Dear LPers,
We have reached the end of another year, and 2011 is finishing with a lot of memories. This has been an year that has witnessed the untimely departure of some valuable friends, colleagues, and role models (Gaetano Aurelio Lanzarone, William Hale Winsbourough, John McCarthy). We remember them and keep them in our prayers.
But 2011 has also been a strong year for LP; we had great events and conferences, and the arrival of many young researchers (e.g., to our annual meeting) is an indication that the field is alive and kicking – so we say “Welcome!!” to the Jael Kriener, Laura Titolo, Martin Slota, Dalal Alrajeh, Domenico Corapi, Flavio Cruz, co-authors at ICLP, and many other young researchers that are joining the ranks of the LP community.
Following the work anticipated in the previous issue, this web site is now the official web site of logic programming and it is pointed by www.logicprogramming.org. We are working with the TPLP editorial board to provide an even more effective coverage of the journal in the web site. All accepted and published papers will be directly accessible from the ALP site, and we will be able to provide statistics concerning accesses to the individual abstracts. TPLP has some outstanding special issues – in particular, the recent special issue dedicated to Prolog systems is a true gem that will be valuable to all researchers and developers. Please take a look at it.
Just as we, as LPers, we recognize the potential and strengths of logic programming in so many domains, we have to admit that there is still a lot of skepticism and resistance towards LP in the general computing community. We need to spread our knowledge! We do know that LP techniques are effective. This year, on the pages of this newsletter, we had the opportunity to celebrate some great applications of logic programming technology – e.g., the interesting use of Prolog in the celebrated IBM Watson System, or the many industrial applications of CLP (e.g., the contribution of Thorsten Winterer in this issue). We also witnessed the amazing progress in ASP technology, as demonstrated in the 3rd ASP competition and the contributions of Logic Programming to Semantic Web, surveyed by the contribution in this issue of Francesco Calimeri and Pascal Hitzler. Moreover, the last two ICLP best paper awards have been assigned to CLP applications.
And talking about celebrations of applications of LP, the next Symposium on Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages (PADL) is about to arrive – it will take place on January 23-24, 2012 in Philadelphia, organized by Claudio Russo and Neng-Fa Zhou.
Let us close with a quick note about ICLP 2012; it is scheduled to take place in early September in the wonderful city of Budapest, Hungary. This is a return for ICLP – ICLP 1993 took place in this venue. This is not an accident, but a recognition of the fundamental role that the Hungarian logic programming community has played since the beginning. Vitor, Peter, (and Agostino) are organizing great events with some surprises. For the third time, accepted long papers will appear directly on TPLP, while technical papers will be published as LIPICS.
Let us close this editorial by sending, on behalf of the whole editorial board, our heartfelt wishes of Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!
Agostino and Enrico