Dear Logic Programming Colleagues,
welcome to a new issue of your favorite ALP Newsletter!
First of all, we need to apologize for the slight delay in the recent publications of the newsletter – new administrative appointments have taken a toll on both of your editors during the summer.
July was a great month for Logic Programming. The 2018 International Conference on Logic Programming took place in Oxford, UK, as part of the Federated Logic Conferences (FLoC). Oxford provided a great venue for this event, and the conference features great presentations and events. If you want to learn more about ICLP 2018, please read the conference report by Alessandro and Paul, in this issue of the newsletter. Let us now look forward to ICLP 2019 – back to the USA and back to Las Cruces, New Mexico – the same site that hosted ICLP 20 years before in 1999.
During the conference in Oxford, the results of the most recent elections to the ALP Executive Committee were announced. It is great to welcome Esra Erdem, German Vidal and Nicola Leone to the Executive Committee – their experience and creativity will bring new vitality to the world of ALP.
This issue of the newsletter presents a number of interesting articles. Amelia Harrison explores the use of the AG semantics to prove program correctness – the beautiful article makes use of the n-Queens program to demonstrate this interesting approach. Paolo and Roberto bring a new contribution to the Games & Puzzles section, helping us discover a new social media (feetbook) and the evil attempts of users profiling by Oxford Synthetica.
Harold Boley, as part of anew initiative aimed at cross-publication between the ALP Newsletter and the RuleML community, brings to us an interesting perspective on PSOA RuleML, a conceptual bridge between relational databases and graph databases. Last but not least, Yuliya Lierler provides an overview of EZSMT, a SMT-based constraint answer set programming system.
A particular remark is due to the special issue of the German journal on AI (Künstliche Intelligenz) entitled “Answer Set Programming Unleashed” edited by Torsten Schaub and Stefan Woltran. The foundations, the systems, the various results and applications of ASP are investigated and explained in details in the several contributions by leading researchers of the area. The issue ends with two interviews: Vladimir Lifschitz and Gerhard Brewka. Don’t forget to read them!
In closing, please let us remind you that we have an active effort aimed at collecting and promoting doctoral dissertations in the area of Logic Programming – if you have a dissertation, a student who has a dissertation, a student of a student who has a dissertation, etc. (transitive closure), please help us collecting the relevant information.
Until the next time…
Agostino & Enrico