Introduction
As I mentioned in the Summer issue of the ALP Newsletter, I am very keen in providing a better exposure, support, and recognition to the excellent work that a number of doctoral students around the world are conducting. These students are the new generation of logic programmers, and from my personal experience, they are leading top quality research. Furthermore, more and more often I see young researchers crossing the lines and combining logic programming with other paradigms and taking our favourite paradigm to new application domains.
The objective of this column, that I hope will become a regular feature of the ALP Newsletter, is to advertise completed (or almost completed) doctoral dissertations that have a connection to the realm of logic programming. If you are a student and you are about to defend your dissertation, please send me your name, affiliation, and a short abstract. If you are a faculty member and you have a student that is about to graduate, please encourage her/him to send me this information.
I count on your help to make this column a success!!

In this dissertation the framework of Hybrid Probabilistic Logic Programming (HPP) has been endowed with a new semantics, more suitable to commonsense reasoning, as well as with a form of negation-as-failure. The semantics of this extended framework has been developed along the lines of both the well-founded and the stable model semantics of traditional logic programming. The dissertation presents also algorithms for the effective computation of these semantics.