHR group in Ulm, Germany, headed by Thom Fruehwirth (the designer of CHR): a recent joint workshop identified a number of interesting research topics - too long to go into detail about here. We collaborate with the Melbourne/Monash teams of Peter Stuckey and Maria Garcia de la Banda: they really gave a renewed swing to the CHR field a couple of years ago by their formalization of the operational semantics of CHR. Only thanks to such a semantics, one can faithfully apply analysis, optimization and program transformation. Their refined operational semantics was dearly needed of course, but is not the end of the semantics story of course: in the mean time, every of my students has defined at least one new semantics for CHR :-) We missed the chance to collaborate more closely with Christian Holzbaur who was the first to implement CHR: unfortunately he has left the CHR scene for now.

International collaboration is very important, for us personally, and for research in general: there are so many unexplored and worthy research issues related to CHR, and we want to share them with you. If you feel you want to contribute to this wonderful area, with engineering or theoretical issues, get in touch with us and maybe we can together push CHR further in the main stream of declarative programming, and declarative programming into the main stream of computer science.

Bart Demoen

Websites:

The websites for CHR, the K.U.Leuven CHR system, JCHR and INCLP(R) can be found at

T. Schrijvers and T. Fruehwirth, The CHR website: http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dtai/projects/CHR/

T. Schrijvers, The K.U.Leuven CHR system website: http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~toms/CHR/

P. Van Weert, The K.U.Leuven JCHR System website http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~petervw/JCHR/

L. De Koninck, The INCLP(R) System website http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~leslie/INCLPR/

And here are some CHR related publications by our group:

T. Schrijvers, Analyses, optimizations and extensions of Constraint Handling Rules, Ph.D. Thesis, Department of Computer Science, K.U.Leuven, Leuven, Belgium, June, 2005, xxiv+210 pages.

T. Schrijvers, and D. Warren, Constraint Handling Rules and Tabled Execution, Logic Programming, 20th International Conference, ICLP 2004, Proceedings (Demoen, B. and Lifschitz, V., eds.), vol 3132, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 120-136, 2004.

T. Schrijvers, J. Wielemaker and B. Demoen, Constraint Handling Rules for SWI-Prolog, 9th Workshop on (Constraint) Logic Programming, Abstract, Ulm, February, 2005.

T. Schrijvers, and T. Fruehwirth, Optimal Union-Find in Constraint Handling Rules, Theory and Practice of Logic Programming 6 (1&2), pp. 213-224, 2006.

J. Sneyers, T. Schrijvers, and B. Demoen, Dijkstra's algorithm with Fibonacci heaps: an executable description in CHR, Proceedings of the 20th Workshop on Logic Programming (Fink, M. and Tompits, H. and Woltran, S., eds.), pp. 182-191, 2006.

J. Sneyers, T. Schrijvers, and B. Demoen, Memory reuse for CHR, Proceedings of Twenty Second International Conference on Logic Programming, Seattle, Washington, USA (Etalle, S. and Truszczynski, eds.), 2006, accepted.

J. Sneyers, T. Schrijvers, and B. Demoen, The Computational Power and Complexity of Constraint Handling Rules, Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Constraint Handling Rules (Schrijvers, T. and Fruehwirth, T., eds.), pp. 3-17, 2005.

J. Sneyers, T. Schrijvers, and B. Demoen, Guard and continuation optimization for occurrence representations of CHR, Logic Programming, ICLP 2005, Proceedings (Gabbrielli, M. and Gupta, G., eds.), vol 3668, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 83-97, 2005.

T. Schrijvers, P. Stuckey, and G. Duck, Abstract interpretation for constraint handling rules, Proceedings of the Seventh ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on the Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming (Felty, A., ed.), pp. 218-229, 2005.

T. Schrijvers, and M. Bruynooghe, Polymorphic algebraic data type reconstruction, Proceedings of Eigth ACM-SIGPLAN International Symposium on Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming, Venice, Italy (Maher, M., ed.), 2006, accepted.

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