In 1997, the Association of Logic Programming bestowed to fifteen recognized researchers in logic programming the title Founders of Logic Programming to recognize them as pioneers in the field. They are: Maurice Bruynooghe, Jacques Cohen, Alain Colmerauer, Keith Clark, Veronica Dahl, Maarten van Emden, Herve Gallaire, Robert Kowalski, Jack Minker, Fernando Pereira, Luis Moniz Pereira, Ray Reiter, J. Alan Robinson, Peter Szeredi, and David H. D. Warren.
ALP instituted awards for ICLP best paper and best student paper awards, as well as other awards, listed in the following.
In ICLP 2002 (Copenhagen) the Best Technical Paper Award went to Tom Schrijvers, Maria Garcia de la Banda, and Bart Demoen for their work: Trailing analysis for HAL, and the Best Applications Paper Award went to Alessandra Russo, Rob Miller, Bashar Nuseibeh, and Jeff Kramer, for their work An abductive approach for analyzing event-based requirements specifications.
We had three papers winning the awards in ICLP 2003 (Mumbay): two were best student papers and one was best application paper. The student papers were: Frank D. Valencia “Timed Concurrent Constraint Programming: Decidability Results and their Application to LTL”, and Brigitte Pientka, “Higher-order substitution tree indexing”, while the best application paper was: Frej Drejhammar, Christian Schulte, Per Brand and Seif Haridi “Flow Java: Declarative Concurrency for Java”.
The Best Technical Paper Award at ICLP 2004 (St. Malo) went to Tom Schrijvers and David S. Warren for the paper “Constraint Handling Rules and Tabled Execution”.
In the same meeting three papers were prized as the Most Influential Papers in 20 Years. The award went to Gelfond-Lifschitz for their 1988 ICLP/SLP paper on stable model semantics, to Jaff ar-Lassez for their POPL 1987 paper on Constraint Logic Programming, and to Saraswat, Rinard, and Panangaden for their POPL 1991 paper on Concurrent Constraint Programming.
In ICLP 2005 (Sitges) the Best Paper Award went to José F. Morales, Manuel Carro, German Puebla, and Manuel V. Hermenegildo for the paper “A generator of Efficient Abstract machine Implementations and its Application to Emulator Minimization”, while the best student paper award was assigned to Ajay Mallya for the paper “Deductive Multi-valued Model Checking”.
The Best Paper Award at ICLP 2006 (Seattle) went to Martin Gebser and Torsten Schaub for the paper “Tableau Calculi for Answer Set Programming”, and the Best Student Paper Award went to Luciano Caroprese, Sergio Greco, Cristina Sirangelo and Ester Zumpano for the paper “Declarative Semantics of Production Rules for Integrity Maintenance”.
ICLP 2007 (Porto) assigned the best paper award to Sabrina baselice, Piero Bonatti, and Giovanni Criscuolo for the paper “On finitely recursive programs” while Matti Jarvisalo and Emilia Oikarinen won the best student paper award for their paper “Extended ASP Tableaux and Rule Redundancy in Normal Logic Programs”.
ICLP 2008 (Udine) assigned the best paper award to Michael Fink for his paper “Equivalences in Answer Set Programming by Countermodels in the Logic of Here-and-there”, while the best student paper went to Shay B. Cohen, Robert J. Simmons, and Noah A. Smith for their paper “Dynamic Programming Algorithms as Product of Weighted Logic Programs”. In that rainy meeting it was also instituted the “best presentation” prize (voted by participants) that went to Vitor Santos Costa.
ICLP 2009 (Pasadena) best paper award went to Henning Christiansen and John Gallagher for their paper “Non-discriminating arguments and their uses” while the best student paper went to Matthias Broecheler and Gerardo Simari for the paper “Using histograms to better answer queries to probabilistic logic programs”.
ICLP 2010 (Edinburgh) best paper award went to Alessandro Dal Palù, Agostino Dovier, Federico Fogolari, and Enrico Pontelli for their paper “CLP-based protein fragment assembly” while the best student paper went to Christian Drescher for the paper “A Translational Approach to Constraint Answer Set Solving” cowritten with Toby Walsh.
