Dear LP’ers,
welcome to the last issue of our ALP newsletter for the 2013. It has been a busy year, with many interesting events. As we get to the end of the year, we reflect on how our beloved LP keeps surprising us with new challenges, ideas and applications.
2013 has been a good year for LP. Several areas, especially ASP, have gained full acceptance in a number of research communities (e.g., in knowledge representation) – where LP is viewed not only as an interesting modeling tool, but as a true and competitive implementation and development platform. Kudos to the teams behind systems like clasp and DLV for their outstanding work and their dedication in creating software that is reliable, efficient and deployable. Yet, we are still facing many challenges. There are still so many application domains where LP can make a profound difference – we need to explore them with vigor. And (yes, this message is to you, dear LP reviewer) we need to be willing to consider application papers for their true value as real contributions to the LP community, not as second class citizens.
We also hope that 2013 will teach us the importance of thinking outside of the box when we think about conferences and scheduling. It would have been so much nicer to be able to attend more than one conference, to send papers to more than one conference – instead we witnessed a conglomeration of most LP events within the span of few weeks, with highly overlapping deadlines. Let us try to avoid this – it is not beneficial to the community and to the needs of our young researchers (who need to publish to advance their degrees and careers).
As we move into 2014, there are several exciting events and activities waiting for us. ICLP will be part of FLOC in beautiful Vienna. FLOC has always been an interesting collection of conferences, with great opportunities for interaction with researchers from other related disciplines. ECAI will be another interesting event, this year in Prague. Last but not least, let us not forget PADL, this year in sunny San Diego, California.
In this issue, you will find an interesting contribution brought by our friend Marco Gavanelli – challenging us to consider LP as a viable instrument in the areas of mobile and ubiquitous computing. Great food for thought.
Moreover, our favourite rock singer Alessandra Mileo with Aidan Hogan wrote for us the paper Lined Data, Logic Programming, and Black Risotto in which they explore the use of adjectives large, wide, open, big in the web community and the importance that our community has and might have in this area.
This issue includes also a nice report from the LPNMR conference (this year co-located with other events, like CLIMA) – Pedro and Son set up a scientifically amazing event, with great contributions in areas of LP for knowledge representation and non-monotonic reasoning.
As we close this editorial, on behalf of the editorial board of the ALP Newsletter, we would like to send our warmest wishes of Happy Holidays and Happy New Year.
Agostino & Enrico