Dear LPers,
we are back. We know you were worried about our health, it is the first time we delay the issue. Well: no problems. The reason for the delay was predicted in June Editorial: most of our favourite conferences took place in September (yes, ALL of them…) and all the community, including the Newsletter contributors were really too busy. We also wanted to take the opportunity to include in this issue reports from some of these conferences.
Anyway, let us start with a great news for the newsletter. Our area editor Michael Kifer is the winner of the test of the time award (20 years) with the paper Transaction Logic Programming (ICLP 1993) co-written with Anthony Bonner. It is a distinct honor to have him part of our editorial board – please congratulate him for this important recognition.
And our sincere congratulations to Thomas Eiter and Michael Fink, who have been recognized for the 10 years test of time award.
This issue of the newsletter starts with the report of the ICLP 2013 conference, where chairs Esra Erdem, Evelina Lamma, Joohyung Lee, and Terrance Swift report on the two above prizes and the events that took place during the conference.
We have other conference reports: Tom Schrijvers reports on the PPDP 2013 meeting, Bart Demoen reports on the Prolog Programming contest, and Domenico Cantone and Marianna Nicolosi Asmundo report on the Italian Conference on Computational Logic (CILC).
We have one system description from our friends from Bologna. Enrico Denti, Andrea Omicini, and Roberta Calegari present the current status of tuProlog: a mature logical system that allows one to easily include Prolog programs within adaptive, pervasive, self-organizing, knowledge-intensive systems, and integrating them with a variety of different programming languages and paradigms, over computing platforms of any kind.
We have two regular papers. The first one is in the area of KR & Non-monotonic Reasoning: Large Object Oriented Knowledge Bases: A Challenge for Reasoning Engines by Vinay K. Chaudhri, Stijn Heymans, Michael Wessel, and Tran Cao Son. The second is from the Foundations area: Building the Knowledge Base System IDP3, by Marc Denecker.
Let us close this short editorial with an invitation: in the last few issues we published some ideas for challenge areas for LP as part of our Left Field column; please help us keep this column alive! Did you read a non-LP paper that stimulated your curiosity? Did you attend a non-LP conference and heard an interesting talk? Please send us a note and we will make sure to share it with the rest of the community.
As usual, please do not hesitate to send us your comments and feedback.
Agostino & Enrico