ICLP 2011 (Lexington) best student paper award was assigned to Jael Kriener for the paper “RedAlert: Determinacy Inference for Prolog” coauthored with Andy King. The best paper award went to Massimiliano Cattafi, Marco Gavanelli, Maddalena Nonato, Stefano Alvisi and Marco Franchini for their paper “Optimal Placement of Valves in a Water Distribution Network with CLP(FD)”.
ICLP 2012 (Budapest) best student award was assigned to Muhammad Islam for his paper (with co-authors C. R. Ramakrishnan and I. V. Ramakrishnan) “Inference in Probabilistic Logic Programs with Continuous Random Variables”. The best paper award went to Gregory Duck for his paper “SMCHR: Satis ability Modulo Constraint Handling Rules”. ALP delegated ICLP 2012 PC co-chairs to recognize two papers as the most influencial papers accepted in ICLP/ILPS 1992 (20 years) and in ICLP 2002 (10 years). The prizes, entitled Test of time awards, went to Michael Gelfond and Vladimir Lifschitz: Representing Actions Extended Logic Programming. JICSLP 1992: 559-573 and to François Bry and Sebastian Schaffert: Towards a Declarative Query and Transformation Language for XML and Semistructured Data: Simulation Unification. ICLP 2002: 255-270. The former is a highly cited paper that put the basis on hundred of approached of solving action languages using prolog, clp(FD), and ASP; the latter established a bridge beteween logic (programming) and Semantic Web.Christoph Redl was awarded as “best presentation” at the doctoral consortium and allowed to present his thesis proposal Answer Set Programming with External Sources in the main conference.
As second edition of the “Test of Time” award, in ICLP 2013 (Istanbul) the paper Transaction Logic Programming (ICLP1993) by Anthony Bonner and Michael Kifer and the paper Uniform equivalence of logic programs under the stable model semantics by Thomas Eiter and Michael Fink (ICLP 2003) were awarded as the most influential paper of 20 years and 10 years ago, respectively. Claudia Schultz has been awarded as “Best Presentation” in the doctoral consortium and allowed to present her thesis proposal Argumentation for Answer Set Programming and other Non-monotonic Reasoning Systems in the ICLP main event.
In ICLP 2014 (Vienna) the awards for the most influential papers from 20 and 10 years ago went to Frèdèric Benhamou, David A. McAllester, Pascal Van Hentenryck: CLP(Intervals) Revisited and to Gregory J. Duck, Peter J. Stuckey, Maria J. Garcìa de la Banda, Christian Holzbaur: The Refined Operational Semantics of Constraint Handling Rules, respectively. The best student award went to Christian Antic for the work On Cascade Products of Answer Set Programs, the best presentation award of the doctoral consortium went to Rehan Abdul Aziz for his work Bound Founded Answer Set Programming, and, finally the best paper award was assigned to Flavio Cruz, Ricardo Rocha, Seth Copen Goldstein, and Frank Pfenning for the paper A Linear Logic Programming Language for Concurrent Programming over Graph Structures.
The best paper award of ICLP 2015 (Cork, Ireland) went to Complexity and Compilation of GZ-Aggregates in Answer Set Programming by Mario Alviano and Nicola Leone; while Amelia Harrison with Formal Methods for Answer Set Programming was awarded as best DC contribution.
Taisuke Sato’s A Statistical Learning Method for Logic Programs with Distribution Semantics was awarded as most influential paper in the 20 years category, while two papers got an ex aqueo in the 10 years category: Sabrina Baselice, Piero A. Bonatti, Michael Gelfond’s with Towards an Integration of Answer Set and Constraint Solving and Michael Codish, Vitaly Lagoon, Peter J. Stuckey’s with Testing for Termination with Monotonicity Constraints.
The best paper award of ICLP 2016 (New York) went to Anytime answer set optimization via unsatisfiable core shrinking by Mario Alviano and Carmine Dodaro, while Amelia Harrison (with Yuliya Lierler) won the best student award with the paper First-Order Modular Logic Programs and their Conservative Extensions.
The test of time awards went to Luke Simon, Ajay Mallya, Ajay Bansal, Gopal Gupta (Coinductive Logic Programming) for the 10 years edition and to Ilkka Niemelä and Patrik Simons (Efficient Implementation of the Well-founded and Stable Model Semantics) for the 20 years edition.
