Contents
Vol. 18 n. 4, November 2005

Editorial
Enrico Pontelli

Dear Logic Programmers,

Welcome to the November 2005 issue of the ALP Newsletter. 

As you can see, the majority of this issue of the newsletter is dedicated to ICLP 2005, held in October in Sitges, and to its many co-located meetings. The conference turned out to be a really great event; the location was outstanding, the program was great, and the organization took care of every detail to make ICLP enjoyable and productive. It was nice to see a good turn-out (I believe we had around 110 registered participants), and I was particularly pleased to see a large number of young researchers -- a sign that logic programming is alive and well! Some of the highlights of ICLP include the honoring of two outstanding researchers in Constraint Programming and Logic Programming (Eugene Freuder and Herve Gallaire) -- with very touching remarks from Bob Kowalski, Pascal Van Hentenryck, David Warren, and Mireille Ducasse -- some very entertaining invited talks (I particularly enjoyed Peter Stuckey's presentation of the G12 project), and the first ICLP Doctoral Consortium. We will publish a report on the ICLP Doctoral Consortium with the February issue of the newsletter (this November issue is already packed!!), but let me anticipate that it was a truly nice experience -- and with some good lessons for the ICLP Doctoral Consortium 2006.

In the meantime, preparation for ICLP 2006 (Seattle, WA) has started. Mirek & Sandro have launched the Call for Papers (you can find it in this issue of the newsletter), and an exciting range of workshops have already been approved to co-locate with ICLP. So get ready to visit the land of Microsoft & Starbucks...

I am happy to report that our ALP President has received a well-deserved recognition for his contributions to science and education. Manuel Hermenegildo has been awarded the 2005 "Premio Nacional de Investigación Julio Rey Pastor, en Matematicas y Tecnologias de la Informacion y las Comunicaciones". This is a great accomplishment -- the award is one of the highest recognitions in Spain and, from what I hear, it will be given by the King of Spain himself. Please, join me in congratulating Manuel for this great, and well-deserved, achievement!

We are striving to make this newsletter better and better. During the ALP Executive Committee meeting in Sitges, we agreed to publish a regular column of News from the ALP EC, to keep people informed of what is happening within the EC. We are also working to add to this column some capabilities to allow readers to offer feedback and suggestions. While we implement this feature, I welcome any feedback in the form of letters (or e-letters), and I will be more than happy to forward your messages to the rest of the EC (or to publish them in the newsletter, if you wish to share your views and suggestions with the whole community).
Another novelty for the newsletter is the addition of a new Area Editor -- Agostino Dovier, from the University of Udine, will help us with articles dealing with real-world applications of logic and constraint logic programming; Agostino has extensive experience with practical applications of logic programming (e.g., in Bioinformatics) and we are happy to have him in our team!
Some more improvements are coming soon, so keep your eyes open...

To bring this one to closure, I would like once again to welcome your comments/critics/suggestions/... on how you would like to see the ALP Newsletter evolve in the near and not-so-near future.

           ‘till the next one.

                                   Enrico


Using a Declarative Process Language for P2P Protocols

Andrés A. Aristizábal, Hugo A. López, Camilo Rueda
Universidad Javeriana Cali
Colombia

Editor: Frank Valencia

Download PDF Version of this Article.


Abstract:

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems can be seen as highly dynamic distributed systems designed for very specific purposes, such as resources sharing in collaborative settings. Because of their ubiquity, it is fundamental to provide techniques for formally proving properties of the communication protocols underlying those systems. In this paper we present a formal model of MUTE, a protocol for P2P systems, in the SPL; a specification language with a striking resemblance to Concurrent Constraint Programming. Furthermore, we use the SPL reasoning techniques to show the protocol enjoys a secrecy property againts outsider attacks. By formally modeling and analyzing a popular (albeit never specified) protocol, we bear witness to the applicability of SPL as a formalism to model and reason about security protocols as well as flexibility of the its reasoning techniques.

Introduction

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) protocols are widely used for communication in distributed systems, providing an accurate and efficient way to perform certain important tasks, including information retrieval and routing. Protocols for P2P systems are then used to share private information between peers, which usually involves security risks. Currently these systems are dramatically receiving attention in research, development and investment. They had become a major force in the nowadays computing world because of its huge amount of benefits, such as its architecture cost, scalability, viability, and resource aggregation of distributed management resources. Essentially this kind of systems are used to obtain the major benefit from distributed resources to perform a function in a real decentralised manner. In this way, these systems are scalable since they avoid dependencies on centralised points, and they also have a low cost infrastructure, since they enable direct communication between the participants of these systems.

The P2P protocols used in various tools have to maintain a certain amount of important properties to guarantee its well functioning. One class of the most relevant P2P protocols are those concerned to security. Properties like secrecy, anonymity and non-traceability have been studied in the literature in order to overcome security risks [9]. Anonymity itself, is considered of the essence of any peer to peer protocol, since the participants on the network wish to establish communications and share resources without revealing their identity. Similarly, secrecy is considered crucial, since messages transmitted and managed between the distributed components in the network shall be kept as a secret for an entity outside the peer to peer group.

Despite the popularity of this kind of protocols, the importance of maintaining security matters within them and the existence of different calculi to reason about protocols, to the best of our knowledge, little has been done in modelling P2P protocols using process languages.

MUTE is a P2P tool for sharing and transmitting resources in a highly dynamic distributed network [12]. It is based on its particular searching protocol, which claims to guarantee an anonymous way of communicating data, in a secure way, through all the P2P network. In spite of being a very well known peer to peer protocol, MUTE has only been informally described.

We shall use SPL, a specification language for security protocols developed by Winskel and Crazzolara to give MUTE a formal specification for the first time. We then use SPL reasoning techniques to verify a secrecy property againts attacks of an outsider.

SPL has strong a similarity with Concurrent Constraint Programming (CCP) [13]. Just like CCP, SPL is operationally defined in terms of configurations containing items of information (messages) which can only increase during evolution. Such a monotonic evolution of information is akin to the notion of monotonic store central to CCP and a source of its simplicity.

One contribution of this paper is to give, to our knowledge, the first formal model of MUTE which abstracts away from details not concerned with secrecy issues. Another contribution is to bear witness of the applicability of SPL and its proof techniques for modelling and reasoning about protocols. The work in the present paper represent our first approach towards the use of SPL as formalism for specifying and verifying P2P protocols. The current work has been submitted to a workshop in P2P systems.

We shall proceed as follows: We extract a formal model directly from the implementation code. Then, using the SPL formalism along with its compositional power, we establish the formal specification of the MUTE protocol searching phase, modeling its components as a set of processes which work together to achieve the main goal of the protocol. Finally we use the proof techniques of SPL to prove a secrecy property for the messages in the network, taking into account an outsider malicious entity.

The paper is structured as follows. In the next section we present a brief summary of preliminaries, including a short introduction of the SPL calculus. In section 3, we explain the MUTE protocol, presenting an intuitive representation, as well as its formalisation on SPL. In the following section, we follow the SPL proof techniques scheme to verify the secrecy property for messages behind a passive outsider in the MUTE protocol. In section 5 we discuss some related work and in the last chapter we give out some concluding remarks, as well as future work.


Preliminaries

This section presents a brief overview of SPL (Security Protocol language), a process calculus for security protocols proposed by Winskel and Crazzolara in [3]. The full coverage of the calculus is given in [2].

SPL

SPL is a process calculus designed to model protocols and prove their security properties by means of transitions and event-based semantics. SPL is based on the Dolev-Yao Model [4], which states that cryptography is unbreakable and the spy is an active intruder capable of intercept, modify, replay and suppress messages. The calculus is operationally defined in terms of configurations containing items of information (messages) which can only increase during evolution, modelling the fact that, in an open network an intruder can see and remember any message that was ever in transit.

SPL Syntax

The syntactic entities SPL are described below:

\begin{figure*}\begin{center} \subfigure[SPL Syntax] { {\footnotesize \begin... ...e } p'_i = p_i $\ \\ \hline \par \end{tabular} } } \end{center} \end{figure*}

The rest of the elements of SPL syntactic set are defined in Table 1(a), where Pub(v), Priv(v),  and $ Key(\vec{v})$ denote the generation of public, private and shared keys respectively. We use the vector notation $ \vec{s}$ to denote a list of elements, possibly empty, s1, s2, ..., sn.

Intuitive Description and Conventions

Let us now give some intuition and conventions for SPL processes.

The output process $ out \, new(\vec{x}) \, M.p$ generates a set of fresh distinct names (nonces) $ \vec{n}=n_1,n_2,\ldots ,n_m$ for the variables $ \vec{x}=x_1,x_2\ldots x_m.$ Then it outputs the message $ M[\vec{n}/\vec{x}]$ (i.e., $ M$ with each xi replaced with ni) in the store and resumes as the process $ p[\vec{n}/\vec{x}]$. The output process binds the occurrence of the variables $ \vec{x}$ in $ M$ and p. As an example of a typical output, $ p_A=out \, new(\vec{x}) \, \{x,A\}_{Pub(B)}.p$ can be viewed as an agent $ A$ posting a message with a nonce n and its own identifier $ A$ encrypted with the public key of an agent $ B$. We shall write $ out \, new(\vec{x}) \, M.p$ simply as $ out \, M.p$ if the $ \vec{x}$ is empty.

The input process $ in \, pat \, \vec{x} \vec{\chi} \vec{\psi} \,M.p$ waits for a message in the store that matches (the pattern) the message $ M$ for some instantiation of its variables $ \vec x$, $ \vec \chi$ and $ \vec \psi$. The process resumes as p with the chosen instantiation. The input process $ in \, pat \, \vec{x} \vec{\chi} \vec{\psi} \,M.p$ is the other binder in SPL binding the occurrences of $ \vec{x} \vec{\chi} \vec{\psi}$in $ M$ and p. As an example of a typical input, $ p_B= in \, pat \, x,Z \,\{x,Z\}_{Pub(B)}.p$ can be seen as an agent $ B$ waiting for a message of the form $ \{x,Z\}$ encrypted with its public key $ B$: If the message of pA above is in the store, the chosen instantiation for matching the pattern could be $ n$ for $ x$ and $ A$ for $ Z$. When no confusion arises we will sometimes abbreviate $ in \, pat \, \vec{x} \vec{\chi} \vec{\psi} \,M.p$ as $ in \,M.p$.

Finally, $ \parallel _{i \in I}P_i$ denotes the parallel composition of all $ P_i$. For example in $ \parallel _{i \in \{A,B\}}P_i$ the processes $ P_A$ and $ P_B$ above run in parallel so they can communicate. We shall use $ !P = \parallel _{i \in \omega}P$ to denote an infinite number of copies of $ P$ in parallel. We sometimes write $ P_1 \parallel P_2 \parallel \ldots \parallel P_n$ to mean $ \parallel _{i \in \{1,2,\ldots n\}}P_i.$

The syntactic notions of free variables and closed process/message are defined in the obvious way. A variable is free in a process/message is has a non-bound occurrence in that process/message. A process/message is said to be closed if it has no free variables.

Transition Semantics

SPL has a transition semantics over configurations that represents the evolution of processes. A configuration is defined as $ \langle p,s,t\rangle$ where p is a closed process term (the process currently executing), s a subset of names $ \mathbf{N}$ (the set of nonces so-far generated), and $ t$ is a subset of variable-free messages (i.e., the store of output messages).

The transitions between configurations are labelled by actions which can be input/output and maybe tagged with an index i indicating the parallel component performing the action. Actions are thus given by the syntax $ \alpha ::= out \, new(\vec n)\, M ~\vert~ in \, M ~\vert~ i:\alpha.$ where $ \vec n$ is as a set of names, i as an index and $ M$ a closed message.

Intuitively a transition   says that by executing $ \alpha$ the process p with s and t evolves into p' with s' and t'. The new set of messages t' contains those in t since output messages are meant to be read but not removed by the input processes. The rules in Table 1(b) define the transitions between configurations. The rules are easily seen to realize the intuitive behaviour of processes given in the previous section.

Nevertheless, SPL also provides an event based semantics, where events of the protocol and their dependencies are made more explicit. This is advantageous because events and their pre and post-conditions form a Petri-net, so-called SPL nets.

Event-Based Semantics

Although transition semantics provide an appropriate method to show the behaviour of configurations, these are not enough to show dependencies between events, or to support typical proof techniques based on maintenance of invariants along the trace of the protocols. To do so, SPL presents an additional semantics based in events that allow to explicit protocol events and their dependencies in a concrete way.

SPL event-based semantics are strictly related to persistent Petri nets, so called SPL-nets [2] defining events in the way they affect conditions. The reader may find full details about Petri Nets and all the elements of a SPL-Nets in AppendixA [Editor Note: the appendix is available in the PDF version of this document] and [2], below we just recall some basic notions.

Description of Events in SPL

In the event-based semantics of SPL, conditions take an important place as they represent some form of local state. There are three kinds of conditions: control, output and name conditions (denoted by $ C$, $ O$ and $ N$, respectively). $ C$-conditions includes input and output processes, possibly tagged by an index. $ O$-conditions are the only persistent conditions in SPL-nets and consists of closed messages output on network. Finally, $ N$-conditions denotes basically the set of names $ \mathbf{N}$ being used for a transition. In order to denote pre and post conditions between events, let $ ^.e = \{^ce,^oe,^ne\}$ denote the set of control, name and output preconditions, and $ e^. =\{e^c,e^o,e^n\}$ the equivalent set of postconditions. An SPL event e is a tuple $ e = (^.e,e^.)$ of the preconditions and postconditions of e and each event e is associated with a unique action $ act(e)$. Figure 1 gives the general form of an SPL event. In the Appendix we will give the events for the protocol MUTE according to the SPL Event-Semantics. The exact definition of each element of the semantics can be can be found in [2]. For space limitations,here we shall recall some and illustrate others.

