2014 Quarter 2

REPORT FROM THE ASSOCIATION FOR CONSTRAINT PROGRAMMING

This is a short summary of activities within the ACP during the months April-June 2014.

The 2014 ACP Executive Committee comprises the following people, in alphabetical order:

  • Yves Deville
  • Pierre Flener - Conference Coordinator
  • 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 Summerschool 2014
  • ACP.2: Doctoral Programme at CP 2014
  • ACP.3: Preliminary Strategic Document of the Committee for Strategic Planning
  • ACP.4: CP 2015 and CP 2016
  • ACP.5: General Assembly 2014
  • ACP.6: ACP Summer School 2015: Call for Proposals
  • ACP.7: Constraints journal Review column

ACP.1. ACP Summer School 2014

The ACP EC has decided to sponsor the ACP Summer school 2014 up to a maximum of 3,000 euros. This year's summer school was held in Bologna, Italy, from June 16 to June 20, with the topic "Practical Constraint Programming". The school attracted about 60 participants. In addition to lectures given by Michela Milano, Willem van Hoeve, Laurent Perron, Louis-Martin Rousseau, Pascal Van Hentenryck, Andrea Lodi, and Hadrien Cambazard, the school contained hands-on sessions and an optimization competition.

Pictures and online material of the presentations can be found on the school's website.

Many thanks to the organizers Alessio Bonfietti, Michele Lombardi, and Pierre Schaus for making this event a great success!

ACP.2. Doctoral Programme at CP 2014

The ACP EC has decided to sponsor the Doctoral Programme at CP 2014 up to a maximum of 6,700 euros.

ACP.3. Preliminary Strategic Document of the Committee for Strategic Planning

The ACP Committee for Strategic Planning has written a Preliminary Strategic Document (based on a presentation at CPAIOR 2014), based on intensive discussions within the committee and the responses to a first survey among the community. There were not enough responses to that survey, so it is reopened until 20 August 2014, at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/TZ6DZBD, so as to achieve a better assessment of the state of the community, and to get comments on the objectives, strategies, and metrics of the Preliminary Strategic Document. According to the mission plan of the committee, a final report will be presented at CP 2014.

ACP.4. CP 2015 and CP 2016

Upon the Call for Bids for the Hosting of CP 2015 and CP 2016, the ACP EC has unanimously voted (modulo conflicts of interest) in favour of the following bids:

  • CP 2015 will be held in Cork (Ireland) on 31 August to 4 September 2015. The conference chairs will be a team led by Barry O’Sullivan (UC Cork). It will be collocated among others with the Boole Bicentenary Conference and the 31st International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP).
  • CP 2016 will be held in Toulouse (France), probably in September 2016. The conference chairs will be a team led by Thomas Schiex (INRA).

The ACP EC thanks all the bidders and organisers for their precious time and dedication. With the early allocation of CP 2016, we strive to give conference chairs a longer planning horizon. The ACP EC hopes to get bids from outside Europe for CP 2017.

ACP.5. General Assembly 2014

The next general assembly of the ACP will be held during the CP 2014 conference. Details of times and topics to follow. If you want to propose topics for discussion, please contact the ACP Secretary at secretary@a4cp.org.

ACP.6. ACP Summer School 2015: Call for Proposals

The Association for Constraint Programming invites proposals for organizing the ACP Summer School on Constraint Programming in 2015. Since its establishment, the summer school has been a major success with feedback from student attendees being very positive.

The proposed topic of the school can be on general CP or on a specific research subject. A complete list of ACP summer schools can be found here: http://www.a4cp.org/events/summer-schools

Members of the CP community who are interested in organizing the 2015 Summer School should send a proposal to secretary@a4cp.org by August 30th 2014, covering the following aspects:

  1. topic of the school
  2. location
  3. dates
  4. organizers
  5. tentative list of speakers
  6. provisional budget

ACP.7. Constraints journal Review column

The "Review column" of the Constraints journal welcomes review articles.

Review papers are full-length state of the art reviews on a well-defined topic (either an application or theoretically-oriented topic). Review-type articles are usually commissioned from leaders in the field, asked to write reviews of the highest quality, authority and accessibility. Existing unpublished high-quality state-of-the-art reviews, appearing for example in PhD thesis, may also be used for a review paper proposal. We welcome suggestions and ideas for articles, but discourage the direct submission of non-commissioned articles. Prospective authors should first consult the Reviews editor (T. Schiex) and should enclose a short (one page) summary of the area they propose to cover. Suggestions should be sent in the form of a synopsis (consisting of a 100-word introductory paragraph, a description of the article structure, and a list of 10-20 commented key references).

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