Dear Colleagues,
welcome to the December 2016 issue of your ALP Newsletter – our apologies for posting this a bit later than usual.
The organization of ICLP 2017 is now in full swing. Melbourne Australia will be the home of this year’s event, and it promises a wealth of exciting activities. The co-location this year is particularly interesting – CP and SAT will be running with ICLP, and the conference will be the week immediately after IJCAI. This is an opportunity to meet researchers from related disciplines and promote an healthy exchange of ideas. The call for papers and the call for workshops for ICLP are already out there – please visit the conference web site at http://iclp17.a4lp.org.
This issue of the newsletter features three contributed articles, dealing with different but all very appealing topics. One paper by Ahmetaj, Ortiz, and Šimkus explores issues related to queries and ontologies, one (by Calegari and Denti) explores issues in home-automation (a great topic!), and the last but not least contribution is a very nice position paper on agents programming (by Brian Logan). We are very happy to see such great contributions and we hope you will enjoy (and don’t be shy about sending a note of thank you/interest to the authors!).
As you may have seen, we have also started exploring a new format for publishing the contributed articles. Considering that the number of people that are reading full papers in a browser is declining, and considering the relatively poor job of HTML in capturing scientific content, we will post only an extended abstract of each contribution along with a link to a PDF downloadable version of the entire contribution.
During the most recent ALP General Meeting, we discussed ideas to bring novelty in the newsletter. One thing that we would like to try right away is to go back to our past and revive the LP Dissertation section. It has been a long time since we received notifications of dissertations completed in LP – and we feel it is a great way to give some visibility to our younger researchers. Thus… if you have any student who is completing a dissertation (or even just a thesis) on any topic related to logic programming, please send us a quick note – we just need a name and a title (a short abstract would be great too). Help us celebrate the successes of your students.
The ALP EC has written the sponsorship guidelines of the association. Please read them carefully. You can ask funds for invited speakers in LP-related events and for students traveling in LP-meetings and schools. It’s a big opportunity.
We hope to continue receiving ideas about how to make your newsletter better.
Agostino and Enrico