To illustrate the elements of the event semantics, consider a simple output event $ e=(\mathbf{Out}\left( out\, new \vec{x} M \right) ;\vec n)$, where $ \vec n = n_1 \dots n_t$ are distinct names to match with the variables $ \vec x = x_1 \dots x_t$. The action $ act(e)$ corresponding to this event is the ouput action $ out\, new \vec{n} M[\vec{n}/\vec{x}].$ Conditions related with this event are:


$ ^ce =\langle out \, new(\vec x).M.p , a\rangle$ $ ^oe=\emptyset$ $ ^ne= \emptyset $
$ e^c = \langle Ic( p[\vec n/ \vec x] ) \rangle$ $ e^o=\left\lbrace M[\vec n/\vec x]\right\rbrace$ $ e^n=\left\lbrace n_1, \dots n_t \right\rbrace$

Where $ Ic(p)$ stands for the initial control conditions of a closed process p: The set $ Ic(p)$ is defined inductively as $ Ic(X)=\{ X \}$ is $ X$ is an input or an output process, otherwise $ Ic (\parallel _{i \in I}P_i)=\bigcup_{i\in I}\{ i:c \ \vert \ c \in Ic(P_i)\}$

Figure 1: Events and transitions of SPL event based semantics. pi and qi denote control conditions, ni and mi name conditions and Ni, Mi output conditions. Double circled conditions denote persistent events.

Relating Transition and Event Based Semantics

Transition and event based semantics are strongly related in SPL by the following theorem from [2]. The reduction   where e is an event and $ M$ and $ M'$ are markings in the SPL-net is defined in the Appendix following the token game in Persistent Petri Nets (see Appendix A [Editor note: appendix available in the PDF version of the document]).

Theorem 2.1  
i)
If $ \langle p,s,t\rangle \stackrel{\alpha}{\longrightarrow} \langle p',s',t'\rangle$, then for some event e with $ act(e) = \alpha$,    formula in the SPL-net.
ii)
If $ Ic(p) \cup s \cup t \stackrel{e}{\longrightarrow} \emph{M'}$ in the SPL-net, then for some closed process term p' for some $ s' \subseteq N$ and $ t'$ $ \in O$,   and M' $ = Ic(p') \cup s' \cup t'.$

Justified in the theorem above, the following notation will be used: Let e be an event, p be a closed process, $ s \subseteq N,$ and t $ \subseteq O.$ We write   iff $ Ic(p) \cup s \cup t \stackrel{e}{\longrightarrow} Ic(p') \cup s' \cup t'$ in the SPL-net.

Events of a Process

Each process has its own related events, and for a particular closed process term p, the set of its related events Ev(p) is defined by induction on size, in the following way:

$ Ev(out \, new \, \vec{x} M.p)$ = $ \{$ Out $ (out \, new \, \vec{x} M.p; \, \vec{n}) \}$


$ \cup \bigcup \{Ev(p[\vec{n}/\vec{x}]) \}$
Where $ \vec{n}$ are distinct names

$ Ev(in \, pat \, \vec{x} \vec{\chi} \vec{\psi} M.p)$ = $ \{\textbf{In}(in \, pat \, \vec{x} \vec{\chi} \vec{\psi} M.p; \, \vec{n},\vec{k},\vec{L}) \} \cup$


$ \bigcup \{Ev(p[\vec{n}/\vec{x},\vec{k}/\vec{\chi},\vec{L}/\vec{\psi}]) \}$
Where $ \vec{n}$ names, $ \vec{k}$ are keys, and $ \vec{L}$ are closed messages
$ Ev(\Vert _{i \in I} p_i)$ = $ \bigcup _{i \in I} i : Ev(p_i)$

where, if $ E$ is a set, $ i:E$ denotes the set $ \{ i:e \ \vert \ e \in E\}.$

The MUTE protocol

The MUTE protocol works in a P2p network as a tool to communicate requests of keywords through the net, so that an specific file can be found and then received [12]. This protocol is composed of two main phases, the searching and the routing part. We will focus directly in its first phase, since it is the most related to the security concerns proposed in our work.

This protocol aims to provide an easy and effective search while protecting the privacy of the participants involved. It is inspired in the behaviour of ants in the search for food. The analogy is accomplished representing each ant as a node of a network, files requested as food, and pheromones as traces. In this way, one of the key properties of this model is the inherent anonymity of the protocol, because, like the ants that do not know the shortest path between the food and the anthill, peers are unaware of the overall environment layout and MUTE messages must be directed through the network using only local hints.1

Since the MUTE protocol claims to have anonymous users, none of the nodes in the P2P network knows where to find a particular recipient. Each node in the MUTE network contains direct connections to other nodes in the network in order to achieve its desired search. This nodes are called "neighbours" and through these, messages are secretly passed, either as a request or as an answer, in such a way that no agent outside the peer to peer network could manage to understand any of these data. Despite anonymity being essential on this protocol, secrecy is also one its main goals, since transmitted messages along the network involve information only concerned to the ones sharing the resources and must not be revealed to the outside world.


Dolev Yao Representation for the MUTE protocol

In spite of being already implemented and used as a tool for downloading and sharing files, to our knowledge MUTE has not yet been formally specified. Part of our work consists in abstracting from the code elements that have an impact in security.

We shall represent a P2P network as an undirected graph $ G$ whose nodes represent the peers and whose edges represent the direct connections among peers. We use $ \it {Peers}(G)$ to denote the set of all nodes in $ G$. Given a node $ X \in \it {Peers}(G)$, Let $ {\it ngb}(X)$ be the set of immediate neighbours of $ X$. We use the Dolev Yoe notation $ X \longrightarrow Y : M$ stating that $ X$ sends a message $ M$ to $ Y.$ For Example, consider a P2P network $ G$ with peers $ A,B$. Suppose that $ A$ is the initiator of the protocol and $ B$ is the responder. In this case, $ B$ can be any node inside the network, with the desired file on its store. So, $ A$ requests a particular file he wishes to download. For this purpose he sends the request to the network, by broadcasting it to his neighbours. This request includes a keyword $ kw \in Keywords$ which will match the desired file. Along the searching path an unknown amount of peers will forward the request until it reaches $ B$, a peer which has the correct file, st $ \exists f \in Files(B)$ and $ kw \in f$, where $ Files$ means the set of all files in the network, $ Files(A)$ means the set of files of the Agent or peer $ A$ in the network, $ Keywords$ the set of keywords associated to the files $ Files$, and $ Keywords(A)$ the keywords associated to the peer $ A$. Then, $ B$ sends its response by means of the header of the file, again by means of a broadcast through a series of forward steps, until it reaches the actual sender $ A$. Figure 2 give a representation of the above description using Dolev Yao notation [4].

Figure 2: Dolev Yao Model of the MUTE protocol
\begin{figure}\begin{center} {\footnotesize \begin{tabular}{lll} $A \longrighta... ... & $(\{N,RES,M\}_{key(Z',A)},Z',A)$\ & \end{tabular}}\end{center}\end{figure}

Here X, Y are variables which represent the forwarder peers along the path that goes from the Initiator to the responder node. This intermediate process may continue, until the target is reached. In the same way, these two variables will represent the peers which will forward the answer from the responder to the initiator. This process may be repeated several times as well.

Figure 3 illustrates a particular P2P network example in which $ A$ is the initiator, $ F_1,F_2,F_3$ are the peers involved in the forwarding process and $ B$ is the receptor that sends its answer via the same three forwarders.

Figure 3: A typical MUTE network topology

MUTE Specification on SPL

We use the core of the MUTE protocol in order to establish some security properties. The phases that we shall consider are the ones that involve the transmission of the keyword, the response message and the keys, leaving behind the phases of connection, and the submessages that include plaintext. We assume that $ key(A,B) = key(B,A).$ The formal model in Figure 4.

Figure 4: MUTE specification on SPL
\begin{figure}\par {\footnotesize \hspace{-0.3cm} \begin{tabular}{lll} {$Init... ...& $\equiv$\ & $\Vert _{A \in Peers(G)} Forward(A)$ \end{tabular}}\end{figure}

Intuitive description of the specification

We assume that the topology of the net has already been established. The agent starts searching for an own keyword. This agent broadcasts the desired keyword to all its neighbours. Its neighbours receive the message and see if the keyword matches one of their files, if at least one of the neighbours have the requested keyword, it will broadcast a response message, such that eventually the one searching for the keyword will get it and understand it as an answer to its request. The message will be forwarded by all the agents until it reaches its destiny. Otherwise, if the keyword does not match any file of the agent, then it will broadcast it to its neighbours asking them for the same keyword. The choice of having or not the right file is modeled in a non-deterministic way. This model abstracts way from issues such as the search for the best path, since it has no impact in secrecy.

MUTE Secrecy Proofs for a Passive Outsider

Here we will establish the secrecy of MUTE for a Spy outside the P2P network.

Definition of the Spy

We use the definition of a powerful spy used in SPL [2] to model the ways of intrusion and attack that an agent can do.
Figure 5: SPL spy model
\begin{figure}{\footnotesize \begin{enumerate} \item Compose different messages... ...y \equiv \Vert _{i \in \{1 \dots 9\}} Spy_i$ \par \end{enumerate}}\end{figure}

In this way, the complete protocol includes the specification of MUTE, $ SecureMute$ in Figure 4, in parallel with the Spy:

$\displaystyle MUTE \equiv SecureMUTE \Vert !Spy$ (1)

Let us recall some elements. Let $ Headers$ be the set of headers of files, which is associated to $ Files$, $ Headers(A)$ the set directly related to $ Files(A)$, such that each header which belongs to $ Headers(A)$ will be associated to a unique file belonging to $ Files(A)$ (See section 3.1).

To analyze secrecy of a given protocol in SPL, one considers arbirtrary runs of the protocol.

Definition 3.1 (Run of a Protcol)   A run of a process p = p0 is a sequence

$\displaystyle \langle p_0,s_0,t_0 \rangle \stackrel{e_1}{\longrightarrow} \dots... ...ghtarrow} \langle p_w,s_w,t_w \rangle \stackrel{e_{w+1}}{\longrightarrow} \dots$    

We shall use in the theorems a binary relation $ \sqsubset$ between messages. Intuitively $ M \sqsubset M'$ means message $ M$ is a subexpression of message $ M'.$ (See Appendix B for the exact definition)

Secrecy Properties

In the following theorems we shall refer to the events of MUTE which for the sake of space are explicitely given in Appendix C.

The first secrecy theorem for the MUTE protocol concerns the shared keys of neighbours. If this shared keys are not corrupted from the start and the peers behave as the protocol states then the keys will not be leaked during a protocol run. If we assume that $ key(X,Y)$ $ \not \sqsubseteq$ t0, where $ X,Y$ $ \in$ $ Peers$, then at the initial state of the run there is no danger of corruption. This will help us to prove some other security properties for MUTE.

Theorem 3.2   Given a run of MUTE $ \langle \textrm{MUTE}\xspace ,s_0,t_0 \rangle \stackrel{e_1}{\longrightarrow} ... ...tarrow} \langle p_v,s_v,t_v \rangle \stackrel{e_{v+1}}{\longrightarrow} \dots $ and $ A_0,B_0 \in Peers(G)$, if $ key(A_0,B_0) \not \sqsubseteq t_0$ then for each $ w \geq 0$ in the run $ key(A_0,B_0) \not \sqsubseteq t_w$

Proof. Outline Following the proof technique given in [2] the proof proceeds by stating a property associated with shared keys not appearing as a cleartext in the protocol. Then we assume a run which contains an event which violates the property stated before, and using dependencies among events within the protocol, we derive a contradiction. (The complete proof can be found in Appendix D1). By proving that shared keys never appear in the cleartext during a run of the protocol, we can guarantee that a Spy outside the P2P network cannot have access to them. Later on we will see the importance of this property for ensuring security in the protocol. $ \qedsymbol$

The following theorem concerns the secrecy property for the request. It states that the keyword asked by the initiator and broadcasted through the network will never be visible for a Spy outside the peer to peer group.

Theorem 3.3   Given a run of MUTE $ \langle \textrm{MUTE}\xspace ,s_0,t_0 \rangle \stackrel{e_1}{\longrightarrow} ... ...tarrow} \langle p_v,s_v,t_v \rangle \stackrel{e_{v+1}}{\longrightarrow} \dots $ , $ A_0 \in Peers(G)$ and $ kw_0 \in Keywords(A_0)$, if for all $ A$,$ B$ $ \in$ $ Peers(G)$, $ key(A,B) \not \sqsubseteq t_0$, where $ B \in ngb(A)$ and the run contains the $ Init$ event a1 labelled with action
$ act(a_1) = Init : (A_0) : i_0 : B_0 :$
$ out \, new (n_0) (\{n_0,kw_0\}_{key(A_0,B_0)},A_0,B_0)$
where i0 is an index, $ B_0$ is an index which belongs to the set $ ngb(A_0)$, and n0 is a name, then for every $ w \geq 0$ in the run $ kw_0 \notin t_w$

Proof. Outline Following the proof technique given in [2] the proof proceeds by stating that the shared keys are never leaked during a run of the protocol (Theorem 3.2). We state a stronger property $ Q$ which holds for all keywords not appearing as a cleartext during a run of the protocol. Then we assume an event which violates property $ Q,$ and using dependencies among events within the protocol we derive a contradiction. (The complete proof can be found in Appendix D2).

By proving that the keyword sent by the initiator peer as a request never appears in the cleartext during a run of the protocol, we can affirm that a Spy outside of the network will never know that keyword, so he will never recognise the file a sender is requesting. $ \qedsymbol$

The next theorem states that the message sent as an answer by the responder will never appear as a cleartext during a run of the MUTE protocol, and in this way nobody outside the peer to peer boundaries will understand it.

Theorem 3.4   Given a run of MUTE $ \langle \textrm{MUTE}\xspace ,s_0,t_0 \rangle \stackrel{e_1}{\longrightarrow} ... ...tarrow} \langle p_v,s_v,t_v \rangle \stackrel{e_{v+1}}{\longrightarrow} \dots $ and $ A_0 \in Peers(G)$ and $ res_0 \in Headers(B_0)$, if for all $ A$,$ B$ $ \in$ $ Peers(G)$, $ key(A,B) \not \sqsubseteq t_0$, where $ B \in ngb(A)$ and if the run contains a $ Resp$ event $ b_2$ labelled with action

$ act(b_2) = Resp : (A_0) : i_0 : B_0 :$
$ out \, new (m_0) (\{n_0,res_0,m_0\}_{key(A_0,B_0)},A_0,B_0)$
where i0 is an index, $ B_0$ is an index which belongs to the set $ ngb(A_0)$ and n0, m0 are names, then for every $ w \geq 0$ $ res_0 \not \in t_w$

Proof. Outline The proof is analogous to that of Theorem 3.2 (The complete proof can be found in Appendix D3).

