Dear LP-ers,
2010 is over. An important year for Logic Programming.
A successful ICLP conference in Edinburgh with the novelty of the proceedings published in TPLP (thanks to Manuel, Torsten, and in particular, Illka) that allowed us to improve the position in university rankings; some important celebrations: the 60th birthday of Maurice Bruynooghe (report), the 65 years of Michael Gelfond (report), the 25th years of Logic Programming in Italy (report), just to cite a few.
But Logic Programming is not only celebrations. The number of applications where it is effectively employed is increasing in diversity and in number. The ALP Newsletter presented a survey in the September issue (report) and presents two applicative technical papers in this issue (by Gerhard Friedrich and by Andrea Calì, Georg Gottlob, Thomas Lukasiewicz, and Andreas Pieris). The speed of the ASP solvers, as demonstrated by the success in the recent SAT competitions. ensures the applicability of this paradigm not only in knowledge representation and reasoning but also in solving other classes of combinatorial problems. LP is used in learning (ILP), in web querying, bioinformatics, and several other domains.
We are ready for the new challenges. In these days the selection of the benchmarks for the new ASP competition (part of the LPNMR program) will be defined. The deadline for LPNMR is over and the one for ICLP is approaching. Please submit your contributions and do your best to enrich these meetings with your participation. We need to the address the research lines for the new decade.
The new format of the Newsletter has received many notices of consensus. Currently we have registered roughly 2,500 visits from more than 1,000 visitors. Thank you again for your interest and your support. This is the fourth (and last, of course) issue of 2010 and several “asynchronous news” have been published as soon as we received them. We would like to encourage you to participate to the life of the newsletter by posting (e.g., by using the form at the end of this Editorial) any kind of comment or suggestion, and and/or sending us comments/reports/personal views etc that we will immediately post in a more structured way.
Last, but most important:
"Salute" from Bire Brewery in Udine
Happy new year to all of you
Enrico and Agostino