2013 Quarter 3

REPORT FROM THE ASSOCIATION FOR CONSTRAINT PROGRAMMING

http://www.a4cp.org

This is a short summary of activities within the ACP during the months July-September 2013.

The 2013 ACP Executive Committee comprises the following people, in alphabetical order.

  • Yves Deville
  • Pierre Flener - Conference Coordinator (after CP 2013)
  • Willem-Jan van Hoeve - Secretary
  • Barry O'Sullivan (ex-officio, non-voting)
  • Thomas Schiex - Treasurer
  • Helmut Simonis - President
  • Guido Tack
  • Roland Yap

The ACP Executive Committee welcomes feedback and suggestions from the ACP community. We encourage you to engage with the ACP-EC to help design new initiatives that promote constraint programming.

ACP.1. ACP Award for Research Excellence in CP

The ACP Executive Committee is pleased to announce that the recipient of the 2013 ACP Research Excellence Award is Prof. Jean-Charles Regin (University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis). Jean-Charles Regin has had a tremendous impact on the field of Constraint Programming both in terms of theory and practice. His results on the alldifferent and cardinality constraints introduced graph theoretic concepts such as matchings and network flows into domain filtering algorithms for global constraints, and are regarded today among the most powerful methods for constraint solving. Moreover, during his tenure as Director of Constraint Programming at ILOG, he was instrumental in delivering CP technology to many real-world industrial applications.

The award was formally presented at the conference CP 2013: http://cp2013.a4cp.org/

Jean-Charles was nominated by Michel Rueher, Laurent Perron and Pierre Schaus. The selection committee consisted of previous award winners Patrick Prosser and Alan Mackworth, this year's CP conference program chair Christian Schulte, ACP secretary Willem-Jan van Hoeve and ACP president Helmut Simonis.

Previous recipients of the award have been Eugene Freuder, Pascal Van Hentenryck, Rina Dechter, Alain Colmerauer, Alan Mackworth and Patrick Prosser.

ACP.2. ACP Doctoral Research Award

The ACP Executive Committee is pleased to announce that the recipient of the 2013 ACP Doctoral Research Award is Tias Guns (PhD, KU Leuven), for his dissertation "Declarative Pattern Mining using Constraint Programming".

In addition, Justin Yip (PhD, Brown University) receives an honorable mention for his dissertation "The Length-Lex Representation for Constraint Programming over Sets".

These were formally announced at the conference CP 2013: http://cp2013.a4cp.org/

In total, seven high-quality dissertations for the ACP Doctoral Dissertation Award were submitted, covering theory, algorithms, hybrid methods, and applications. The selection committee consisted of Gilles Pesant, Mark Wallace, and ACP Secretary Willem-Jan van Hoeve.

Previous recipients of the award can be found at: http://www.a4cp.org/awards/doctoral-research-award

ACP.3. CP 2013 Conference

The conference CP 2013 was held in Uppsala (Sweden), and attracted 194 participants. On behalf of the ACP, the Executive Committee would like to congratulate the various people responsible for making this conference a great success. In particular, we especially thank Mats Carlsson, Pierre Flener, and Justin Pearson (Conference Chairs), Christian Schulte (Program Chair), Laurent Michel (Workshop and Tutorial Chair), Christopher Mears and Nina Narodytska (Doctoral Program Chairs), Guido Tack (Publicity Chair), and the members of the various program committees.

The conference received 170 (long and short) papers as follows: 138 papers submitted to the main track and 32 papers submitted to the application track. A total of 47 papers was accepted to the technical track, and 12 papers were accepted to the application track.

In addition to the paper presentations, the conference program featured three invited talks (Michela Milano, Torsten Schaub, Peter Stuckey), a public lecture (Pascal Van Hentenryck), and an invited system presentation (Pascal Van Hentenryck and Laurent Michel). The program also included four tutorials, on `MaxSAT Latest Developments' (Carlos Ansotegui), `Replication and Recomputation in Scientific Experiments' (Ian Gent and Lars Kotthoff), `Constraint Programming for Vehicle Routing Problems' (Phil Kilby), and `Constraint Programming for the Control of Discrete Event Dynamic Systems' (Gerard Verfaillie).

The CP conference also included the first `Lightning Model and Solve Competition', organized by Peter Stuckey and Hakan Kjellerstrand.

A day of workshops preceded the conference:

  • WCB13: Constraint Based Methods for Bioinformatics
  • TRICS13: Techniques foR Implementing Constraint programming Systems
  • CSPSAT: 3rd International Workshop on the Cross-Fertilization between CSP and SAT
  • CP Solvers: Modeling, Applications, Integration, and Standardization
  • Workshop on Optimization for Smart Cities
  • COSpeL: Domain Specific Languages in Combinatorial Optimization
  • ModRef: Constraint Modelling and Reformulation

ACP.4. CP 2014 Program Chair

The ACP Executive Committee has selected Barry O'Sullivan (University College Cork, Ireland) as program chair for the CP 2014 conference. The CP 2014 conference will be held in Lyon, France. The Conference Chairs are Yves Deville and Christine Solnon.