If we prove that the answer header sent by the receiver, never appears in the cleartext during a run of the protocol we can manage to guarantee that a Spy outside the peer to peer network will never know or access the file. $ \qedsymbol$

Related Work

To our knowledge, little work has been done in formalisation of P2P protocols using Process Calculi. In particular, the project Pepito [5] has started efforts in verification of properties using CCS variants in static versions of P2P protocols [1], in particular, correctness properties. Other analysis has been made for specific P2P functionalities, like [14] and [15]. However, to our knowledge, this is the first formal attempt using process calculi to model and reason about security properties in P2P protocols.

Concluding Remarks and Future Work

The use of process calculi allows us to formalise communication protocols leaving aside technical details, transforming complex distributed algorithms into abstract models syntactically close to their descriptions in pseudo-code. In particular, the use of SPL calculus lets us model several processes involved in the protocol without losing dependencies among them, in order to verify security properties along all the protocol path. In this way, these properties essential to communication (P2P) protocols can be easily verified. We demonstrate the above by giving the first formal description MUTE and by showing secrecy properties for messages wrt a passive outsider in the MUTE protocol. This bears witness of the specification power of SPL and its reasoning techniques.

We have proved the secrecy property for a passive outsider in the MUTE protocol. It will be interesting to explore security properties for threats inside the P2P network or an outsider who can masquerade as a trusted peer. Our future work will be the verification of the secrecy property for an insider in the MUTE protocol. In the same way, we shall explore the SPL expressiveness in order to model new cutting-edge protocols, using its own reasoning techniques, or extending it in order to verify other important security properties like non-traceability and non-malleability.

Bibliography


1
J. Borgstrôm, U. Nestmann, L. O. Alima, and D. Gurov.
Verifying a structured peer-to-peer overlay network: The static case.
In TBD, editor, Proc. Global Computing 2004, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, page TBD. Springer, 2004.

2
F. Crazzolara.
Language, semantics, and methods for security protocols.
Doctoral Dissertation DS-03-4, brics, daimi, May 2003.
PhD thesis. xii+160.

3
F. Crazzolara and G. Winskel.
Events in security protocols.
In ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, pages 96-105, 2001.

4
D. Dolev and A. C. Yao.
On the security of public key protocols.
Technical report, Dept. of Computer Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA, 1981.

5
S. Haridi and T. Sjôland.
Pepito - peer-to-peer: Implementation and theory, 2002.

6
G. Lowe.
An attack on the needham-schroeder public-key authentication protocol.
Inf. Process. Lett., 56(3):131-133, 1995.

7
G. Milicia.
$ \chi$-Spaces: Programming Security Protocols.
In Proceedings of the 14th Nordic Workshop on Programming Theory (NWPT'02), November 2002.

8
R. Milner.
Communicating and Mobile systems. The Pi Calculus.
Cambridge University Press, 1999.

9
D. S. Milojicic, V. Kalogeraki, R. Lukose, K. Nagaraja, J. Pruyne, B. Richard, S. Rollins, and Z. Xu.
Peer-to-peer computing.
Technical Report HPL-2002-57, HP Labs, March 2002.

10
C. Perkins.
IP Mobility Support - RFC2002.
IETF RFC Publication, 1996.

11
J. L. Peterson.
Petri nets.
ACM Comput. Surv., 9(3):223-252, 1977.

12
J. Rohrer and M. Roth.
Mute: Simple, anonymous file sharing, 2005.
Available at http://mute-net.sourceforge.net/howAnts.shtml.

13
V. Saraswat.
Concurrent Constraint Programming.
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1993.

14
M. Srivatsa and L. Liu.
Vulnerabilities and security threats in structured peer-to-peer systems: A quantitative analysis.

15
H. J. Wang, Y.-C. Hu, C. Yuan, Z. Zhang, and Y.-M. Wang.
Friends troubleshooting network: Towards privacy-preserving, automatic troubleshooting.
In G. M. Voelker and S. Shenker, editors, IPTPS, volume 3279 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 184-194. Springer, 2004.

Footnotes

... hints.1
Abstracting from the MUTE website, available at [12]



Second Workshop on Constraint Handling Rules
Workshop Report

Tom Schrijvers
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Belgium

Editor: Enrico Pontelli



Website:     http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~toms/CHR2005/
Proceedings:    http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/publicaties/rapporten/cw/CW421.abs.html


The Second Workshop on Constraint Handling Rules took place in Sitges (Spain) at the occasion of ICLP'05, on October 5, 2005

The Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) language has become a major declarative specification and implementation language for constraint reasoning algorithms and applications. Algorithms are often specified using inference rules, rewrite rules, sequents, proof rules or logical axioms that can be directly written in CHR. The clean semantics of CHR facilitates non-trivial program analysis and transformation.

This workshop followed the First Workshop on Constraint Handling Rules that was organized in May 2004 in Ulm, Germany. It meant to bring together, in an informal setting, people involved in research on all matters involving CHR.

The full-day workshop programme consisted of one invited talk, eight paper presentations and a discussion. Eighteen people were officially registered for the workshop. The effective number of participants was even higher and additional workshop proceedings were sold.

We were privileged to have a distinguished invited speaker: Martin Sulzmann (National University of Singapore) talking about his successful application of CHR in the functional programming world, systematic type system design for Haskell.

From the eleven papers submitted to the workshop, the Program Committee accepted eight papers for the paper presentations. These papers addressed various topics including type systems, Java implementations of CHR, lexicographic constraints, program analysis and optimization.

New to the CHR workshop this year was the Best Paper Award. The Program Committee selected the best paper from the accepted papers, based on its outstanding quality in both presentation and scientific contribution and for its impact on the field of CHR:

    The Computational Power and Complexity of Constraint Handling Rules.
    Jon Sneyers, Tom Schrijvers, Bart Demoen

The final discussion comprised future research plans and topics: CHR as business rules, analysis, implementation, the G12 project... Also a call for active participation was made in the CHR website (http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~dtai/projects/CHR/) and mailinglist (http://listserv.cc.kuleuven.ac.be/archives/chr.html). In particular, it was agreed to collect ideas for PhDs and other research topics on the CHR website.

We are grateful to all the participants, the authors of the submitted papers, the Program Committee members, and the referees for their time and efforts spent in the reviewing process, the ICLP 2005 organizers and the workshop chair Hai-Feng Guo.

Hope to see you all at CHR 2006 (time and location to be announced)!



The 11th Prolog Programming Contest

Bart Demoen1 and Phuong-Lan Nguyen2
1Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
2UCO, France

Editor: Enrico Pontelli


Download PDF version.

You read that correctly: the eleventh contest it was. You wonder "what happened to the previous ten?" ... the first ten are condensed in a nice booklet with the unsurprising title "The First 10 Prolog Programming Contests". It contains the questions and answers of the first 10 contests, a little history and the hall of fame. It is still available: see
http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~bmd/PrologProgrammingContests/book10years.html

Let us first thank the people who helped making the 11th contest a success:
The contest room was meant for 10 teams of three people each. It was fully packed. An extra team sqeezed in on the floor against the wall and when a 12th team showed up, they decided they wouldn't fit in anymore. Among the participants, there were six winners of previous contests: some of them even won more than one contest. That did not impress the other participants much and everybody went for it: they got six problems to choose from and the idea was that they solve as many of them in as little time as possible, while using only one laptop per team. The whole event lasted two hours.

Usually this contest has no losers - except the people who do not participate - but this time we almost lost it ... an unnamed organiser wasn't able to read/write most of the contestants' memory sticks and this caused panic and a lot of hassle while distributing the testsuite and handing in the solutions. Luckily, three memory sticks were found to comply with the old operating system of the local organiser and teams started letting the sticks circulate to whomever needed them. It was admirable how the competing teams cooperated on this.

32 solutions were handed in, of which 20 passed our testsuite: that's extremely good. All teams handed in at least two solutions and that is quite unusual. No team submitted a solution to the Pebble Graph Game problem. That problem was in fact a decoy: it was not difficult, but it takes more typing than it is worth during a contest. No team fell in the trap.

Two teams deserve a special mentioning: the Brazilian-Portuguese team handed in two solutions, both of which were rejected because they violated the DO NOT USE ASSERT/RETRACT rule. And just so that Vitor knows: the Turing problem was correct but incredibly slow, and the grammar problem was fast but ... incorrect.
The Belgian-Australian team was incredibly fast at the start of the contest and they kept submitting at a high rate: solutions for 5
problems were handed in. However, this team forgot to test their solutions - maybe because of memory stick problems in the beginning of the contest - and they also used assert for one problem. They ended up with 2 correct solutions, as did 5 other teams.

The two best teams send in 4 solutions and got 3 correct: nobody did better. In that case the time to submit is decisive: the shorter the better. Let us first name the teams: the Czech team (named Hungarian during the banquet speech - sorry for that) consisted of Roman Bartak, Jiri Vyskocil and Pavel Cevnar. And the Hungarian-Swedish team had Mats Carlsson, Peter Szabo and Peter Szeredi. The Hungarian-Swedish team programmed in SICStus Prolog and used the clp(fd) library for the
didit problem: that was the problem they got wrong. The Czech team missed an essential ingredient in the statement of the Turing problem: we wanted all visited tape squares to be printed out and this team wrote extra code to clip the visited blanc squares ... what a pity because the Czechs would have won, because they were about 30 amortized minutes slower than the winners!Bart Demoen at the Prolog Programming Contest

The Hungarian-Swedish team indeed won the contest. During a serene ceremony at the conference banquet, the team members received a t-shirt with the ICLP05 logo and in capital letters VENCEDOR of the 11th Prolog Programming Contest. They will also receive a certificate so that even after the t-shirt is worn out, they can brag that they were the best Prolog programmers in 2005!

For the 5th time, there was a parallel contest over the net: teams around the world could solve the same set of questions in 24 hours and submit by e-mail. Only three teams participated and the winner was once more Bernhard Pfahringer who submitted 6 correct solutions in the shortest time. He commented on his solutions as follows: accept my apologies for some truly ugly Prolog code ... he was also right there  smile

It was fun once more, so why stop at 11 ...

The 12th Prolog Programming Contest is being prepared as we speak: it will take place during ICLP06, August 17-20, 2006 in sleepless Seattle, Washington, USA. We hope to see you there !



Report on the Dagstuhl Seminar on Nonmonotonic
Reasoning, Answer Set Programming and Constraints

Wolfgang Faber
University of Calabria
Italy

Editor: Enrico Pontelli

Download PDF Version of this Article.

Picture of Participants to the Meeting
By now, Dagstuhl Castle in Germany is already well-known among computer scientists as a superb location for top-level seminars, in which the latest research results can be discussed in a laid-back atmosphere. Originally built in 1760, after serving most of its time as a manor house of a noble family it was converted into an old-age home run by Franciscan nuns in 1959, and was finally purchased by the state of Saarland, which opened the International Conference and Research Center for Computer Science Schloss Dagstuhl in 1990. Located in the wooded hills of the Saarland in central-western Germany, not far from the border to France and Luxemburg, the castle has a reclusive character, which makes out-of-session socialization almost a necessity and accounts for the special flair of Dagstuhl seminars.

From April 24 to April 29, 2005, 58 researchers from America, Asia, Australia, and Europe gathered there for Seminar 05171 “Nonmonotonic Reasoning, Answer Set Programming and Constraints,” organized by Gerhard Brewka (University of Leipzig), Ilkka Niemelä (Helsinki University of Technology), Torsten Schaub (University of Potsdam), and Mirek Truszczynski (University of Kentucky). This was actually already the second seminar on this topic, the first one (Dagstuhl Seminar 02381) took place in September 2002.

The academic program was fairly dense, comprising 3 invited talks, 41 regular presentations, a presentation with subsequent open discussion and a panel. In addition, WASP, the European Working Group on Answer Set Programming, held a meeting, and an excursion was scheduled for one afternoon. The dominant topic of this seminar was answer set programming (ASP), which is basically function-free logic programming under the answer set (closely related to the stable model) semantics, but also featured related areas such as ID-logic and boolean satisfiability (SAT).

The first day started off with an invited talk by Tomi Janhunen, on translating normal logic programs into propositional theories, such that models of the propositional theories correspond to the stable models of the logic program.

In the first regular session on foundations, Joohyung Lee presented a model-theoretic counterpart of loop formulas, which are at the core of the current SAT-based ASP engines. Kewen Wang subsequently spoke about relevance and forgetting in ASP, also giving computational properties. Ending the session, John Schlipf reported on experimental work for determining the distribution of randomly generated normal propositional logic programs.

After lunch, Gerd Brewka presented prioritized component systems, a framework which combines ideas from ASP, answer-set optimization, and CP-nets. Axel Polleres then spoke about recent developments in the area of Semantic Web Services, and the potential role of ASP in this ever-emerging field. To end this section, Wolfgang Faber showed how magic sets may be adapted for ASP, and how this technique can be fruitfully exploited for data integration.

After some cake and coffee, Jeffrey Remmel explained how to extend ASP by suitable constructs in order to reason about infinite sets. An extension to ASP was also the topic of the next talk by Pascal Nicolas. He dealt with adding certainty levels, arriving at possibility theory for ASP. Paolo Ferraris then gave a novel characterization of models in equilibrium logic for propositional theories, and explained how it can be used to define the semantics of ASP with aggregates. The final extension for that day was described by Giovambattista Ianni, who presented an extension of ASP by templates.

There was also an after-dinner session, in which Christian Anger and Mirek Truszczynski spoke about Asparagus, a benchmarking system for ASP. After their report on the benchmarks, status, and latest results, there was an open discussion about future directions of this effort.

