The ICLP Doctoral Consortium (DC) in Budapest, Hungary, at the occasion of ICLP 2012, was the eight edition of this forum. The DC aims to provide students with an opportunity to present and discuss their research directions and to obtain feedback from peers as well as from world-renown experts in the field. The DC was held on Sept 4, one day before ICLP started, thus allowing the students to get known to each other at a rather early stage of the entire event. So they had time to exchange ideas on the other days and jointly followed the remainder of the conference.
The programme of the DC 2012 consisted of 7 student contributions. In this year, the submitted research summaries were carefully peer-reviewed not only by the organizers but also by a programme committee in order to provide even more helpful feedback to the students’ research. The accepted summaries have been published in LIPIcs, together with the ICLP technical communications. During the event the students had 25 minutes to present the context of their work, the current state of their thesis, and the open issues they still have to solve. 5 minutes were reserved for discussions. The guidelines for the slides were to use only a very few number of words. The students took this challenge in very creative way resulting in an exceptional quality of presentations in this year, with research topics ranging from Answer-Set Programming to Types in PROLOG. Details about the programs as well as the students’ research summaries are available under http://sites.unife.it/iclp-dc-2012/
The best student presentation was elected in a two-step process. Before the DC, each member of the PC (filtering out those with possible conflicts of interests) evaluated each of the research summaries. After the DC, each of the students evaluated the presentation of the other students. The final evaluation was the average between the two scores, thus taking into consideration both the research summary and the presentation. The winner was Christoph Redl, and he also had the opportunity to give his talk to the whole ICLP audience.
For lunch, we had an informal discussion with renown experts from the field about Career Planning, Scientific Writing and Presentations, Research projects, and the future of LP. We would like to take this opportunity to thank our “special guests” Enrico Pontelli, Torsten Schaub, and Dave Warren for the lively discussion. Special thanks also to the local organizers of ICLP, in particular Péter Szeredi, for the help in organizing this lunch as well as taking care for the handling of the student grants.
Finally, we would like to send a big thank you to the applicants, the programme committee and all other participants. Their contributions were the basis for the success of this year’s consortium! Last but not least, the support from ALP was of great help.
The next doctoral consortium will be run at ICLP 2013 in Istanbul, Turkey.