ALP ISSUE, Editorial

Editorial, Vol. 30, No. 2, July 2017

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Dear LPers,

Welcome to the Summer issue of your favorite newsletter.

it is sad to open the newsletter with news about friends and colleagues that have passed away. Unfortunately, logic programming has lost one of its founding fathers, a charismatic figure who has been instrumental in laying the foundations of the field that we all love and appreciate. Alain Colmerauer passed away on May 12. You can read the “in memoriam” contributions by his close friends Frédéric Benhamou and Veronica Dahl.

ICLP 2017 is coming. After 30 years we are back to Melbourne, Australia. The combination with SAT and CP will provide an exciting event, with great opportunities to learn from these other communities. The program will feature joint workshops, invited speakers, the programming competition, and a joint CP/ICLP Doctoral Consortium. This is a great opportunity to meet with old friends and learn about the new directions the tLP is taking.

As a consolidated tradition in the summer issue, we have a “games and puzzles” contribution by Roberto Bruni and Paolo Baldan. The war against mosquitoes is endless!

We have two other technical contributions:

  1. A nice historical and semantical introduction to Negation As Failure by Marc Denecker, Mirek Truszczynski, and Joost Vennekens,
  2. A trip in the music world using constraint programming by John Hooker (please listen the attched mp3 files).
We would like to thank Emma J Pearce and the CUP offices for having fixed the missing links to the electronic appendices of the editorial of the TPLP special issues of ICLP 2013 and 2014. The appendices contain the Technical Communications and the Doctoral Consortium contributions. All the contributions are now easily accessible from the ALP pages:

Some shameless advertising: TPLP has just published a Special Issue on New Trends of Constraint Logic Programming. The accepted papers introduce the reader to new scenarios that combine traditional constraint (logic) programming, (constraint) answer set programming, satisfiability modulo theory, and distributed constraint optimization using ASP. It is a great reading and a great source of references.

One final request – the ALP Newsletter would like to revive a column dedicated to recognition of the work done by our students – e.g., doctoral dissertations, Master’s theses, even undergraduate research projects that are focused on logic programming. Please help us recognizing these opportunities – a quick email to the editors is all it takes!

For those of you heading to their summer vacations, please enjoy your holidays. For those of you heading to ICLP – see you in Melbourne!

Agostino and Enrico