The second day started with an invited talk by Thomas Eiter. In his talk he presented how ASP can be extended in order to be used in the semantic web, in particular for tightly coupling ASP to other reasoning engines.

The following regular session focussed on ASP solvers. Nicola Leone started by reporting on ongoing enhancements and applications of the DLV system, followed by Torsten Schaub, who presented a platform for distributed answer set solving called Platypus. Mirek Truszczynski concluded the session by describing how to apply pseudo-boolean constraint solvers for answer sets computation.

In the afternoon, the relationship of ASP to SAT and other logics was discussed in detail. Yuliya Lierler started by describing how to use SAT solvers to compute answer sets for disjunctive logic programs. Marco Maratea followed by analyzing the relationship between Answer Set and SAT on an algorithmic level. Eugenia Ternovska then presented a framework for representing and solving NP search problems, which combines ideas from SAT, constraint satisfaction, and ASP. Finally, Ken Satoh built on computing minimal hitting sets in order to enumerate maximal sets with respect to the monotone property.

Finally, there was a panel discussion, moderated by Ilkka Niemel¨a, on future developments of the field. Marc Denecker, Yannis Dimopoulos, Michael Gelfond, Nicola Leone, and Ilkka himself were the panelists. Interesting discussions developed, which could only be stopped by the call for dinner.

In the evening, the members of the European Community funded Working group on Answer Set Programming (WASP) held their meeting, while the other participants enjoyed discussions and the many leisure opportunities offered in the castle, such as billiards, ping pong, the music room, the wine cellar, or just had a walk to the medieval castle ruins on a hill nearby.

The third day started with an application session. Stijn Heymans introduced extended conceptual logic programs and showed how they can be used to simulate description logics and for nonmonotonic ontological reasoning in the Semantic Web. Rafal Grabos then introduced us to the combinatorial vote problem and how it can be solved by using logic programs with ordered disjunctions. Conformant planning, finding plans which certainly establish a goal in a nondeterministic environment, were the focus of Michael Gelfond’s talk. He showed how ASP can be used to solve this problem. Finally, Alessandra Mileo explained how to represent user profiles of persons browsing the web by means of ASP.

The next session was again focusing on the relation between ASP, SAT and other logics. Ilkka Niemelä started by describing how to solve boolean equation systems by using ASP, thus being able to model check alternating formulas of modal mu-calculus. Agustín Valverde followed by describing how to compile propositional theories into ASP in a modular way, giving also complexity results. Closing the session, David Pearce focused on paraconsistent answer sets for propositional theories, defining them as an extension of Routley semantics.

After lunch, Martin Gebser spoke about the ASP system nomore++, and its approach of computing answer sets. Stefania Costantini outlined a methodology for static analysis for Answer Set Programming, based on graph cycles.

Then, most of the participants joined an excursion to the nearby city of Trier, which is said to be the oldest city in Germany. Split into two groups we visited the the major sights of Trier, including the Porta Nigra, dating back to the Romans, the large basilica, the town center and the house in which Karl Marx was born, all backed up by eloquent explanations and anecdotes by the tour guides. The evening ended with a nice dinner in a restaurant which also offers specialities prepared according to ancient Roman recipes.

The fourth day was opened by David Mitchell’s invited talk, which focused on SAT Solving, giving a comprehensive overview of the developments and challenges in this field.

In the following session, Inna Pivkina described how Revision Programming can be applied to computing minimal solution updates in the von Neumann-Morgenstern approach. Marina de Vos then talked about how to employ ASP for modelling and analysing social properties in multi-agent systems, while Fabio Massacci reported how he used ASP in Security Requirements Engineering.

After lunch, the focus was on equivalences of logic programs. In a joint talk, Hans Tompits and Stefan Woltran gave an overview of their contributions to this field, which included characterisations and complexity of strong and uniform equivalence in ASP, as well as generalizations of the equivalence notion, which are aimed at modular programming. To complete the session, Kathrin Konczak introduced and discussed strong equivalence for logic programs with preferences.

The following session, dealing with ID-Logic, was opened by Maarten Marien, who presented an algorithm and system for model generation in ID-Logic. Joost Vennekens followed by analyzing properties of ID-logic by means of approximation theory.

In the final session of this day, Ramon Otero spoke about how to represent protein folding as a dynamic process in ASP, indicating that computationally this approach is challenging the best alternative methods. Finally, Yuting Zhao reported on different schemes for randomly generating ASP programs, and experiments in which hard regions could be identified.

In the morning of the last day of the seminar, Artur Mikitiuk started by describing a language of propositional logic with pseudo-boolean constraints to model search problems, along with a system that works via translations to classical or pseudo-boolean satisfiability. Martin Brain ordered his computer to “Do what I meant, not what I said”, describing issues and challenges in debugging ASP. Victor Marek then defined proof schemes, and showed how this construct can be used to prove properties of ASP.

In the final session, Emilia Oikarinen reported on a system which translates parallel circumscription into disjunctive ASP, and finally Loreto Bravo defined a semantics for consistent answers of peer-to-peer systems with trust relations, and showed how to use ASP to compute them. After her talk, the organizers took the opportunity to wrap up the seminar and start an open discussion, after which the event was formally closed.

As a coda, Joost Vennekens is editing a volume of Dagstuhl Seminar Proceedings, in which papers accompanying some of the presentations will be published.

Summarizing, the event brought together many of the researchers of the area, and allowed for exchanging the latest developments and trends. I believe that each participant could profit a lot of the seminar, and I am quite sure that many great ideas and future publications have been come up with during this get-together.




International Conference on Logic Programming
Conference Report

Emad Saad
New Mexico State University
USA

Editor: Enrico Pontelli


Group Picture of ICLP and CP 2005 Participants
(Reproduced with permission; © Copyright by Helmut Simonis, 2005)

ICLP05 was so special this year (from October 2nd to October 5th) for many reasons; geographically and scientifically. Geographically, because it has been held in Spain (for the first time), specifically, in the historical, very refreshing warm weather, and the pure blue color sea Sitges (Barcelona). The location was amazing since it is a center to both researchers form the west and the east of the globe. Scientifically, because ICLP05 was co-located with its sister CP05 this years which further enriched the events by sharing ideas and cross fertilization among the broad areas in both fields. ICLP this year also initiated the doctoral consortium program for the first time in the history of ICLP. The doctoral consortium selected seven PhD students who as well presented their ongoing work as research posters at ICLP05.

Furthermore, ICLP05 watched tutorial sessions and five workshops in addition to the usual CICLOPS (Colloquium on Implementation of Constraint and Logic Programming Systems) workshop. These workshops are CSLP (Constraint Solving and Language Processing), WCB (Constraint Based Methods for Bioinformatics), WLPE (Logic Based Methods in Programming Environments), MoVeLog (Mobile Code Safety and Program Verification Using Computational Logic Tool), and CHR (Constraint Handling Rules). No need to mention the interesting talks that shared the common interests to both LP and CP communities that were established by the invited speakers.

The ICLP05 program covered a wide range of topics in the theory and practice of logic programming. This includes Answer set programming, program analysis, LP based languages, Abduction in LP, constraint logic programming, tabled LP, semantics of LP and higher order, and higher order and termination. These topics formed the various sessions of ICLP05. Relating answer set programming to different paradigms and formalisms was the center to ICLP05 contributions to this area. Some of the interesting talks was about a formal and practical study on the relationship between answer set programming (smodels) and SAT (cmodels). Regarding, the relastioship between answer set and CLP, two talks were presented; the integration of Answer Set and SAT solving and a practical comparative study between finite domain constraint logic programming and answer set programming solutions to different NP-complete benchmark problems. In addition to a
presentation in the integration of answer set programming with probabilities, presentations about implementations for advanced equivalence checking in answer set programming and reducing inductive definitions to propositional satisfiability were held. In program analysis session, two presentations were held, nondeterminism of functional logic programs and techniques for scaling up analysis based pre-interpretation were presented. A Prolog implementation of an optimized semantics query language and a distributed and probabilistic constraint programming language were presented in the LP based language session. Abduction in LP watched two contributions at ICLP05, the development of a new logic programming language with assumption and abduction, namely, HYPROLOG and the abduction of linear arithmetic. Although, constraints received a lot of attention at the co-located CP05, ICLP05 received contribution in CP and held a session on constraints. The constraints session had three presentations about parallelizing union-fined constraint handling rules using confluence, guard and continuation optimization of occurrence representations of CHR, and coordination of many agents. The Tabled LP session got two interesting presentations; a space efficient data structure for incremental tabled evaluation and dynamic mixed strategy evaluation of tabled logic programs. This followed by two poster presentation sessions which was followed by poster display session. The sessions of Semantics of LP and higher order and higher order and termination had very interesting presentations covered the well-founded semantics with disjunctions, framed temporal logic programs semantics, practical
higher order pattern unification, small proof witness for LF, polynomial interpretation as a basis for termination, and testing for termination with size change graph.

Last but not least, there were two major contributions to ICLP05. The ICLP05 best student paper award which was given to Ajay Mallya for his contribution deductive multi-valued model checking and the ICLP05 best paper awarded to Jose Morales, Manuel Carro, German Puebla, and Manuel Hermenegildo for their contribution a generator of efficient abstract machine implementation and its applications.

A brief pictorial view of ICLP 2005


Ian Horrocks
Ian Horrocks delivering his invited talk on Description Logics		 Piero Bonatti
Piero Bonatti showing us how to combine ASP and Constraint Solving		 Gopal Gupta
Gopal Gupta introducing the second invited talk of ICLP
Peter Stuckey
Peter Stuckey offering an interesting talk about the G12 Project		 Eugene Freuder
Eugene Freuder honored		 Pascal Van Hentenryck
Pascal Van Hentenryck introducing Herve Gallaire
Bob Kowalski
Bob Kowalski introducing Herve Gallaire		 David Warren
David Warren honoring Herve Gallaire		 Mireille Ducasse
Mireille Ducasse introducing Herve Gallaire
Herve Gallaire
Herve Gallaire being honored for his contributions to the field		 Eclipse
The crowd admiring the eclipse (the solar one, not the CLP one...)		 Mallya
Ajay Mallya presenting the best student paper of ICLP 2005
Gopalan Nadathur
Gopalan Nadathur discussing higher-order pattern unification		 Panel
Some of the panelist discussing the future of logic programming languages		 Enrico
Yours truly, trying to introduce the speakers of the session on Semantics and Higher-order
View
A view of the docks in Sitges


(© Copyright Enrico Pontelli, 2005)

Italian Conference on Theoretical Computer Science
Conference Report

Roberto Bagnara
University of Parma
Italy

Editor: Enrico Pontelli


The Ninth Italian Conference on Theoretical Computer Science (ICTCS '05) took place at the Certosa of Pontignano, near Siena, Italy, on October 12-14, 2005.  ICTCS is the bi-annual conference of the Italian Chapter of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (IC-EATCS), and has, among its topics, several ones that can be of interest to members of the Logic Programming community (foundations of programming languages, program analysis, artificial intelligence, knowledge representation, web programming; program specification and verification; term rewriting; theory of data bases; symbolic and algebraic computation).

The 2005 conference was organized in a beautiful monastery (called "Certosa" from the "Carthusian" monastic order) in Pontignano, a few kilometers from Siena.  The Certosa of Pontignano dates back to the 14th century and, after a long and adventurous history, was purchased in 1959 by the University of Siena, who then turned it into a university residence and conference center.  Even though the Certosa underwent extensive work during the Renaissance and later, it preserved its original atmosphere as an oasis of peace (the harmonious architectural structure, the gardens, the works of art...), something that makes it a particularly suggestive location for a scientific meeting.

The program committee, chaired by Mario Coppo (University of Torino) and Elena Lodi (University of Siena), selected 29 papers for presentation out of the 83 submitted.  The program was completed by three invited talks by Luca Cardelli (Biological System as Reactive Systems), Nicola Santoro (Mobile Agents Computing: Security Issues and Algorithmic Solutions), and Giuseppe Castagna (Semantic Subtyping: Challenges, Perspectives and Open Problems).  I think all the invited speakers did a great job of communicating the important ideas even to non-experts in the respective fields.  The proceedings of the conference were published in volume 3701 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Springer).

A personal selection of papers that may be of interest to the logic programming practitioner is the following:
One of the presentations that I enjoyed the most was about
The paper was extremely well presented by Adriana Compagnoni, and those who will take my advice to read it will not be disappointed. Actually, I think here there is something a PhD student may want to look at.  My advice is: read the work by Medel and colleagues, devise a modified WAM that does the right thing, and make sure Prolog becomes the language of choice for developing systems in future multi-level security architectures.  (As easy as this!)

To conclude, attending ICTCS '05 was an interesting and enjoyable experience.  Michele Pinna (Universities of Siena and Cagliari) and his colleagues did a very good organization work.  I do not remember who said that the secret for a successful conference lies in the ratio between meeting and eating (I will be grateful to whoever points me to the source of this undeniable truth).  From this point of view, I must say that the food was excellent and always accompanied by good Chianti wine made from grapes grown in the Certosa's vineyards (Pontignano is in the southern part of the Chianti Classico wine area).  The social dinner, held at the "Al Mangia" restaurant in the famous Piazza del Campo square, at the heart of Siena's historic centre, was also very tasty.



Constraint Solving and Language Processing
Workshop Report

Henning Christiansen
Roskilde University
Denmark

Editor: Enrico Pontelli


The purpose of the CSLP workshops is to provide a forum that promotes mutual awareness and cooperation, and to provide an overview of the research in this area that we find very exciting and promising, of language processing by means of constraint-based methods and linguistic modelling inspired by constraints.

Such approaches seem relevant for a variety of languages, such as natural language, formal and semiformal language, biological and genetic encodings, as well as general input data to multimodal and pervasive systems. We believe that these areas can provide mutual inspiration to each other. The view of grammar expressed as a set of conditions simultaneously constraining and thus defining the set of possible utterances has influenced formal linguistic theory for more than a decade. CLP and CS provide flexibility of expression and potential for interleaving the different phases of language processing, including handling of pragmatic and semantic information.

