2017 Quarter 1

REPORT FROM THE ASSOCIATION FOR CONSTRAINT PROGRAMMING

This is a short summary of activities within the ACP during the months December-March 2017.

The 2017 ACP Executive Committee (EC) comprises the following people, in alphabetical order:

  • Alan Frisch
  • Maria Garcia de la Banda - Secretary
  • Christophe Lecoutre - Treasurer
  • Laurent Michel - President
  • Nina Narodytska
  • Claude-Guy Quimper - Conference Coordinator
  • Helmut Simonis (ex-officio, non-voting)
  • Charlotte Truchet

The ACP EC 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: CP 2017 Conference

The 23rd International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2017) takes place in Melbourne, Australia, from August 28 to September 1. It will be collocated with the conferences SAT 2017 and ICLP 2017, and is preceded by the IJCAI 2017 conference. The conference will continue the successful format of thematic tracks, the doctoral program, workshop and tutorial programs, and much more. Deadline for abstract submission is approaching (27th of April). Visit the website for the latest information: http://cp2017.a4cp.org/

ACP.2: Call for Bids for CP 2019

Since the ACP plans CP conferences two years in advance, we now solicit bids for CP 2019. Such bids, following the guidelines at http://www.a4cp.org/events/conference-organisation-policy, are to be sent to conf-coordinator@a4cp.org by 31 May 2017.

ACP.3: Call for ACP Doctoral Research Award 2017

We invite nominations for the 2017 ACP Doctoral Research Award. The ACP Doctoral Research Award is awarded every year to a promising young researcher working in the area of constraint programming and who defended her/his thesis between January and December in the last two calendar years. The award will be presented at the CP 2017 conference, where the winning researcher will present a talk on the topic of her/his doctoral dissertation. The award includes a cash prize of 500 euros, plus free registration for the conference. The award committee is chaired by Tias Guns.

Past winners of this award can be found at: http://www.a4cp.org/awards/doctoral-research-award.

The deadline for submitting nominations is 20 May 2017.

More details about the submission process can be found at http://www.a4cp.org/node/1163.

ACP.4: Call for ACP Research Excellence Award 2017

We invite nominations for the 2017 ACP award for Research Excellence in Constraint Programming. This award is awarded every 2 years to celebrate those CP researchers who have made exceptional and very influential research contributions to CP with their work. The award will be presented at the CP 2017 conference in Melbourne, where the award recipient will give a plenary talk. For the list of previous awardees, see: http://www.a4cp.org/awards/research-excellence-award

The deadline for submitting nominations is 1st June 2017.

More details about the submission process can be found at http://www.a4cp.org/node/1164.

ACP.5: Sharing of research materials

We believe our community can become better educators and learners through increased cooperation. To facilitate this increased cooperation we request your contribution and suggestions. As a first step we will collect, curate and publish on the web a compilation of URLs for educational material for use by both CP educators and learners.

If you would like to contribute, please email URLs of anything you wish to share to Alan.Frisch@york.ac.uk by April 10, together with brief context containing at least:

  • who you would like to be credited as the author(s) of the material,
  • who is the intended audience for the material and what background do you expect of the audience,
  • a brief overview of the content, and
  • a mention of any distinguishing features of the material, that is how it differs from what is typically available.

We also encourage your comments and feedback on this initiative by email to Alan.Frisch@york.ac.uk. All emails received will be acknowledged. If all goes well, we expect to have something available by the end of April.

We look forward to your contributions and thank you in advance.