2018 Quarter 3

REPORT FROM THE ASSOCIATION FOR CONSTRAINT PROGRAMMING

This is a short summary of activities within the ACP during the months July-September 2018.

The 2018 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 2018

The annual conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, was held in Lille, France, in August 2018. CP 2018 presented 41 full and 9 short papers selected from 114 submissions, and organized according to the following topics/tracks: main technical track; applications track; CP and data science; CP and music; CP and operations research; CP, optimization and power system management; multiagent and parallel CP; and testing and verification. We thank all the organizers for their substantial efforts on behalf of the CP community, especially conference co-chairs, Gilles Audemard and Christophe Lecoutre.

Pictures are available in the CP 2018 photo album.

ACP.2: Summer School 2018

The 14th Summer School of the ACP was held in June 4-8th at the Snow King Resort in Jackson, Wyoming, USA. It was organized by Lars Kotthoff, leader of the Meta-Algorithmics, Learning and Large-scale Empirical Testing (MALLET) lab at the University of Wyoming, with generous sponsorship from the College of Engineering and Applied Science and from Artificial Intelligence Journal. The speakers at the school included Helmut Simonis, Christian Schulte, Lars Kotthoff, Chris Beck, Laurent Michel, and Serdar Kadıoğlu. The school attracted 17 participants from Europe, Canada and US, including 5 from industry. They learned the capabilities and current research directions in the area of Constraint Programming, with particular emphasis on academic and industrial applications of CP technology.

ACP.3: Distinguished Service Award 2018

This year's ACP Distinguished Service Award was presented to Michela Milano during the conference CP 2018 in Lille, France. The award committee's citation reads "Awarded in recognition of her contributions to the field of constraint programming through sustained service by providing leadership, editorial guidance, and cross-domain interactions, in particular with the broader areas of artificial intelligence and operations research." We congratulate Michela Milano for this well-deserved award!

A list of previous award winners can be found on the ACP website.

ACP.4: Doctoral Research Award 2018

The 2018 ACP Doctoral Research Award was presented to Ciaran McCreesh during the conference CP 2018 in Lille, France, for his dissertation "Solving Hard Subgraph Problems in Parallel". Ciaran received his doctoral degree from the University of Glasgow (College of Computing and Engineering), 2017, under the supervision of Patrick Prosser and David Manlove.

A list of previous award winners can be found on the ACP website.

ACP.5: Election Results 2018

The election results were announced at the general assembly of CP 2018. The following candidates (in alphabetical order) were elected:

  • Sophie Demassey
  • Emmanuel Hebrard
  • Michele Lombardi
  • Christian Schulte

On behalf of the ACP, the Executive Committee would like to congratulate those elected, and thank all candidates who took part in the election. Many thanks also to Alan Frisch, Christophe Lecoutre, Laurent Michel, and Nina Narodytska for their contributions to the ACP and the CP community at large during their past terms of office!

The new ACP Executive Committee will start operating in January 2019. For more information, see here.

ACP.6: Diversity Commitment

ACP members have raised concerns regarding the lack of diversity of invited speakers at the CP conferences: at the last 3 CP conferences (CP2016 - CP2018), only 1 was a woman and only 1 was a person of colour out of 12 invited speakers. Also, all 5 invited speakers of the corresponding doctoral programmes were male.

The ACP-EC wholeheartedly agrees and has decided to strengthen its commitment to diversity by adding the following paragraph to the conference handbook:

"The ACP recognises that some sections of our scientific community are often under-represented in particular aspects of our conference programs, including invited speakers, session chairs and program committees. As this can significantly affect diversity in the long-term, the ACP requires its conferences to strive for a level of diversity in all aspects of its conference that, at a minimum, reflects that of our scientific community and, at best, gives some prominence to minority sections."

ACP.7: CP2020 Location and Chairs

The selection of Program Chair (Helmut Simonis), Conference Chairs (Tias Guns, Siegfried Nijssen, and Pierre Schaus) and venue (Louvain-la-Neuve Campus of UCLouvain) for the 26th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2020), has been finalised. The conference will take place around August-September, 2020 (dates still to be finalised).

ACP.8: Call for Outreach Initiatives

The ACP supports the promotion of CP and is willing to develop its impact in scientific or industrial communities, where CP technologies could be better or more widely used. The ACP will fund initiatives to build bridges with either new areas of industrial applications, or other scientific communities. The funding will be a total of up to 5000 euros each year, where each initiative can be supported with at most 1000 euros. There is no deadline for submissions; the call for submissions is permanently open.

For more information, including submission criteria, please visit http://a4cp.org/events/outreach