The first workshop was held over three days in 2004 resulting in the publishing of an LNAI volume (see ref. below) whereas the workshop in Sitges was a more intimate event with one invited talk by Jerry R. Hobbs and four submitted papers reviewed and selected by an international program committee.

Jerry R. Hobbs' talk on "Syntax, Metonymy, and Intention" and the following discussion tied his logically based approach to the incarnation of logic in the shape of constraint-based techiques. This session provided many inspiring points for future research, in the same way as Jerry's research has been inspiring for generations of researchers for around three decades or so. This talk gave the right context and perspectives for the other presentations which were
Organizers of this year's CSLP were Philippe Blache, Henning Christiansen (Chair), Veronica Dahl, and Gerald Penn. Jørgen Villadsen took part in the editing process. We would like to thank the international program committe whose members are listed at the website referenced below, and the ICLP organization for providing the perfect setting for the workshop. The planning of the third CSLP has begun and is likely to take place in 2006 co-located with an international conference.

The CSLP workshops are initiated as part the CONTROL project, CONstraint based Tools for RObust Language processing, whose topics overlap with the workshops' and whose purpose also includes to identify interesting applications and initiate detailed studies. CONTROL is funded by the Danish Natural Science Research Council and Computer Science Section at Roskilde University. - If you may have found interest in CSLP and CONTROL, do not hesitate to write to the author.

Websites
The CONTROL project http://control.ruc.dk/
CSLP'05 http://control.ruc.dk/CSLP2005.html
CSLP'04 http://control.ruc.dk/CSLP2004.html

Publications
[1] H. Christiansen & J. Villadsen (eds.): Constraint Solving and Language Processing - Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop. Datalogiske skrifter no. 104, Roskilde University, 2005.
http://www.ruc.dk/dat/forskning/skrifter/DS104.pdf

[2] H. Christiansen, P.R. Skadhauge, & J. Villadsen (eds.)
Constraint Solving and Language Processing. First Int'l Workshop on Constraint Solving and Language Processing, Roskilde, Denmark, September 2004, Revised Selected and Invited Papers.
Springer LNAI 3438, 2005.



Theory and Practice of Logic Programming
and the ISI Web of Knowledge

Maurice Bruynooghe
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Belgium

Editor: Enrico Pontelli

Download PDF Version of this Article.


We are living in a time where university administrators are increasingly relying on various measurements to assess the quality of research. After all, we cannot expect they read our own research papers to make a personal judgement. Whether we like it or not, but in many places, papers in good journals are a must for research results to be taken seriously. Typically, university administrators use the ISI web of Knowledge, a product of the Thomson Corporation, to make the assessment. More precisely, they make use of the Journal Citation Report to obtain the impact factor of a journal and to compare it with the impact factor of other journals in the discipline.

The above explains why giving up the Journal of Logic Programming out of protest with the excessive pricing policies of Elsevier was a difficult step. Theory and Practice of Logic Programming started in 2001 with Cambridge University Press, and being a new journal, was not included in the ISI reports. Fortunately, with the backing of SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, “an alliance of academic and research libraries and organisations working to correct market dysfunctions in the scholarly publishing system”, TPLP appeared already in the 2003 edition of the Journal Citation Report. That was the first year for which there were enough data to compute a regular impact factor.

TPLP is the journal of the Logic Programming community; it is important for the community that it is a thriving journal; members of the community can contribute to this thriving. One aspect of its thriving is how well it does in those Journal Citation Reports. In the remainder, we dwell on the impact factor and on some other information one can extract from the ISI reports. While many have heard about impact factor, few precisely know how it is computed.

The impact factor is derived from the publications that are covered by the ISI database. Important for our community is that (all Proceedings that appear in) Lecture Notes in Computer Science is included (but not Proceedings by ACM Press, IEEE Press, Morgan Kaufmann, . . . ).

In the 2003 Journal Citation Report, one finds the following data: 
Cites in 2003 to articles published in 2002:
Cites in 2003 to articles published in 2001:		 22
24
Sum: 46

and

Number of articles published in 2002:
Number of articles published in 2001:		 19
22
Sum: 44

The impact factor is obtained by dividing the number of cites by the number of articles, i.e., 46/44= 1.045. Out of 345 journals listed in computer science, the ranking of TPLP is 108.

Similarly, in the 2004 Journal Citation Report, one finds:

Cites in 2004 to articles published in 2003:
Cites in 2004 to articles published in 2002:		 40
45
Sum: 85

and

Number of articles published in 2003:
Number of articles published in 2002:		 23
19
Sum: 42

This gives an impact factor of 85/42= 2.024. Out of 347 journals in computer science, the ranking is 46. (Apparently, the two extra journals listed in 2004 are Lecture Notes in Computer Science, and Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence. Although (some? all?) articles published in them are in the corpus, no impact factors for LNCS and LNAI are given for 2003 —both are listed in reports previous to 2003—.)

Note that the impact factors of both years are almost unrelated as the cites are originating from a different set of data. The only overlap is in the window of articles whose citations are counted. This window has a width of two years hence overlaps with one year.

The citation reports also allows one to see which sources are citing TPLP articles. Lumping together figures from both years, one arrives at the following table where the column IF refers to cites that contribute to the impact factor, the column other refers to cites to articles that are not in the window used for computing the impact factor, and the column total is the sum of both.

Citing journal IF other total
Lecture Notes in Compute Science 60 15 75
Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 24 2 26
Theory and Practice of Logic Programming 11 6 17
Computational Intelligence 9 0 9
Fundamenta Informaticae  4 2 6
Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence  4 1 5
Information and Computation  2 1 3
Science of Computer Programming 3 0 3
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering  2 0 2
Information Sciences  2 0 2
Theoretical Computer Science  1 1 2
Advances in Virus Research  2 0 2
Others with each 1 citation  7 6 13

The table shows how dependent the impact factor is on LNCS/LNAI: 84 out of 131, i.e., more than 75% is due them. Not surprisingly if one realises that most volumes are Proceedings that, due to the fast publication cycle, refer to the recent work. In contrast, journal papers have a much slower publication cycle so that references to recent work are much less frequent.

Remarkably is that Advances in Virus Research has 2 references to TPLP. It concerns two different papers (in Volume 60, 2003) that refer to Yi-Dong Shen, Li-Yan Yuan, Jia-Huai You, and Neng-Fa Zhou, Linear Tabulated Resolution Based on Prolog Control Strategy, TPLP, Vol 1(1): 71-103. I have no online access to that journal and could not check whether this is indeed the case. However, I could verify that neither Trends in Biotechnology 23(2) 2005 nor Theoretical and Applied Genetics 109(4), 2004 refer to TPLP as claimed by ISI. However, a paper on Simulating complex intracellular processes using object oriented computational modelling in Progress in Biophysics & Molecular Biology
86(3), 2004 does indeed refer to Andy King and Lunjin Lu, A Backward Analysis for Constraint Logic Programs, TPLP, Vol 2(4&5) pp 517-547 as claimed by ISI.

There exists also a different kind of errors. Using Cited Reference Search, I attempted to find all citations to TPLP. I found 182 citations of which 14 had various errors that caused them not to be linked to the proper entry (in which case they also cannot contribute to the impact factor).

Errors in citations occurrences
wrong page number: 7
wrong year: 2
missing Volume number: 2
missing page number: 1
wrong initials in author name: 1
incomplete initials in author name: 1

Browsing through the list, I was constructing the following list of most cited papers:

One can ask to sort the list according to source title. LNCS/LNAI does not appear as a single item, but the list contains (pieces of) titles of individual volumes. One obtains (only titles with more than 2 citations):

Source Title Record Count % of 182
Theory and Practice of Logic Programming 22 12.0
Logic Programming, Proceedings 11 6.0
Logic Based Program Synthesis and Transformation 10 5.5
Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning, Proceedings 10 5.5
Program Development in Computational Logic 10 5.5
Computational Intelligence 4 2.2
Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages, Proceedings 4 2.2
Theoretical Computer Science 4 2.2
Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence 3 1.6
Computational Logic in Multi-Agent Systems 3 1.6
Inconsistency Tolerance 3 1.6
Journal of Logic and Computation 3 1.6
Logics in Artificial Intelligence, Proceedings 3 1.6

I assume that Logic Programming, Proceedings refers to different instances of ICLP. Though apparently, also here things can go wrong; the list has also an entry Logics Programming, Proceedings (with two citations) that likely also refers to an ICLP conference.

Conclusion To have a thriving journal with a good impact factor, its recent papers need be cited. You can contribute to the standing of TPLP in two ways. One one hand by submitting important work, either original research (eventually an elaboration of a conference paper) or survey work that will obtain many citations. On the other hand by precise citations to (recent) TPLP papers, in particular when you publish in the LNCS/LNAI series of Springer. The most up to date information about published and forthcoming papers are on the ALP website:
http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~dtai/projects/ALP/TPLP/
Other sources are DBLP:
http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/journals/tplp/index.html
and Cambridge University Press:
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=TLP

Maurice Bruynooghe
Editor-in-Chief TPLP (until 31 December 2005)
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Department of Computer Science



Car Park Oddity

Paolo Baldan
University Ca' Foscari of Venice
Italy

Editor: Enrico Pontelli


In the city of Oddeven there is a car park, which extends over a rectangular area of n x m square meters, where n is even. Cars can be parked horizontally or vertically, as shown in the picture below, and each of them occupies an area of 2 x 1 meters (you can imagine the car park as divided into squares of 1 x 1 meters, where each car occupies two adjacent squares, horizontally in a row or vertically in a column).
figure 1

The car park is often very crowded and sometimes, when drivers park carefully, it can be completely full, i.e., not a single square remains free.

Some days ago, I parked my car there and I was filling the last remaining place. The car park attendant looked at me and said: "This car park is really a mess: a huge number of cars some parked horizontally, some others vertically. But I am sure that the number of horizontal cars is even."

Somehow surprised I asked for an explanation and he replied: "Well, it is clear since the number n of rows in the car park is even!"

Question. Could you justify his answer?

Solution. Consider any vertical line dividing two adjacent columns, as the one drawn in red in the picture below.

Figure 2

Then observe that such line crosses an even number of cars. In fact, the line divides the parking in two parts each including an even number of squares, say l on the left and r on the right.
Now, the cars which are entirely on the left of such line obviously occupy an even number of squares, say e. The remaining l-e squares on the left of the line are occupied by cars which are crossed by the line, and thus such cars are exactly l-e, which is even. Observing that each horizontal car is crossed by exactly one vertical line, we conclude the total number of horizontal cars is even (since it is the sum of even numbers).


Workshop on Constraint Based Methods for Bioinformatics
Workshop Report

Rolf Backofen1 and Agostino Dovier2
1Jena University, Germany
2Università degli Studi di Udine, Italy

Editor: Enrico Pontelli


Download PDF version of this article.

Agostino Dovier - one of the organizersThis worskhop is the successors of the workshops Constraints and Bioinformatics/Biocomputing held in CP'97 and CP'98. After those meetings a lot of work has
been done in the area. This workshop was conceived to allow to sum up the situation and to produce new stimulus for the research.

We received 10 valuable submissions. 8 of them have been accepted and successfully presented. Even if scheduled in the afternoon of the last day, a lot of people attended at the talks (we counted 33 people, with an average presence close to 25), some of them from (constraint) logic programming (e.g., Maurice Bruynooghe, Veronica Dahl, Pierre Flener, Enrico Pontelli, Peter Stuckey) and others from Bioinformatics (e.g., Tony Kusalik), and Information Theory (e.g., Andrea Sgarro).
Each talk has been very appreciated by participants, as witnessed by the several questions raised (more than 4 questions per paper, in average).

The main topics presented and discussed were about RNA Structure Design, Local/Multiple alignment, and System Biology, which are current hot topics in this field. Note that e.g. several PC members have recently presented new results in the area of constraints and bioinformatics (e.g. on protein folding/docking, which is another hot topic in bioinformatics) in several conferences like PPDP, CP, and LPAR. Due to time limits, these contributions where not presented on the workshop.


Sebastian Will - one of the speakersBioinformatics is a  challenging research area where every  major contribution can    have    significant   impact   on   medicine, agriculture, and industry. But results need to be known in those areas. One of the suggestions emerged in the final discussions is to try to spread our results in bioinformatics conferences. This will show the powerful of constraint-based methods to that community and, possibly, to understand the limits (if any) of our approaches when applied to real-world applications. Anyway, the participants seem to have enjoyed the workshop and they kindly suggested us to organize a new edition for next year (connected with ICLP or CP - actually CP could be more suited).
Since the huge interest and number of participants, the next time we will ask for a full-day workshop. We conclude by acknowledging the  PC members, the external referees, all the participants, the ICLP workshop chair Hai-Feng Guo, and the local organizers in Sitges.

Other information, pictures from the workshop, and the proceedings can be found in the workshop web-site http://www.dimi.uniud.it/dovier/WCB05.


(© Photographs courtesy of Agostino Dovier)

15th Workshop on Logic-based Methods in Programming Environments
Report

Alexander Serebrenik
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Belgium

Editor: Enrico Pontelli


The 15th Workshop on Logic-based methods in Programming Environments, organised by A. Serebrenik and S. Muñoz-Hernández, took place on October 5, 2005 as a satellite workshop of ICLP'05, the 21th International Conference on Logic Programming. This workshop continues the series of successful international workshops on logic programming environments started in 1989.  This year we aimed at emphasizing two aspects: on one hand we want to discuss the presentation, pragmatics and experiences of logic-based tools for development and analysis of programs; on the other one, we attempted at shifting the traditional focus on environment tools for logic programming to logic-based environmental tools for programming in general.

The first session was dedicated to verifying program specifications. Tristan Denmat discussed proving and disproving invariants, generated by means of dynamic analysis, with constraint reasoning (joined work with  A. Gotlieb and M. Ducassé). William Heaven presented a way to enhancethe Alloy analyzer with patterns of analysis (joined work with A. Russo).

