Editorial, March 2013

Dear LPers,

Welcome to the new issue of your ALP newsletter.

First of all, Happy Easter to all of you. While Easter time is a time of rest and family for most, it is not time for vacation for logic programmers. We are facing an hard season in terms of conference deadlines. Let us take a quick look at some of the most popular conferences where we can find logic programming work:

  • RR, July 27-29, Manheim /Germany), Deadline March 30.
  • ICLP, Aug 24-28, Istanbul (Turkey), Deadline April 3 (paper registration)
  • CP 2013, Sept 16-20, Uppsala (Sweden), Deadline April 17 (paper registration)
  • LPNMR, Sept 15-19, Corunna (Spain), Deadline April 17 (paper registration)
  • PPDP, Sept 16-18, Madrid (Spain), Deadline May 27 (paper registration)
  • LOPSTR, Sept 18-20, Madrid (Spain), Deadline June 4 (paper registration)
  • CILC 2013 Catania, Sept 25-27 , Catania (Sicily), Deadline June 14
  • WFLP, Sept 11-13, Kiel (Germany), Deadline June 16

We are aware that organizers try to do their best in finding the best time for a meeting. Nevertheless, a minimum of synchronization would go a long way in better serving the community of authors and researchers. Let us consider what could be wrong with this picture:

  1. Four conferences with deadlines within a 2-week period
  2. 6 (!!!) conference within one month
  3. Conferences with a full overlap – PPDP/LOPST with LPNMR, both important meeting of our community
  4. Conferences with partial overlap – e.g., the above mentioned conferences and CP, which is another community that  shares several interests (and researchers) with logic programming.
  5. In the USA, the Fall semester typically starts around the 20th of August – it is absolutely impractical to take off from teaching duties and travel to Europe several times in the span of 2/3 weeks.

This fact will probably decrease the number of submissions and participation and this is not what we should be aiming at. Forcing researchers to make a choice about one conference versus another simply because of lack of synchronization and scheduling is not fair. PLEASE: if you plan to organize a conference, communicate with the other conference organizers, and think about what is best for the authors and researchers.

Let us go back to this issue of the newsletter. We present two feature articles, both dealing with system implementation, with a particular focus on constraint-based techniques.

The first one Tor: Modular Search with Hookable Disjunction, by Benoit Desouter and Tom Schrijvers deals with the capability of programming search startegies at high level. The second, The SAT Compiler in B-Prolog, by Neng-Fa Zhou, shows how a constraint satisfaction problem encoded in B-Prolog can be compiled to a SAT formula and exploiting of the solving capabilities of the best SAT solvers.

In this issue we also open a new track. The (out of) left field track in which we would like to point out interesting topics outside our main research lines, that might represent apromising scope of applications of our techniques (or simply might be interesting to read for some minutes). We start this track focusin on Graph Analytics and Big Data.

As usual, we look forward your comments!!!

Till the next time

Agostino and Enrico