Dear LPers,
Welcome to the June 2013 Issue of your favorite Newsletter.
As you may have noticed, the graphical design of the ALP website (and of the Newsletter) has been slightly changed. We hope you find the current design clean and accessible. The change was forced on us by a series of hacking attempts (perhaps those imperative language folks?) that have successfully brought our site to a halt. As a result, we opted to trade our manually customized style for a default WordPress template (which would guarantee regular security updates). We hope the current rendering (obtained by setting several parameters of the template) is acceptable.
The other news is that the Association for Logic Programming has finally created an official presence on Facebook. We have created a Facebook page for the Association. The page will feature highlights of all posts and announcements from the ALP site and newsletter (including call for papers, position announcements, book announcements, etc.). But, differently from the ALP site, the Facebook page will be open to you, to your comments, opinions, and provide a venue for discussions and exchange of ideas. Please make sure to “Like” our new ALP Facebook page and be an active part of it.
In this issue we have the honor of presenting the new book Programming with Higher-Order Logic by two of the major reaserchers of this important extension of logic programming, namely, Dale Miller and Gopalan Nadathur.
Waiting for the final ICLP acceptation list, we have published the list of LPNMR accepted papers, communicated by Son Tran; LPNMR has shaped a very exciting program, and its co-location with events like CLIMA is making it an event that will surely attract many of our community members.
In this issue, you can find another instance of our new Left Field column – focused on the new wave of research ideas in the area of cyber-physical systems. We believe that LP can have a strong role in this application domain. As done in the past, we reiterate our call for submissions to this column – if you stumble on any interesting paper, report, event that is not directly linked to LP but has the potential of benefiting from LP, please send us a note and we will make sure to include it in our Left Field column.
This issue of the newsletter provides one scientific contribution, by Pedro Cabalar. Pedro found some time for us in the tight LPNMR organization schedule to write a great survey on the introduction of non Herbrand functions in Answer Set Programming: Setting the stage for ASP functions. Last but not least, Paolo Baldan and Roberto Bruni are back with a Games and Puzzle contribution (following their mosquito’s buster that received a huge number of visits since its publication). Paolo and Roberto propose an interesting problem of building a bridge against blocking bridges between two neighboring islands. Any relationship with real life individuals and events is unintentional…
So, now, let’s move to travel agency for organizing our full summer schedule!!!
Agostino and Enrico