by Marcello Balduccini, Kodak Research Labs, USA
Stefan Woltran, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
Since its introduction, answer set programming (ASP) has been widely applied to various knowledge-intensive tasks and combinatorial search problems. ASP was found to be closely related to SAT, which has led to a new method of computing answer sets using SAT solvers and techniques adapted from SAT. While this has been the most studied relationship, the relationship of ASP to other computing paradigms, such as constraint satisfaction, quantified boolean formulas (QBF), or first-order logic (FOL) is also the subject of active research. The goal of the ASPOCP (short for, ASP and other computing paradigms) workshop is to facilitate the discussion about crossing the boundaries of current ASP techniques, in combination with or inspired by other computing paradigms.
This year the 3rd edition of the ASPOCP workshop was held in Edinburgh, Scotland. After two editions organized by Wolfgang Faber and Joohyung Lee, this year the workshop was chaired by Marcello Balduccini and Stefan Woltran. ASPOCP10 was held as a full-day workshop as part of FloC/ICLP in Edinburgh on July 20th 2010, and the program included one invited talk and 9 regular paper presentations. The workshop was opened by an invited talk by Torsten Schaub, titled ASP Solving and Other Computing Paradigms: A Potassco-sque Perspective, in which Torsten described various aspects of the Potassco project, including the use of techniques borrowed from the area of databases for non-ground processing of programs, and the integration of constraint processing in their ASP-system clasp. The regular presentations covered several topics, from theoretical foundations, to techniques for the development of solvers, to applications based on the combination of ASP with other paradigms (for a list of accepted papers click here).
We would like to take the opportunity here to thank all authors, speakers, reviewers and participants. Their work and contributions were the basis for the success of this year’s ASPOCP workshop. Extended versions of a selection of the best papers of ASPOCP 2010 and LaSH 2010 will also be published on a special issue of AI Communications.
It is planned that the next ASPOCP will be run at ICLP 2011 in Lexington/Kentucky.