2013 Quarter 1

REPORT FROM THE ASSOCIATION FOR CONSTRAINT PROGRAMMING

http://www.a4cp.org

This is a short summary of activities within the ACP during the months January-March 2013.

The 2013 ACP Executive Committee comprises the following people, in alphabetical order. The committee has held internal elections for the different offices: Helmut Simonis was elected to be the new president of the ACP. The other officers are identified below:

  • 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.

The term of the following members of the ACP Executive Committee ended in December 2012:

  • John Hooker
  • Barry O'Sullivan
  • Peter Stuckey

Many thanks for their work for the community and their help in running the association. Barry O'Sullivan will continue on as past president member of the executive committee.

Also coming to an end of his appointment is past Secretary Jimmy H.M. Lee, who has helped running the Association for many years. His position will be taken up by Willem-Jan van Hoeve. Pierre Flener will, after CP2013, take up the currently vacant position of Conference Coordinator.

ACP.1. ACP Summer School 2013

The 2013 ACP Summer School took place on the 6th-11th of January 2013 in ANU's Kioloa Costal Campus (Kioloa, New South Wales, Australia). The chair of the Summer School was Toby Walsh, working with a local arrangements committee comprising Phil Kilby, Peter Stuckey, Abdul Sattar, Sylvie Thiebaux, Pascal Van Hentenryck, and Mark Wallace. The School was organized by the Optimisation Research Group at NICTA, its theme was solving large scale combinatorial optimisation problems in practice. By all accounts, this was a very successful summer school, the ACP would like to thank Toby and his team for their efforts.

ACP.2. CP 2013 Conference

The CP 2013 conference will be held in Uppsala, Sweden. The Conference Chairs for the conference will be Mats Carlsson, Pierre Flener, and Justin Pearson. The Program Chair is Christian Schulte (KTH, Sweden). Details of the conference can be found at: http://cp2013.a4cp.org

ACP.3. Next Annual Meeting

The next annual meeting of the ACP will be held during the CP2013 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.4. Call for Nominations: ACP Research Excellence Award 2013.

The Executive Committee of the ACP invites nominations for the 2013 ACP award for Research Excellence in Constraint Programming, which will be presented at CP 2013 in Uppsala, Sweden, in September 2013. The purpose of this award is to celebrate those CP researchers who have made exceptional and very influential research contributions to CP with their work.

The award recipient will give a plenary talk at CP 2013. The costs for his/her participation to the conference will be covered by the ACP. Past winners of this award can be found at: http://4c.ucc.ie/a4cp/awards/research-excellence-award

Nominations for the research excellence award are due June 15, 2013.

ACP.5. Call for Nominations: for the ACP Doctoral Research Award 2013.

The Executive Committee of the ACP invites nominations for the 2013 ACP Doctoral Research Award, which will be presented at CP 2013 in Uppsala, Sweden. The ACP Doctoral Research Award is awarded every year to a promising young researcher working in the area of constraint programming and who defended his/her thesis between January and December in the last two calendar years. Past winners of this award can be found at: http://www.4c.ucc.ie/a4cp/awards/doctoral-research-award

Nominations for the doctoral research award are due June 1st, 2013.

ACP.6. Expressions of Interest in Hosting of CP 2014 and CP 2015

The ACP likes to plan CP conferences two years in advance. We are therefore interested in hearing expressions of interest from those who are considering hosting the conference in 2014 and 2015.

Proposals to host the CP conference are due June 1st, 2013.

ACP.7. Website outage

The website of the ACP http://a4cp.org was offline for several weeks at the beginning of the year. This was caused by a hard-disk crash during migration of the server, followed by the discovery of an attack on the website, requiring time-consuming auditing of the installed content. Many thanks to the 4C volunteers, especially Peter MacHale and David Devlin, for helping with this difficult problem.