Dear LPers,
We have reached the end of another year and we hope your are enjoying the holidays season!
2014 has been a very positive year for logic programming, with a number of remarkable events for our community.
First of all, ALP elections: we have some new members in the ALP Executive Commitee (see https://logicprogramming.org/the-association-for-logic-programming/board/) and a new president: Gopal Gupta ended his successful term and Torsten Schaub has been elected as our president. On behalf of all the team behind the ALP Newsletter, we wish to express our sincere “Thank You” to Gopal for his continuous efforts in promoting LP worldwide, and our “Thank you and Good luck!” to Torsten for taking on this challenging position. We have no doubts he will do great things for our association.
Similarly, some fresh blood entered in the board (area editors) of this Newsletter: please send them your papers!!!
The main event for ALP in 2014 was surely ICLP @ FLOC in Vienna; we have reported on that in the September issue.
Let’s focus on the future. We are ready for a new challenging year. ICLP will join CP in Cork, Ireland: the two communities share a lot of interests and several of us work in both fields. The ICLP/CP co-location worked well in the past and we are sure this will happen in 2015 as well. But don’t forget the other events such as LPNMR in Lexington, PADL in Portland, RuleML, etc. We are sure there will be many more to come. Please use our facebook page to suggest events that we have forgotten (or send us the CFPs and we will be happy to publish them in this web site).
Another important event for 2015 will be the celebration of the 30th birthday of the Italian association for logic programming (GULP, www.programmazionelogica.it). The event will be celebrated at the annual meeting of GULP (the CILC conference) at the end of June in Genova, with some special events and a summer school on logic programming. The Italian association had a great influence within ALP; from 1994 to 2003 the Italian meeting was organized jointly with the Spanish (PRODE) and Portuguese (APPIA) associations: this generated strong links between researchers in these countries, collaborations that continue today. As a final, personal, remark: our first paper (on {log}) was presented in the GULP 1991 meeting; GULP 1990 was also the first conference we ever attended!
In this issue we are glad to announce the Book The Deductive Spreadsheet, by our old friend Iliano Cervesato.
As feature articles, Andre’ Freitas and Joao C. Pereira da Silva present their paper Semantics at Scale: When Distributional Semantics meets Logic Programming (communicated by Alessandra Mileo and Thomas Krennwallner).
We have two papers communicated by Paul Tarau: AspCcgTk: Towards Syntactic Parsing with Semantic Disambiguation by Means of Declarative Programming, by Yuliya Lierler and Peter Schuller and Automatic Integration of Hybrid Java-Prolog Entities with LogicObjects by Sergio Castro and Paulo Moura.
On behalf of the editorial team of the ALP Newsletter, we wish Happy New Year to all of you!!!
Agostino and Enrico