Dear LPers,
we have reached the end of 2020 – which has been in many ways a challenging year.
In spite of the challenges, the ALP community has continued to move forward. We have completed the elections of new members of the ALP Executive Committee (welcome to Andrea Formisano, Jose Morales, Son Tran and Yuliya Lierler). On behalf of the entire ALP community, we would like to give our THANK YOU to the outgoing members of the EC (Alessandro Dal Palù, Ricardo Rocha, Paul Tarau, and Jan Wielemaker) and to our past president Thorsten Schaub for their dedication and hard work. Of course the best wishes for his term to the new president Thomas Eiter!!!
2020 has been the year of virtual conferences – the pandemic has made it impossible to organize gatherings and discouraged many of us to jump on a plane. ICLP has been no exception – instead of savoring the beauty and the flavors of Calabria, we have met in Zoom rooms. It was an interesting experience, with great participation. Overall, a great success. Kudos to the organizers for the hard work in transitioning the event from face-to-face to fully online. And just as we have passed ICLP 2020, activities are already in progress to organize ICLP 2021 (Porto and/or virtual), under the leadership of Ricardo Rocha as general chair and Andrea Formisano and Anne Liu as program chairs.
ICLP 2021: here or in our room?
In spite of COVID-19, ALP has continued to move forward. We have done extensive work on the ALP site, which contains up-to-date references to published TPLP papers and now provides access to information about all ICLP conferences for which we could locate (or reconstruct) a web site. This is an ongoing process and we would welcome any help and additions from the community. In particular, if you have online materials concerning ICLP/ILPS/JICSLP from the 90s, please do contact us (e.g., anything dated before 1995).
The ALP site provides some new materials that we have recently posted. First of all, thanks to Paul McJones and Luis Moniz Pereira, we have some new outstanding posts related to the history of logic programming. Luis was also able to provide us access to issues of the ALP Newsletter from 1981-1984 – they are amazing readings, highly recommended!
Several featured articles have appeared in the ALP site:
- DaRLing: a Datalog OWL 2 RL Rewriter
- The ILASP System for Inductive Learning of Answer Set Programs
- The Alpha Solver for Lazy-Grounding Answer-Set Programming
- Polyvariant program specialisation and its application in program analysis and verification
Last but not least – the Executive Committee and our President are working hard to ensure that our main publication venues (TPLP as a journal and ICLP as a conference) maintain a strong rating – e.g., within CORE. Currently ICLP is rated as an “A” conference (at par with CP, SAT, LPNMR).
An extensive data collection has taken place during the last few weeks, e.g., citation numbers for the full papers accepted to ICLP. Needless to say, maintaining a high ranking (“A” or better) is crucial to ensure that logic programming is a visible and healthy research field.
You can do your part to help the community. Please make sure to submit great papers to both ICLP and TPLP, and make sure to always cite TPLP versions of the papers in your articles (e.g., do not cite arXiv versions of the same).
As far as TPLP is concerned, the Scimago Ranking
sets TPLP in the first quartile (Q1/top) for
- Computational Theory and Mathematics,
- Hardware and Architecture, and
- Software,
but only in the second quartile (Q2) for
- artificial intelligence (this is not completely surprising, given the domination of machine learning/data mining within that community) and,
- Theoretical Computer Science. Interesting enough, even Theoretical Computer Science ranks Q2 in that same ranking.
Unfortunately rankings are becoming every day more used for universities, departments, research groups, and even researchers evaluation that can affect research funding and career advancement.
We cannot close without taking a moment to remember the friends from our community we have lost during 2020:
- Jan Maluszynski
- Christian Schulte
- Francisco Bueno
- Harold Boley
Their friendship and their outstanding research contributions will never be forgotten.
On behalf of the entire team of the ALP Newsletter, we would like to send you our warmest wishes of Happy New Year.
Agostino & Enrico