Traditionally, program analysis forms an important topic at WLPE. This year the results considered set-sharing (J. Navas, F. Bueno and M. Hermenegildo) and  non-termination (E. Payet and F. Mesnard). Moreover, German Puebla introduced a generic framework for the analysis and specialization of logic programs (joined work with M. Hermenegildo and E. Albert).

In the final session of the workshop Susana Muñoz-Hernández presented a way to extend Prolog with incomplete fuzzy information(joined work with C. Vaucheret). The workshop has been concluded by a talk of Ludovic Langevine discussing a tracer driver to debug, monitor and visualize constraint logic programs (joined work with M. Ducassé).

On behalf of the organisers I would like to thank the PC-members for timely reviews and fruitful discussions, the authors for contributing interesting papers covering a wide variety of topics, and, last but not least, the workshop participants for questions that lead to lively discussions during the meeting.



ALP Executive Committee Report
Editor: Maria Garcia de la Banda



The ALP Executive Committee met at Sitges, Spain (thanks to ICLP and CP for getting most of us together!) with a long agenda which included issues as diverse as workshop, conference and student funding; author copyrights; TPLP status; newsletter status; various conferences's organisation and funding status; and a possible website reorganisation. All this resulted in a very lively meeting, the first one with Manuel Hermenegildo as president.

The main points agreed during the meeting can be summarised as follows:


Community News
List of News:



Journal of Automated Reasoning
Special Issue on
Empirically Successful Automated Reasoning

Communicated by Geoff Sutcliffe

 
With improving technology, theorem proving and related methods are successfully being applied to larger problems and used in more domains. To further disseminate developments and results in this area, a special issue of the Journal of Automated Reasoning dedicated to empirically successful automated reasoning will be published.

We invite submission of articles describing work on the implementation and deployment of working automated reasoning systems and applications. Both participants of the successful ESCAR-workshop at CADE-20 (see http://www.cs.miami.edu/~geoff/Conferences/ESCAR/) and other authors are invited to submit contributions. Submissions should be mature journal articles.  They may address any aspect of "really working" systems and applications, and should not focus on theoretical ideas that have not yet been translated into working software.

Similar to the ESCAR-workshop, this special issue will have two tracks, one for systems and one for applications. Suggested topics include, but  are not limited to:

Systems
Applications
Submission format:
Submissions should be written in general terms understandable by the usual audience of the journal.  They will be fully refereed to usual journal standards.

Submissions should be formatted according to JAR's author guidelines (see the link on the home page below), and preferably be written in LaTeX. A LaTeX style file can be obtained here:
    http://www.springeronline.com/authors/jrnlstylefiles

Dates:
Submission ..... December 5, 2005
Notification ... January 20, 2006
Camera ready ... March 6,    2006

Websites and Submission procedure:
Please send an email with the title, authors' names, and abstract in plain text, and the full paper in PDF-format as an attachment,  to the following address by December 5:
    esar-jar@eprover.org
Please feel free to send any questions or inquiries to this address as well.  The website for this special issue, containing more useful information, is available at
    http://www.eprover.org/EVENTS/ESAR-JAR
Deepak Kapur.
Editor-in-Chief,
Journal of Automated Reasoning
Bernd Fischer, Stephan Schulz, Geoff Sutcliffe.
Guest Editors.




PhD Scholarship - Bond University
Centre for Software Assurance

Communicated by Paddy Krishnan
 
The Centre for Software Assurance at the School of Information  Technology, Bond University is offering the Bond University and KJRoss  and Associates Joint PhD scholarship to an applicant with a degree in Computer Science or a closely related discipline. The PhD scholarship  will include a full waiver of tuition and also include a tax exempt living allowance for 3 years.

The research project:
Nowadays our day to day activities depend on the correct working of a number of systems that have a significant software subsystem. This increased dependency forces one to ensure that such systems behave as required. The aim of the research is to develop techniques to guarantee behaviour for large systems such as those used for banking,  e-commerce and government services. This research is supported by KJRoss and Associates who provide specialist services in software verification and validation to a variety of large clients. They were the  first laboratory to complete the world recognised NATA accreditation for software testing in Australia.

The successful candidate will be expected to  conduct research that contributes to the areas of  software assurance, modeling and tools towards automated testing. Details on the research project is available on request from Prof. P. Krishnan (email: pkrishna@staff.bond.edu.au)

Applications including a CV with names of three referees and a research plan should be submitted to Prof. P. Krishnan (email: pkrishna@staff.bond.edu.au) by  the 10th of November 2005.

Electronic copies of supporting document(s) such as transcripts, publications are acceptable - although you will be required to submit certified copies to complete the process.

Please send only PDF files by email.

More information on the University and the Centre for Software Assurance can be obtained from http://www.bond.edu.au and http://www.sand.bond.edu.au respectively.
Information on KJRoss and Associates can be obtained from http://www.kjross.com.au



EATCS Award 2006
Call for Nominations

Communicated by Mariangiola Dezani

EATCS annually honors a respected scientist from our community with the prestigious EATCS Distinguished Achievements Award. The award is given to acknowledge extensive and widely recognized contributions to theoretical computer science over a life long scientific career.

For the EATCS Award 2006, candidates may be nominated to the Awards Committee. Nominations must include supporting justification and will be kept strictly confidential. The deadline for nominations is: December 1, 2005.

Nominations and supporting data should be sent to the chairman of the EATCS Awards Committee:
Professor Mariangiola Dezani-Ciancaglini
Dipartimento di Informatica
Universita' di Torino
c. Svizzera 185, 10149 Torino (Italy)

Email: dezani@di.unito.it

Previous recipients of the EATCS Award are
R.M. Karp (2000)
C. Boehm (2001)
M. Nivat (2002)
G. Rozenberg (2003)
A. Salomaa (2004)
R. Milner (2005)

The next award is to be presented during ICALP'2006 in Venice.




Dr A. Leeuw-Damry-Bourlart Prize

 Communicated by Thomas Stuetzle
 
Professor Marco Dorigo, co-director of the artificial intelligence  lab of the Free University of Brussels, Belgium, and one of the founders of the swarm intelligence and swarm robotics research fields, will be awarded next November 2005 the prestigious "Prix Dr A. De Leeuw-Damry-Bourlart" for his contributions to artificial intelligence and robotics.

The prize, 75,000 EUR worth, will be presented to Professor Dorigo by the King of Belgium during a ceremony that will take place on November 22nd, 2005, at the Palais des Academies in Brussels.




CSL 2006 Ackermann Award
Call for Nominations

 Communicated by CSL
 
The EACSL Outstanding Dissertation Award for Logic in Computer Science (The Ackermann Award) will be presented to the recipients at the annual conference of the EACSL (CSL'06). The jury is entitled to give more than one award per year. The first Ackermann Award was presented at CSL'05.

The 2005 recipients were
Mikolaj Bojanczyk
Konstantin Korovin
Nathan Segerlind

Eligible for the 2006 Ackermann Award are PhD dissertations in topics specified by the EACSL and LICS conferences, which were formally accepted as PhD theses at a university or equivalent institution between 1.1.2004 and 31.12. 2005.

The deadline for submission is 31.1.2006.

Submission details are available at http://www.dimi.uniud.it/~eacsl/award.html and http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/eacsl

The award consists of
The jury consists of seven members:



King's College London
PhD Studentship in Computer Science

 Communicated by Maribel Fernandez
 
Applications are invited for a PhD studentship at King's College London, as part of the project Computational Applications of Nominal Sets (joint with the University of Cambridge), funded by EPSRC.

The studentship can start any time between October 2005 and September 2006.  Relevant research areas for this grant are:
 Please see the project web page for further information and how to apply:
  http://www.dcs.kcl.ac.uk/staff/maribel/CANS.html


The Journal of Theory and Practice of Logic Programming
Specification, Analysis, and Verification of Systems

 Communicated by Michael Leuschel
 
This is to announce a new area of the journal of Theory and Practice of Logic Programming: Specification, Analysis and Verification of Systems. The aim of this new area issue is to attract high-quality research papers on the interplay between system analysis, specification and verification on the one hand (e.g., model checking, reduction, abstraction, refinement, the B-Method, Z, UML, animation, test case generation) and logic programming techniques (e.g., constraints, abstract interpretation, program transformation) on the other hand.

A non-exhaustive list of topics of interest is thus:
 Submission of manuscripts
Electronic submissions: The preferred form of submission is to send two email messages, the first one with the information containing the title, the author(s), and the abstract of the submission, and the second one with a Postscript file. Both emails should be sent to the area editor Michael Leuschel (leuschel @ cs.uni-duesseldorf.de) with a copy to the Editor-in-Chief.

Paper submissions: These are also acceptable, but their handling may be delayed (four copies to the appropriate Area Editor and one copy to the Editor-in-Chief).

The submitted manuscripts should not be published or simultaneously submitted  to another journal or to a conference. Full versions of important conference papers are welcome. Upon acceptance of an article by the journal, the author(s) will be asked to transfer copyright of the article to Cambridge University Press.



Lucca Institute for Advanced Studies
PhD Program in Computer Science and Engineering

 Communicated by Ugo Montanari
 
IMT, Institutions, Markets, Technologies, Institute for Advanced Studies Lucca, is an open, competitive Graduate School with an international faculty designed to attract talented students and scholars on an international basis. IMT is located in Lucca (Tuscany, Italy).

IMT focuses on institutional and technological change and aims to realize a strong integration between research and education, combining theoretical grounding and problem solving techniques.
The PhD Program in Computer Science and Engineering aims at preparing researchers and professionals with a wide knowledge about the foundations of informatics and about its applications to a variety of systems and disciplines, focusing on aspects of particular importance in the present context. Scientific theories developed within informatics have been, and still are, remarkably relevant not only for developing devices and tools which are commonly used in today society, but also for facing new theoretical problems of wide perspective and for helping innovative developments in biology, humanities, economy, etc. In particular, the study of models, algorithms and verification methods of distributed systems with shared resources, with attention to the problems of security, concurrency, real time, open endness, distributed decisions, etc. has fostered the development of the informatics of the new wide area networks. The new version of informatics is changing the perspective of other disciplines and several aspects of common life, and is the target of very active research in the international scene.

The duration of the PhD Program is 3 years. Classes start in January 2006. Courses and seminars are held in English.
15 Scholarships are in competition for each of our PhD programs, of which 8 are full and 7 are partial. The annual grant for students with full scholarship amounts approximately 10.560,00 Euros. All students are exempt from tuition fees.
Deadline for application is November 22nd 2005.
Further information about the IMT School, its nature and its activities, and also the online Application Form, can be found on the school's website: www.imtlucca.it or can be provided by the PhD Secretariat - Via San Micheletto 3, 55100 Lucca, ITALY; Tel.: +39 0583 4339561; Fax +39 0583 4339564; e-mail: applications@imtlucca.it

Board of the PhD Program in Computer Science and Engineering

Coordinator
UGO MONTANARI, University of Pisa, Pisa
ROBERTO BARBUTI, University of Pisa, Pisa
GIORGIO BUTTAZZO, Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa
PAOLO CIANCARINI, University of Bologna, Bologna
ALESSANDRO D'ATRI, Luiss Guido Carli University, Rome
IMRICH CHLAMTAC, University of Texas, Dallas
CARLO GHEZZI, "Politecnico di Milano" Technical University, Milan
LUCIANO LENZINI, University of Pisa, Pisa
ANTONIO PRETE, University of Pisa, Pisa
MARTIN WIRSING, Ludwig Maximilians Universität, München


CLA 2005
Call for Papers

 Communicated by Pierre Lescanne
 
A proceedings volume of the best presentations of the "Computational Logic and Applications" workshop (Chambéry, June 20-21 2005) will be published electronically in "Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science" (DMTCS). See http://www.dmtcs.org/proceedings/

Together with those papers, the editors wish to present recent work on connected topics and ask interested authors to submit short communications fitting with the topics of the workshop (see below).

The 2005 CLA workshop was the third one on that topics (see program at http://www.lama.univ-savoie.fr/~david/CLA05). It was the occasion for 25 researchers from Krakow, Chambéry and Lyon to meet in a friendly atmosphere to present their recent work. The first CLA workshop took place in Krakow in 2002, the second one in Lyon in 2004.

CALL FOR SUBMISSION
Authors are invited to submit papers presenting original research on
computational logic and theoretical aspects of computer science. The
main (but not the only ones) topics of the workshop were
SUBMISSIONS
Authors are invited to submit a full paper of 5 to 10 pages on original research.  The submissions will be refereed according to the usual rules based on an international panel of referees. The papers should be sent electronically as a pdf or dvi file to rene.david@univ-savoie.fr.

IMPORTANT DATES
Deadline for submission: January 31, 2006
Notification to authors: March 15, 2006
Final version: April 17, 2006

PUBLICATIONS
Accepted papers will be published as an issue of DMTCS together with an account of lectures on "random boolean expressions" given by Daniele Gardy (Versailles).

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
René David (Chambéry)
Daniele Gardy (Versailles)
Pierre Lescanne (Lyon)
Marek Zaionc (Krakow)


LOPSTR 2003
Proceedings Copies

 Communicated by Maurice Bruynooghe
 
As editor, I have some spare copies of the Proceedings of LOPSTR 2003 (LNCS 3018)
If interested in a copy, send me an email with a postal address where the copy can be delivered.

Maurice Bruynooghe
Maurice.Bruynooghe@cs.kuleuven.ac.be

University of Savoie in Chambery
Maitre de Conferences Position

 Communicated by Rene David
  
A "Maitre de Conférences" position will be available for the Logic group  of the maths department of the University of Savoie in Chambery.
This position is destinated to reinforce our group.

The themes of research we are looking for are thus
The teaching assigments will be those of a maitre de conférences with lessons in "mathematical tools for computer science". For example, the  person we are looking for will be in charge of courses as "data bases"  or "Maths for computer science".

The courses should be  given in French.
Two conditions are necessary to get this position

This position is not yet official but, since it should appear officially only around February, we would like to have contact with possible candidates much before.

