Conference Report: ASPOCP11

The 4th edition of the Workshop on Answer-Set Programming and Other Computing Paradigms (ASPOCP11) took place on July 10th in Lexington, Kentucky, USA, and was co-located with ICLP 2011.

Yuliya and Michael

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 series of workshops 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 program of the workshop included 7 technical contributions and two invited talks. The technical presentations ranged from topics such as hybrid answer-set solving to alternative solving techniques as well as from a new treatment of function symbols to modeling aspects.

Michael and Stefan

The invited talks were given by Ilkka Niemelä and Michel Gelfond. The former described an approach for combining ASP and SMT (SAT Modulo Theories) via difference logics. The latter gave a personal account on the history of action languages and on their relation to ASP.

Illka and Yuliya

The accepted papers can be found at http://www.dbai.tuwien.ac.at/proj/aspocp11/accepted.html.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank all authors, speakers, reviewers and participants. Without their contributions the success of this year’s ASPOCP would not have been possible. We would also like to thank the local organizers of ICLP for their valuable help. The period for the organizers Marcello Balduccini and Stefan Woltran has ended with this edition of the workshop. The next editions of ASPOCP will be organized by Michael Fink and Yuliya Lierler. We would like to wish them best of luck and we hope they will find the task of organizing ASPOCP as enjoyable as we did.

Marcello Balduccini (Eastman Kodak Company, USA)
Stefan Woltran (Vienna University of Technology, Austria)