Dear LPers,
ICLP 2012 is on its way, just a couple of months away; we are certain that while you are reading these words you are also busy finding flights and hotels to join us in beautiful Budapest. The program of ICLP is progressively taking shape; we have an outstanding selection of technical papers – 20 papers and 37 technical communications. We are certain that you will be impressed by the quality and significance of this year’s contributions. The selection was hard – we received 102 submissions and many were of great quality. Hurry up for Early registration!
While we finalize the conference program, we can anticipate some items that will surely make it worthwhile registering immediately. Ferenc Darvas will provide an invited talk on several Applications of Logic Programming in Hungary, Jan Wielemaker will lead a session dedicated to the celebration of 25 years of SWI Prolog. Mike Elston will give an invited talk on Applications of Prolog and CHR to stock brokering tools (see also his article in this issue of the ALP Newsletter). Moreoever, ICLP will offer an exciting Tutorial on Logic-based Agents and the Semantic Web by Viviana Mascardi.
The ICLP program will be very dense. This is why there was room for just one tutorial. PC members voted for the tutorialists, as usual. The one arrived second (for few votes) was about argumentation. Don’t worry, in this issue we have a nice introduction on Abstract Argumentation and Answer Set Programming by Sarah Alice Gaggl and Stefan Woltran.
But let us move on to another ICLP surprise. Let us travel back in time to 2004. During the ICLP 2004 social dinner, in the fascinating Saint Malo (see also this brief report), the ALP community recognized three papers as the Most Influential Papers in 20 Years. The awards went to Michael Gelfond and Vladimir Lifschitz, for their 1988 ICLP/SLP paper on stable model semantics, Joxan Jaff ar and Jean-Louis Lassez, for their POPL 1987 paper on Constraint Logic Programming, and to Vijay Saraswat, Martin Rinard, and Prakash Panangaden for their POPL 1991 paper on Concurrent Constraint Programming. In a similar spirit, but with different rules, last year in Lexington the ALP executive assigned to the ICLP12 program chairs the task of recognizing the most influential papers presented in the ICLP and ILPS conferences in 1992 (20 years) and 2002 (10 years). The winners have been selected and invited to give a talk in Budapest. But they are kept secret till that day!
Following these “award” events we would like to try to produce a short list (10-20 entries) of most influential papers in Logic Programming nominated and voted by Newsletter readers. We could populate a list but we prefer starting collecting your suggestions (either using the blog at the end of this Editorial or sending us an email). We just wish to point out the paper that perhaps constitutes the birth of our community (even if there is plenty of previous papers on resolution that deserves to be cited): Robert A. Kowalski: Predicate Logic as Programming Language. IFIP Congress 1974: 569-574. Please suggest papers, use the blog, don’t be shy!!! Then we’ll collect them in a page, and in case, open a voting stage.
Hoping to see you in Budapest
Agostino and Enrico