Dear LPers,
Welcome to a new issue of your favorite newsletter. The summer is upon us, many of us are baking under unusually extreme temperatures. So what is more refreshing than a new edition of ICLP? We are all ready to pack our bags and head to beautiful Lexington, Kentucky – the land of Bluegrass, the Derby (and, yes, Bourbon). Some of us had the pleasure to visit Lexington in previous occasions (e.g., at the celebration of Michael Gelfond’s 65th birthday) and it is a truly pleasant and attractive place.
ICLP’11 is welcoming us with a very high quality program, rich of technical presentation, short papers/posters, and a rich selection of workshops. I am sure that this will be another successful event and Mirek and Victor are ready to welcome all the LPers to Lexington. We also need to extend our Kudos to Michael and John for the hard work in soliciting and selecting papers – this was not an easy task, this year ICLP’s deadlines were very close to those of many other relevant events; but, in spite of this, Michael and John have been able to attract and select top-notch papers, that will surely grasp the interest of the whole LP community.
Let’s move to this issue of the newsletter. As it has become practice over the last few months, the newsletter has become more and more a dynamic communication mechanism for the LP community. News item are posted on a continuous basis, so don’t forget to come back and visit this site often. You will find CFPs, conference reports, announcements and other interesting news items, constantly updated.
For this particular issue, we have solicited an outstanding group of new contributions.
In particular, Paolo Baldan and Roberto Bruni offer us a very challenging problem for George and Mildred’s new house (but, we assume, also for Paolo’s close Venice home).
Włodzimierz Drabent, instead, follows up on the paper by Howe and King, presented in the March issue of the Newsletter, by removing the extra-logical features used.
The area editors of Inductive Logic Programming, Luc De Raedt and Vitor Santos Costa, together with Angelika Kimmig, collected a nice overview of available Prolog system with probabilistic features. In particular they collected and introduced seven original contributions by Chitta Baral, Michael Gelfond, J. Nelson Rushton, Weijun Zhu, Fabrizio Riguzzi, Taisuke Sato, Yoshitaka Kameya, David Poole, Bernd Gutmann, Theofrastos Mantadelis, Guy Van den Broeck, Gerda Janssens, Jianzhong Chen, Stephen Muggleton, James Cussens, and Nicos Angelopoulos, Nicos Angelopoulosy, and James Cussens, that present the systems:
P-log, cplint_pita, PRISM, AILOG2, ProbLog, Pepl, MCMCMS, and CLP(BN)
The Constraint Logic Programming area editors Roman Barták and Tom Schrijvers introduce three papers on constraint logic programming systems on finite domains, one on SWI-Prolog, by Markus Triska, one on SICStus Prolog, by Mats Carlsson, and one on BProlog, by Neng-Fa Zhou and Yuanlin Zhang (with a special guest).
So, we have plenty of systems. It’s time to use them. Be ready for doing that during the programming contest in Lexington:
Prolog Programming Contest
See you in Lexington
Agostino & Enrico