Editorial June/July 2016

Dear LPers,

Welcome to the June/July issue of the ALP Newsletter.

There are many interesting news coming from the Association. We would like to say a big ‘THANK YOU’ to Manuel Carro, who is stepping down after serving as Conference Coordinator since 2010. Manuel did a fantastic job in enhancing the visibility of the ALP conferences and ensuring a streamlining of the organization process. At the same time, we would like to welcome Marco Gavanelli as the new Conference Coordinator.

Marco and Manuel have already started working hard – in the web site of the Association you can find a newly updated Conference Organization Policy – please make sure to consult it and get excited about submitting a proposal to organize an upcoming ICLP!

The Executive Committee has extensively discussed the issue of use of the ALP mailing list. Currently, the ALP mailing list is used exclusively for circulating the digests of the Newsletter (4 times per year) and for announcing ALP elections. This mailing list represents also the official membership list of ALP – i.e., members of the ALP mailing lists are automatically allowed to vote during the ALP elections.

It is the desire of the Executive Committee to maintain the traffic on this mailing list to the minimum. On the other hand, there is also a desire to provide to the ALP community with a convenient mechanism to quickly circulate announcements for conferences and events that are highly relevant to the ALP community. To meet this need without adversely impacting the existing ALP mailing list, we have established a new mailing list (ALP-CFP – reachable at [email protected]) which will be exclusively dedicated to CFPs for conferences that are relevant to ALP. This mailing list will have an open participation and all traffic on it will be moderated to avoid inappropriate messages. The mailing list has been initially populated with the same membership as the current ALP mailing list – but people will have the option to independently signing on or off depending on their interest (and without impacting their “official” membership to ALP). Please use the new mailing list for announcing your conferences and workshops! The first message on this new mailing list is the invitation to contribute to the 2017 Competition on Computational Models of Argumentation.

I am sure you are all eagerly waiting on the announcement of the program for ICLP 2016 – New York City in October sounds like a wonderful perspective, and we are sure that Manuel and Andy are assembling a very exciting program.

Last but not least – please enjoy the content of this new issue of the newsletter; we have three contributed articles, one by Maratea on abstract solvers for ASP, one by Morillo Torres et al. on task scheduling for energy  consumption, and the usual entertaining games by Baldan and Bruni. Please enjoy them.

Until the next one…

Agostino & Enrico