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Workshop Report
Colloquium on Implementation of Constraint Logic Programming Systems (CICLOPS'07)
Workshop Web Page: http://www.di.uevora.pt/ciclops07/CICLOPS%202007.html The 7th Colloquium on Implementation of Constraint and LOgic Programming Systems (CICLOPS 2007) was held on September 8, 2007, as an ICLP 2007 workshop, at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Porto. During the last years the workshop has provided one of the main forums for Prolog implementors to share experience and to discuss current work and research directions. We are very happy with this year's workshop. We had a larger than usual number of participants, with 35 registrations. They could attend 11 presentations which covered topics ranging from low-level implementation techniques through large-scale applications. Arguably, the most popular subjects were constraint solver implementation and parallel execution, namely through multi-threading. During the workshop we were quite impressed with the level of debate and interest from the audience, resulting in very lively discussions going on during the event. As we said, most subjects in logic programming implementation were covered: Morozov presented some of his work on actor Prolog. Lukácsy discussed a Prolog based system for information extraction on the web. Degrave presented an algorithm for global analysis of Mercury, Santos Costa discussed a scheme for very compact compilation of Prolog and Mercury programs, and Chico discussed tabled execution in Ciao-Prolog. Constraints were a hot topic in this workshop: Estevez discussed constraints for the functional-logic language Toy, Richaud presented a nice implementation of global constraints. Parallelism and threads motivated the work on and-parallel ciao presented by Carro, the work on Logtalk presented by Moura, and the work on gnu-prolog presented by Morgadinho. Last, contraints and parallelism were integrated in a talk by Abreu. From the number of submissions and the lively discussions we were expecting interest in the panel on parallelism and multicores. Even so, we were pleasantly surprised by the audience (over 50 people were attending) and by the quality of the discussion. This was much a function of the excellent panelists. Demoen presented the skeptical point of view. Hermenegildo emphasized pushing forward based on previous work on global analysis. Warren took an application oriented approach. Pontelli mentioned how his work on ASP benefited but also moved on from his original work. And Abreu shared some of his experience with constraint solvers and parallel execution. Maybe fortunately, we believe that there is no clear line of research accepted by everyone, but it seems clear that there is a motivation and even a need to move forward, and that doing so must benefit from previous experience in this area. We would like to thank the program committee members, the panelists and the other reviewers for their work that made this workshop a success. Last, but not least, the ICLP 2007 conference organization was most helpful and most effective, thank you! |
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