If you are interested by this position, please contact
For more informations on our laboratory visit  : www.lama.univ-savoie.fr
For more informations on our university visit :  www.univ-savoie.fr




New Release of Teyjus

 Communicated by Gopalan Nadathur
  
There is now a long overdue new release of the Teyjus implementation of Lambda Prolog that can be obtained from the URL http://teyjus.cs.umn.edu.

This release reorganizes the source code directories to be in line with a new form of the repository for the code and also fixes a number of bugs reported over the last few years. Another major change is that the new release uses the notion of L_lambda or higher-order pattern unification introduced by Dale Miller several years ago. The basis for this usage is a new algorithm developed by Natalie Linnell and myself. A paper describing this algorithm was presented at ICLP'05. You can get a copy of the paper and also an SML implementation of the algorithm from the URL
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~gopalan/recentpapers.
A point to note is that the implementation will still solve arbitrary higher-order unification problems but only after it has discovered pattern unification does not suffice.

The inclusion of higher-order pattern unification has been a major change to the system. While we are releasing the code only after significant testing, it is possible that there are still a few bugs lurking in it. I would be grateful for help in locating and eliminating such problems. If you have built software on top of teyjus, please replace version 1.0-b33 by 1.0.b34 in your releases only after you have checked your composite system out carefully. Some of you have also modified some initialization files in the source code to suit your needs. In this case, please note that the source code subdirectories that earlier appeared at the top level now are embedded under sources. Look at the directory structure and also read INSTALL carefully to note relevant changes.

As a cautionary note, I also mention that there can be a glitch depending on which version of flex resides in your environment. There is a new version of flex that is not compatible with the manual. Unfortunately the specific incompatibility makes unavailable a feature that was exploited in the teyjus system to get around a bug in the older version of flex. Either way there is going to be a problem at the moment with one or another version of flex. I have therefore to remain faithful to the older version of flex. In due course I will post a "patch" for people who would like to move to the newer version.

There are other developments with this code underway. The most significant aspect is a redesign of the abstract machine based on using higher-order pattern unification in an intrinsic way (at this point we will abandon completeness with unrestricted higher-order unification but will treat what has been called the dynamic L_lambda fragment) and a change in the simulator for this machine that removes a dependency from 32 bit architectures. Another aspect is a separate compilation based treatment of the accumulate construct for module interactions.




New Journal
Logical Methods in Computer Science

 Communicated by Dana Scott
 
Dear Colleague:

We are writing to inform you about the progress of the open-access, online journal "Logical Methods in Computer Science," which has recently
benefited from a freshly designed web site, see:

                 http://www.lmcs-online.org

In the first year of its existence, the journal received 75 submissions: 21 were accepted and 22 declined (the rest are still in the editorial process). The first issue is complete, and we anticipate that will be three in all by the end of the calendar year. Our eventual aim is to publish four issues per year. We also publish Special Issues: to date, three are in progress, devoted to selected papers from LICS 2004, CAV 2005 and LICS 2005.

The average turn-around from submission to publication has been 7 months. This comprises a thorough refereeing and revision process: every submission is refereed in the  normal way by two or more referees, who apply high standards of quality.

We would encourage you to submit your best papers to Logical Methods in Computer Science, and to encourage your colleagues to do so too. There is a flier and a leaflet containing basic information about the new journal on the homepage; we would appreciate your posting and distributing them, or otherwise publicising the journal. We would also appreciate any suggestions you may have on how we may improve the journal.

Yours Sincerely,

Dana S. Scott (editor-in-chief)
Gordon D. Plotkin and Moshe Y. Vardi (managing editors)
Jiri Adamek (executive editor)



Cork Constraint Computation Centre
Postdoc Position in Distributed Constraint Satisfaction

 Communicated by Gene Freuder
 
There is an opening for a one year postdoc at the Cork Constraint Computation Centre in the area of Distributed Constraint Satisfaction. This position will be co-funded by and involve collaboration with Microsoft Research Cambridge. We would like the position to taken up as soon as possible.

Interested parties please contact Prof. Gene Freuder: e.freuder@4c.ucc.ie

Further information about the Cork Constraint Computation Centre can be found at http://www.4c.ucc.ie and about Microsoft Research Cambridge at http://research.microsoft.com/aboutmsr/labs/cambridge/default.aspx.



Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science

 Communicated by Mike Mislove
 
Dear Colleagues,

One of the minor inconveniences that Hurricane Katrina caused has been the temporary failure of the Tulane email servers, both university-wide and within the math department. The latter hosted the  ENTCS Macro Home Page, so progress on publishing ENTCS volumes has been hindered since the hurricane.

I am happy to announce that the ENTCS Macro Home now has its own, separate web host, which can be found at http://www.entcs.org
Please point your browser at this page, where you will find  detailed instructions on how to prepare proposals for publishing material in ENTCS, as well as instructions about how to prepare  files both for preliminary, hard copy versions of proceedings for limited distribution at meetings, as well as how to prepare the final versions of papers for publication online at ScienceDirect.

While ENTCS production has been hampered over the past month or so, it has now been restarted, and publication of ENTCS issues and volumes is now proceeding as usual, with minimal delays.

As usual, if you have any problems or questions about the ENTCS macros, or about ENTCS in general, please let me know.

Best regards,
Mike Mislove, Managing Editor ENTCS, michael.mislove@gmail.com



Logtalk 2.26.0 Released

 Communicated by Paulo Moura
 
Hi!

Logtalk 2.26.0 is now available for downloading from the Logtalk web  site:

    http://www.logtalk.org/

This release major highlights are support for defining predicate  aliases when using uses/2 directives and support for compiling and  using Prolog modules as Logtalk objects (complemented by a new Prolog  integration and migration guide). The new support for compiling  Prolog modules allows you to easily reuse libraries that are  distributed with common Prolog compilers. It also allows you to reuse  module code on Prolog compilers that lack a module system.

Other noteworthy changes are improved documentation, improvements to  installation and documenting scripts, simplification of installation  instructions, consolidation of most example source files into single  source files, some bug fixes, and support for ignoring, copying as- is, or rewriting proprietary Prolog directives when compiling source  files.

Detailed release notes are available from the following URL:

    http://www.logtalk.org/releasenotes.html

Happy logtalking,

Paulo


Doctoral and PostDoctoral Research Positions
Declarative Languages and Artificial Intelligence Group
Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium

 Communicated by Tom Schrijvers
 
The Declarative Languages and Artificial Intelligence Group at the Catholic University of Leuven invites applications for doctoral and postdoctoral research positions in the area of Constraint Handling Rules (CHR).

For the postdoctoral position, applicants should have a Ph.D. in Computer Science and for the doctoral position, a masters degree in Computer Science. In addition, both a background and interest in one or more of the following areas are required:
as well as good implementation skills in various programming paradigms. The ideal candidate has experience in system building and is already familiar with the CHR language.

Both positions offer flexibility in the choice of research topics within the broad context of ongoing projects related to the development of the CHR language. Further details concerning this project and associated research may be found at http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~toms/CHR/ and http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dtai/projects/CHR/.

Appointment to the postdoctoral position will be for the period of one year. Appointment to the doctoral position will be for the period of one year intially with possibility for extension to four years ending in a Ph.D. The salary is compatible with the departmental rates for postdoctoral and doctoral research fellows, and can take experience into consideration.

Please direct inquiries and applications to:

   Professor Bart Demoen
   Department of Computer Science
   K.U.Leuven
   Celestijnenlaan 200A
   B-3001 Heverlee
   Belgium

   Email: bart.demoen@cs.kuleuven.be
   Phone: +32 16 327547

Applications should be received no later than January 23, 2006 and include a curriculum vitae and a list of three references. Review of applications begins as of now. Positions start as soon as possible, and on October 1, 2006 at the latest.



Logic Programming Doctoral Dissertations
Editor: Enrico Pontelli

Introduction
The objective of this column 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!!


Marcello Balduccini
Answer Set Based Design of Highly Autonomous, Rational Agents
Texas Tech University, USA,  2005
A-Prolog is a knowledge representation language that combines a high level of abstraction and direct computability. This dissertation shows how complex rational agents can be built with A-Prolog and the associated programming methodology. We describe the design of agents capable of fairly sophisticated reasoning, including planning, diagnosis, inductive learning. 

The reasoning approach is model-based, with the domain model shared by all the reasoning components, thus increasing flexibility and maintainability. We also describe CR-Prolog, an extension of A-Prolog that allows to increase the level of sophistication of reasoning, and show how CR-Prolog can be used in our agent to improve the quality of reasoning, e.g. finding plans that satisfy weak constraints, and finding most likely diagnoses.


Davide Martinenghi
Advanced Techniques for Efficient Data Integrity Checking
Roskilde University, Denmark, 2005

Date of defense: October 26, 2005
Url author: http://www.ruc.dk/~dm/
Url thesis: http://www.ruc.dk/dat/forskning/skrifter/DS105.pdf

Integrity constraint checking, understood as the verification of data correctness and wellformedness conditions that must be satisfied in any state of a database, is not fully supported by current database technology. In this respect, database management systems need to be extended with means to verify, automatically and incrementally, that no violation of integrity is introduced by database updates. For this purpose a procedure is developed, aimed at producing incremental checks whose satisfaction guarantees data integrity. A so-called simplification procedure takes as input a set of constraints and a pattern of updates to be executed on the data and outputs a set of optimized constraints which are as incremental as possible with respect to the hypothesis that the database is initially consistent. In particular, the proposed approach allows the compilation of incremental checks at database design time, thus without burdening database run time performance with expensive optimization operations. Furthermore, integrity verification may take place before the execution of the update, which means that the database will never reach illegal states and thus rollback as well as repair actions are virtually unneeded.

In addition, results on the theoretical limitations of the simplification approach are given, including the impossibility of always obtaining optimal simplifications and of an exact characterization of this notion of optimality. Finally, the applicability of simplification is extended to a number of different contexts, such as recursive databases, concurrent database systems, data integration systems, and XML document collections and a performance evaluation of the proposed model is provided.

Stephen-John Craig
Practicable Prolog Specialisation  
University of Southampton, UK, 2005

Date of defense: June 3rd, 2005
In software development an emphasis is placed on creating reusable general programs which solve a wide class of problems, however it is a struggle to balance generality with efficiency. Highly parametrised modular code is reusable but suffers a penalty in terms of efficiency, in contrast carefully optimising the code by hand produces faster programs which are less general and have fewer opportunities for reuse. Partial evaluation is an automatic technique for program optimisation that optimises programs by exploiting known data.
While partial evaluation is improving, the uptake by mainstream users is disappointing.

The aim of this thesis is to make partial evaluation accessible to a wider audience. A basic partial evaluation algorithm is given and then extended to
handle the features encountered in real life Prolog implementations including constraint logic programming, coroutining and non-declarative constructs. Offline partial evaluation methods rely on an annotated version of the source program to control the specialisation process. A
graphical development environment for specialising logic programs is presented allowing users to create, visualise and modify their annotated source programs.

An algorithm for automatically generating annotations is given using state of the art termination analysis, combined with type-based abstract interpretation for propagating the binding types. The algorithm has been fully implemented and we report on performance of the process on a series of benchmarks. In addition to an algorithm for generating a safe set of annotations we also investigate the generation of optimal annotations. A self-tuning system, which derives its own specialisation control for the particular Prolog compiler and architecture by trial and error is developed. The system balances the desire for faster code against code explosion and specialisation time.

Additionally it is demonstrated that the developed partial evaluator is self-applicable. The attempts to self-apply partial evaluators for logic programs have, of yet, not been all that successful. Compared to earlier attempts, the system is effective and surprisingly simple. The power and efficiency of the implementation is evaluated using the specialisation of a series of non-trivial interpreters.



Net Talk
edited by Roberto Bagnara


Object Oriented Prolog
From: Mauro Di Nuzzo


I wrote this today. It will be appreciated if any serious prolog programmer
could take a look.

Thank you.
http://www.prologonlinereference.org/archives/oop.zip



From: A.L.
Subject: Re: Object Oriented Prolog

How this differs from existing OO implementations?...


From: Bart Demoen
Subject: Re: Object Oriented Prolog

Mauro Di Nuzzo wrote:
> Hi!
> I wrote this today. It will be appreciated if any serious prolog programmer
> could take a look.
> Thank you.
> http://www.prologonlinereference.org/archives/oop.zip

Probably I am not serious enough for your purposes, but five of the links in your main web page result in Not Found.

Also, after having a brief look at oop_example2.pl  oop_example.pl, I am wondering: what does your approach offer we cannot get from OO packages in other Prolog systems ?



From: Mauro Di Nuzzo
Subject: Re: Object Oriented Prolog

> Probably I am not serious enough for your purposes, but five of the
> links in your main web page result in Not Found.

All apologies, if I have to work for money, too. Probably I forget to say that I put just one page online to try my PSP cgi.
It works. In the future I will update my site with some contents, if "Lord Time" could help me.

Instead, I was just asking some help from someone. I know, Bart Demoen is a great name (I really think so), but I was looking, probably, for someone else.

> Also, after having a brief look at oop_example2.pl  oop_example.pl, I am
> wondering: what does your approach offer we cannot get from OO packages
> in other Prolog systems ?

I answered to this same question posted by A.L.

Probably a not-serious programmer like me is confused by the complexity of the various prolog OO implementations. Some of them are a little more clear, so Trinc's one (but commercial). As an example, look just at the operators definitions of the SICStus OO implementation:
:- op(1200, xfy, [ & ]).
:- op(1198, xfx, [ :- ]).
:- op(1198,  fx, [ :- ]).
:- op(550,  xfx, [ ::, <: ]).
:- op(550,   fx, [ ::, <: ]).
Other are based on modules (see Ciao's one).
Besides, all prolog OO implementation I saw, is based on the following scheme:
:- define_class class_name.
member1(...).
member2(...):-....
etc...
:- end_of_class_definition.
And this approach is quite always compile-time, where another different exists for run-time (dynamically created classes).

Instead, my permits to write, for example:
:- class(one_class,[]).
:- class(another_class,[]).
another_class::member1(...).
one_class::one_class(...):-....
etc...
And class/2 predicate is used for compile-time or for run-time declared classes.

