Welcome to the September issue of the ALP Newsletter.
The last few months have been intense with meetings and conferences, another sign that the logic programming community is alive and vibrant. In particular, the joint conference ICLP/CP was another outstanding success, with great events, great presentations, and opportunities for interactions and exchange of ideas. A big ‘THANK YOU’ goes to all the organizers and committee members, that put a tremendous amount of effort in this event. Let’s now start thinking ICLP 2016 🙂
ICLP was also the opportunity to continue the conversation that we announced and started in the last issue of the newsletter – concerning the model of publication to be adopted for the ICLP conference. The discussion started with the previous issue continued in a special session of ICLP (and later within the EC Boards). Participants expressed their opinions and at the end the EC decided to maintain the current model, but relaxing some constraints on the strictness of the reviews, in order to give more chances to application papers and to those that in the past were considered “conference papers”. At the same time, some further discussions will occur to determine a more stable arrangements for the release of the Technical Communications; some options being considered include LIPICS, as done in 2010-2012, and CEUR, as done in 2014-2015. The option of a special journal for hosting all
conferences in the area of computational logic has been also proposed and it received some interest.
As suggested by the president after the panel we have reorganized our website in order to provide better access to the ICLP proceedings (from 2010 onwards). By moving your mouse on “ICLP conferences” you will have access to the links to full papers and technical communications of all that period.
Going back to this issue of the newsletter, you will find interesting reports from some of the events that took place in the last few months, including ICLP, CILC (the Italian primary conference on logic programming) and the ICLP Programming Competition. Last but not least, we have a very exciting contribution by Francesca Toni and Claudia Schulz discussing the ever important link between logic programming and argumentation (a topic that has been gaining great relevance in recent years) and a foundational contribution by Luis Moniz Pereira and Ari Saptawijaya on conterfactual reasoning (with some sensible applications).
As usual, we welcome your comments and suggestions.
Agostino and Enrico