2021 Quarterly Report 3

ACP.1: CP 2021

The annual conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, was held virtually, October 25-October 29. CP 2021 featured 57 papers, 4 tutorials, and 3 workshops. Presentations were streamed multiple times each day for viewing convenience throughout the globe. We thank all the organizers for their substantial efforts on behalf of the CP community, especially program chair Laurent Michel, and the conference co-chairs, Carmen Gervet and Philippe Vismara.

ACP.2: Winter School 2021

This year's ACP Winter School will take place virtually November 29th - December 2nd. It will be co-organized by Andre Cire and David Bergman. The focus of the school is on Decision Diagrams for Optimization, with a particular focus on how decision diagrams are being applied in the context of constraint programming.

Please refer to the Winter School's website here: https://sites.google.com/view/acpwinterschool2021/home

Registration is free, but you will need to register in order to receive details for connecting to the sessions: https://uconn.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3WRa1um89mntnQq

ACP.3: Research Excellence Award 2021

This year's ACP Research Excellence Award was presented to John Hooker during CP 2021. The award committee's citation reads "For sustained and ongoing contributions to the development of constraint programming through synthesis with operations research and artificial intelligence and seminal impact, most notably, in the techniques of logic-based Benders decomposition and decision diagrams for optimization." We congratulate John Hooker for this well-deserved award!

ACP.4: Doctoral Research Award 2021

The 2018 ACP Doctoral Research Award was presented to Margarita Castro during CP 2021 for her dissertation titled "Optimization Methods based on Decision Diagrams for Constraint Programming, AI Planning, and Mathematical Programming". The citation reads "The thesis covers theory, empirical evaluation, and application of the methods proposed, and does each in a thorough and comprehensive way. The theoretical contributions include new algorithms and encodings, integration of new mathematics into algorithms, and a study of the theoretical properties of relaxations. The empirical work is carefully evaluated, and the benefits are well illustrated: the thesis closes a large number of previously unsolved instances from several problems. This would already have been a good thesis had it contained just the theory or just the empirical work, but having both makes it excellent."

ACP.5: Early Career Award 2021

The inaugural ACP Early Career Award was presented to Ferdinando Fioretto during CP 2021. The citation reads: "For contributions to the field of constraint programming and, in particular, fundamental advances in distributed constraint satisfaction, constraint-based differential privacy, fairness in artificial intelligence, and their applications in energy, mobility, and census data."