In 2017 (Melbourne), the best student paper award went to Finite Model Reasoning over Existential Rules (by iovanni Amendola, Nicola Leone and Marco Manna), the best paper award went to The Intricacies of 3-Valued Extensional Semantics for Higher-Order Logic (by Panos Rondogiannis and Ioanna Symeonidou), the test of time 20 years went to Hybrid Probabilistic Programs by Alex Dekhtyar and V.S. Subrahmanian and the test of time 10 years went to User-Definable Resource Bounds Analysis for Logic Programs Jorge Navas, Edison Mera, Pedro Lopez-Garcia, and Manuel V. Hermenegildo.
In 2018 (Oxford), colocated with FLOC, he 20-year test-of-time award went to Admissible Graph Rewriting and Narrowing (R Echahed, JC Janodet), the 10 Years year test-of-time award to F. Calimeri, S. Cozza, G. Ianni and N. Leone for the paper Computable functions in ASP: theory and implementation The Best paper award went to Exploiting Answer Set Programming with External Sources for Meta-Interpretive Learning (Tobias Kaminski, Thomas Eiter and Katsumi Inoue ), and the best student paper to Routing Driverless Transport Vehicles in Car Assembly with Answer Set Programming (Martin Gebser, Philipp Obermeier, Michel Ratsch-Heitmann, Mario Runge and Torsten Schaub.
In 2019 (Las Cruces, NM) the 20-year test-of-time award (now renamed as the John Alan Robinson award) went to Frédéric Benhamou, Frédéric Goualard, Laurent Granvilliers, Jean-Francois Puget for their work titled “Revising Hull and Box Consistency.” The 10-year test-of-time award (now renamed as the Alain Colmerauer award) went to Martin Gebser, Max Ostrowski, Torsten Schaub for their work titled “Constraint Answer Set Solving.” The conference offered a number of additional awards: Best student paper award to Ariyam Das and Carlo Zaniolo for the paper “A Case for Stale Synchronous Distributed Model for Declarative Recursive Computation”, Best DC paper/presentation award to Yusuf Izmirlioglu for the paper “Reasoning about Qualitative Direction and Distance between Extended Objects using Answer Set Programming”, Best technical paper award to Giovanni Amendola, Carmine Dodaro and Marco Maratea for the paper “Abstract Solvers for Computing Cautious Consequences of ASP programs”, Best applications paper award to Fernando Saenz-Perez for the paper “Applying Constraint Logic Programming to SQL Semantic Analysis”, Best Systems Paper Award to Thomas Eiter, Paul Ogris and Konstantin Schekotihin for the paper “A Distributed Approach to LARS Stream Reasoning”
In 2020 (Rende, Italy), the first on-line edition of our meeting, the 20-year test-of-time award went to Extending Classical Logic with Inductive Definitions (by Marc Denecker), the 10 Years year test-of-time award to Catching the Ouroboros: On debugging non-ground answer-set programs (by Johannes Oetsch, Jörg Pührer, Hans Tompits). The Best Technical paper went to Gianvincenzo Alfano, Sergio Greco, Francesco Parisi and Irina Trubitsyna: On the Semantics of Abstract Argumentation Frameworks: A Logic Programming Approach, the best student paper to Pedro Cabalar, Jorge Fandinno, Javier Garea, Javier Romero and Torsten Schaub: eclingo: a Solver for Epistemic Logic Programs, and the best application paper went to Momina Rizwan, Volkan Patoglu and Esra Erdem: Human Robot Collaborative Assembly Planning: An Answer Set Programming Approach.
In 2021 (Porto, Portugal), the 2nd on-line edition of our meeting, the John Alan Robinson 20-Year Test-of-Time Award went to Ultimate Well-Founded and Stable Semantics for Logic Programs with Aggregates (by Marc Denecker, Nikolay Pelov, and Maurice Bruynooghe ), the Alain Colmerauer 10-Year Test-of-Time Award went to The PITA System: Tabling and Answer Subsumption for Reasoning under Uncertainty (by Fabrizio Riguzzi and Theresa Swift). Best Paper Award and Best Student Paper Award went to Viktor Besin, Markus Hecher and Stefan Woltran for their paper Utilizing Treewidth for Quantitative Reasoning on Epistemic Logic Programs. Best Paper Honorable Mention went to Angelos Charalambidis, Panos Rondogiannis and Antonis Troumpoukis for A Logical Characterization of the Preferred Models of Logic Programs with Ordered Disjunction. The Best Application Paper Award went to Carmine Dodaro, Giuseppe Galatà, Andrea Grioni, Marco Maratea, Marco Mochi and Ivan Porro for An ASP-based Solution to the Chemotherapy Treatment Scheduling Problem, while the Best Doctoral Consortium Presentation Award went to Rafael Kiesel for the paper Quantitative and Stream Extensions of Answer Set Programming. The Programming Contest Winner is the Picat Team: Alfredo Beaumont, Peter Bernschneider and Neng-Fa Zhou, and the Programming Contest Runner Up winner was Sebastiano Team: Sebastiaan J.C. Joosten
In 2022 (Haifa, Israel), the John Alan Robinson 20-Year-Test-ofTime Award went to Towards a Declarative Query and Transformation Language for XML and Semistructured Data: Simulation Unification (by François Bry and Sebastian Schaffert), the Alain Colmerauer 10-Year-Test-ofTime Award went to ASP Modulo CSP: The Clingcon System (by Max Ostrowski and Torsten Schaub). Best Paper Award went to Matthias Lanzinger, Stefano Sferrazza, and Georg Gottlob for their paper MV-Datalog+-: Effective Rule-based Reasoning with Uncertain Observations. Best Paper Award went to Alice Tarzariol, Martin Gebser, Mark Law, and Konstantin Schekotihin for their paper Efficient Lifting of Symmetry Breaking Constraints for Complex Combinatorial Problems. Best Application Paper Award went to David Gelessus, Michael Leuschel for their paper Making ProB Compatible with SWI-Prolog.
The Best Doctoral Consortium Presentation Award went to Alice Tarzariol: A Model-Oriented Approach for Lifting Symmetries in Answer Set Programming. The Programming Contest Winner is the Bule Team: Jean Christoph Jung, Valentin Mayer-Eichberger, and Abdallah Saffidine. The Programming Contest Runner Up winner was Tripple Negation Team: Alice Tarzariol, Wolfgang Faber, and Martin Gebser. The Programming Contest Podium Finish winnder was tuw Team: Andre Schidler, Katalin Fazekas, and Rafael Kiese.
In November 2022, in connection with the year of Prolog, a new award was instituted by ALP: The ALP Alain Colmerauer Prolog Heritage Prize. The first edition of the Award went to
- ProB: Harnessing the Power of Prolog to Bring Formal Models and Mathematics to Life. Michael Leuschel and STUPS Group.
Since it was the first edition, there were many excellent submissions these other nominations were selected as finalists: Logic Model Processing. Pierre Dissaux. Symbium: The Computational Law Company. Michael Genesereth, Abhijeet Mohapatra, and Leila Banijamali. PROLEG: Practical Legal Reasoning System. Ken Satoh. Pacioli: a PROLOG system for financial report validation. Miguel Calejo and and Charles Hoffman.
The 2023 edition instead went to
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2023 Alain Colmerauer Prize – Theresa Swift and Carl Andersen; for Showcasing the relevance of modern Prolog’s reasoning capabilities to contemporary imperative languages and contributing to making Prolog accessible to the wider AI community.
In ICLP 2023 (London, UK) the following awards were assigned:
- Best Paper Award. Masood Feyzbaksh Rankooh and Tomi Janhunen; for Capturing (Optimal) Relaxed Plans with Stable and Supported Models of Logic Programs
- Best Student Paper Award to Yuheng Wang, Paul Fodor, Michael Kiefer; for Knowledge Authoring for Rules and Actions
- Best Doctoral Consortium Paper Award to Ramsha Ali; for Flexible Job Shop Scheduling in Wafer Manufacturing: Optimization and Simulation Methods
Moreover, the
- 10-Year Test-of-Time Award went to: M. Banbara, T. Soh, N. Tamura K. Inoue, T. Schaub; for Answer set programming as a modeling language for course timetabling
- John Alan Robinson 20-Year Test-of-Time Award went to: Thomas Eiter and Michael Fink; for Uniform Equivalence of Logic Programs under the Stable Model Semantic
Details on ICLP conferences can be retrieved from conferences web sites: https://logicprogramming.org/conferences/