However, I really do not have so much experience to say what is better. I am just a modest prolog home-programmer.



From: Mauro Di Nuzzo
Subject: Re: Object Oriented Prolog

oop.pl provides (someone gave the followings as a definition of OO):

DATA ABSTRACTION:
:- class(abstract_class1, []).
:- instance_of(concrete_object, abstract_class1).

(MULTIPLE) INHERITANCE:
:- class(abstract_class2, []).
:- class(abstract_class3_inheriting_1_2, [abstract_class1,abstract_class2]).

ENCAPSULATION:
:- class(abstract_class4, []).
abstract_class4::attribute1(_) :- private.
abstract_class4::set_attribute1(X) :- this(T), T<-attribute1(X).

POLYMORPHISM:
:- class(abstract_class5, [abstract_class4]).
abstract_class5<-attribute1(_) :- public.



From: A.L.
Subject:  Re: Object Oriented Prolog


Mauro Di Nuzzo wrote:
>POLYMORPHISM:
>:- class(abstract_class5, [abstract_class4]).
>abstract_class5<-attribute1(_) :- public.

Maybe the problem is that you posted lincense file that is 4 times longer than the rest of the stuff, but there is no manual.

Question: why you call the above "polymorphism"?... Could you provide more complex examples of polymorphism? How do you understand "polymorhism"? How do you implement "method overriding"?...

More examples please, especially convincing example that your polymorphism is the same as in, say, Java...


From: Mauro Di Nuzzo
Subject: Re: Object Oriented Prolog

> >POLYMORPHISM:
> >:- class(abstract_class5, [abstract_class4]).
> >abstract_class5<-attribute1(_) :- public.

Sorry, the above is wrong. Only now I recall to my mind that Prolog is polymorphic by its own. I havent got an implementation of polymorphism. One should use retractall/1 before redefining an inherited member. For example, the above should be written:

:- class(abstract_class5, [abstract_class4]),
retractall(abstract_class5::attribute1(_)).
abstract_class5::attribute1(_) :- public.

> Maybe the problem is that you posted lincense file that is 4 times
> longer than the rest of the stuff, but there is no manual.

Probably you are right also on this. But I should keep the license file (we are dealing with KBs). For the manual, I really had no time yet. I've just commented the files. Besides, it is so much simple that a manual seemed excessive.



From: A.L.
Subject: Re: Object Oriented Prolog

Mauro Di Nuzzo wrote:
>> >POLYMORPHISM:
>> >:- class(abstract_class5, [abstract_class4]).
>> >abstract_class5<-attribute1(_) :- public.

>Sorry, the above is wrong. Only now I recall to my mind that Prolog is
>polymorphic by its own.
>I havent got an implementation of polymorphism. One should use retractall/1
>before redefining an inherited member.
>For example, the above should be written:
>:- class(abstract_class5, [abstract_class4]),
>retractall(abstract_class5::attribute1(_)).
>abstract_class5::attribute1(_) :- public.

I doubt whether this is enough. Just as remainder, object has "static type" and "dynamic type" what is the type that was used when object was created. When method is called, dynamic type is used to determine what version of method implementation should be used.

When the following Java program is executed (class M), it displays ABC. I don't see how such effect could be obtained using tour implementation of polymorphism. Maybe I am wrong...

public class A {
        public void p() {
                System.out.println("A");
        }
}

public class B extends A {
        @Override
        public void p() {
                System.out.println("B");
        }
}

public class C extends B {
        @Override
        public void p() {
                System.out.println("C");
        }
}

public class M {
        public static void main(String[] args) {
                A aA = new A();
                A aB = new B();
                A aC = new C();
                aA.p();
                aB.p();
                aC.p();
        }
}


From: Mauro Di Nuzzo
Subject: Re: Object Oriented Prolog


The following program does exactly what it is expected for.

-----------------------------------ptry.pl
:- ensure_loaded(oop).
:- class(a, []).
    a::p :- write('A').

:- class(b, [a]), retractall(b::p).
    b::p :- write('B').

:- class(c, [b]), retractall(c::p).
    c::p :- write('C').

:- class(m, []).

m::main :-
    ia instance_of a,
    ib instance_of b,
    ic instance_of c,
    ia::p,
    ib::p,
    ic::p,
    nl.

--------------------------

?- consult(ptry).
yes
?- m::main.
ABC
yes


From: A.L.
Subject: Re: Object Oriented Prolog

Mauro Di Nuzzo wrote:
>The following program does exactly what it is expected for.

>-----------------------------------ptry.pl
>:- ensure_loaded(oop).
>
>:- class(a, []).
>    a::p :- write('A').
>
>:- class(b, [a]), retractall(b::p).
>    b::p :- write('B').
>
>:- class(c, [b]), retractall(c::p).
>    c::p :- write('C').
>
>:- class(m, []).
>
>m::main :-
>    ia instance_of a,
>    ib instance_of b,
>    ic instance_of c,
>    ia::p,
>    ib::p,
>    ic::p,

So far, so good. Now do the same, but class B will NOT implement b::p. Actually, will have no metods. However, DO NOT remove ib::p call from main

Do the same experiment, removing also implementation  of c::p, nut not changing the main (i.e. olny class a will implement method p)


From: Mauro Di Nuzzo
Subject: Re: Object Oriented Prolog

> So far, so good. Now do the same, but class B will NOT implement
> b::p. Actually, will have no metods. However, DO NOT remove ib::p
> call from main

?- m::main.
AAC
yes

> Do the same experiment, removing also implementation  of c::p, nut
> not changing the main (i.e. olny class a will implement method p)

?- m::main.
AAA
yes

I think it is all right. Dont you?



From: A.L.
Subject: Re: Object Oriented Prolog

Yes. OK, I will have closer look....

From: Mauro Di Nuzzo
Subject: Re: Object Oriented Prolog

If interested, I update my OOP implementation. It is downloadable at http://www.prologonlinereference.org/archives/oop.zip.

Archive is 7 KBytes. Once unzipped, it contains: 10 KBytes manual, 6 KBytes sources, and 5 KBytes examples.

All of them are working (although preliminary) versions.


From: A.L.
Subject: Re: Object Oriented Prolog

OK, but now anser the question (that I posted about a year ago) :

Why you think that OO is needed for Prolog?


From: Mauro Di Nuzzo
Subject: Re: Object Oriented Prolog

A.L. wrote:
> OK, but now anser the question (that I posted about a year ago) :

A year ago... I hope someone have given you a good answer.

> Why you think that OO is needed for Prolog?

I think Prolog is a beautiful language. Several things can be made with even little programming. My interest in Prolog extensions came to me when I learned SQL some years ago. Since then, I have tried to suggest people that Prolog could be mor powerful and more simple than SQL in database managing. No way. In my opinion Prolog has to embed all the programming possibilities, even those that seem to be far from adding real benefits to the language. I think that implementing other paradigms, without disturbing pure Prolog too much, is quite easy. Besides, some extensions could give some real advances. Among these, OO. In particular, I will give some simple examples regarding my implementation, without talking of things like "data abstraction", "encapsulation", "inheritance", and so on, even though things could really appear more ordered with OO.

According to me, Prolog lacks a simple method of overwrite data. Polymorphic by nature, it leaves that work to the programmer via assert/retract clauses in the database. So, if I am interested in keeping just one fact, I have to take care of how many assertions/retractions I do. SWI Prolog offer nb_setval/nb_getval predicates, and sometimes they could be useful. Otherwise, one has to implement his own. These implementations have to be different each time, according to the specific needs. My implementation tries to define one predicate, namely <-/[1,2], that could serve in every case. So, in addition, one could implement an event-oriented programming by means of on/1 predicate. It is frustrating to see events in every languages and not in Prolog (events are very logical things).

It seems to me that this could be useful, in the scope of an OO implementation. In particular:
  1. a method for handling attributes (the above "one fact"s);
  2. a method for handling events;
  3. a method for handling different types of instantiations (via constuctor/_ and destructor/_ predicates);
  4. and yes: data abstraction, encapsulation, inheritance
  5. or yes: a method for keep things ordered
  6. as FINALLY, a way in which all Prolog programmers can use the same objects.
[Regarding the point F) it seems to me that someone have to do the bad job of writing a library of objects.]

All the above features can be implemented and adapted to one's needs by every Prolog programmer, since my implementation is programmed in Prolog (so I do not want to extend the compiler).

In conclusion, I think that (almost) the following 3 things:
  1. database management (already excellent plus various odbc interfaces);
  2. object/event oriented programming;
  3. server side scripting (prolog server pages, for example); have not to be lacking in Prolog.
I have read a very interesting thread in this newsgroup called "mainstreaming prolog" (or a thing like this). This lies with us.


From: A.L.
Subject: Re: Object Oriented Prolog

Mauro Di Nuzzo wrote:
>In conclusion, I think that (almost) the following 3 things:
>1) database management (already excellent plus various odbc interfaces);
>2) object/event oriented programming;
>3) server side scripting (prolog server pages, for example);
>have not to be lacking in Prolog.

My wiev on Prolog is that Prolog is what it is: a LOGIC programming language. Whatever problems fits in the framework of logic programming, it should be solved with Prologi. What I think is not OK are attempts to convert Prolog into genaral purpose programming language.

I like Amzi terminology: they deliver "Prolog Logic Server". What you can do with logic programming, do with Prolog, other things do with languages that are better for the job. I don't see any sense in doing GUI in Prolog, server pages, databases and such things. Of course, it is possible, but it has no sense.

And now, my corrected question: why do you think that OO is useful for LOGIC programming?...


From: Jan Wielemaker
Subject: Re: Object Oriented Prolog

A.L. wrote:
> Mauro Di Nuzzo wrote:
>
>>In conclusion, I think that (almost) the following 3 things:
>>1) database management (already excellent plus various odbc interfaces);
>>2) object/event oriented programming;
>>3) server side scripting (prolog server pages, for example);
>>have not to be lacking in Prolog.
>
> My wiev on Prolog is that Prolog is what it is: a LOGIC programming
> language. Whatever problems fits in the framework of logic
> programming, it should be solved with Prologi. What I think is not
> OK are attempts to convert Prolog into genaral purpose programming
> language.

> I like Amzi terminology: they deliver "Prolog Logic Server". What
> you can do with logic programming, do with Prolog, other things do
> with languages that are better for the job. I don't see any sense in
> doing GUI in Prolog, server pages, databases and such things. Of
> course, it is possible, but it has no sense.

That of course is one view, but not the whole community agrees to this.  With SWI-Prolog we try to turn it into a general purpose
programming language and considering the response from the community there are a lot of people that like this idea.  I think the argument boils down to two main points: (1) Good bridges between programming languages are hard to create.  Weak points are a mixture of efficiency, cooperation in garbage collection, debugging and development environment and packaging for distribution. (2) Many people are not very good at programming in multiple languages.  I do a lot of programming in both C and Prolog and after not using one of them for a couple of days I start mixing up syntax.  I don't think I'm an exception.

Prolog's powers are far more widespread than logic.  In fact, plain Prolog isn't very good at logic.  Only using extensions such as tabling it becomes a bit better.  Without that and related to logic, I'd say Prolog is good at backtracking, which is a nice building block.


From: A.L.
Subject: Re: Object Oriented Prolog

Jan Wielemaker wrote:
>That of course is one view, but not the whole community agrees to
>this.  With SWI-Prolog we try to turn it into a general purpose
>programming language and considering the response from the community
>there are a lot of people that like this idea.  I think the argument
>boils down to two main points: (1) Good bridges between programming
>languages are hard to create.  Weak points are a mixture of
>efficiency, cooperation in garbage collection, debugging and
>development environment and packaging for distribution. (2) Many
>people are not very good at programming in multiple languages.  I
>do a lot of programming in both C and Prolog and after not using
>one of them for a couple of days I start mixing up syntax.  I don't
>think I'm an exception.

Most likely we have different points of view. So called "community" is mostly academic or academic like; I am doing softare development in commercial environment, with products in the range of million lines of code. The reality there is a bit different than in academic/hobbyst setting. Large systems consist of modules that are developed by different teams and using tools and technology that is best for doing the job. There are methodologies and tools for linking these modules together, even if written in different languages. It is hard to imagine that million lines application woudl be written as single, monolithic block.

Prolog fits well to this lanscape, since commercial vendors (Amzi, SICS, IC-PARC, IF) provide excellent tools for integrating Prolog with other systems. I don't see any problems with using Prolog Beans that SISCtus provides. This is very elegant and flexible interface, very similar to other interafces we are using.

Prolog is good in this what it is doing (for me, this is CLP(FD) that is not available in other languages), but this is it. I cannot imagine a reason why Prolog could replace Java in providing database access, or could repalce Visual Basic or C# in doing GUI.

>Prolog's powers are far more widespread than logic.  In fact, plain
>Prolog isn't very good at logic.  Only using extensions such as
>tabling it becomes a bit better.  Without that and related to logic,
>I'd say Prolog is good at backtracking, which is a nice building
>block.

If Prolog is not good in logic, then, what is the area where Prolog is good?...


From: Jan Wielemaker
Subject: Re: Object Oriented Prolog

A.L. wrote:
> Most likely we have different points of view. So called "community"
> is mostly academic or academic like; I am doing softare development
> in commercial environment, with products in the range of million
> lines of code. The reality there is a bit different than in
> academic/hobbyst setting. Large systems consist of modules that are
> developed by different teams and using tools and technology that is
> best for doing the job. There are methodologies and tools for
> linking these modules together, even if written in different
> languages. It is hard to imagine that million lines application
> woudl be written as single, monolithic block.

Where you already have network interfaces between components and different teams building the components, there is of course very little reason not to make the best choice for each component individually.

I know a development team using SWI-Prolog working on (actually already deployed) commercial program of approx. 200,000 lines of code. Most likely this is functionally about the same size as 1,000,000 lines in the other languages you mention. They started with Java and Prolog on the server side, but eventually use exclusively Prolog at the server side and pure Java for the clients.

> Prolog fits well to this lanscape, since commercial vendors (Amzi,
> SICS, IC-PARC, IF) provide excellent tools for integrating Prolog
> with other systems. I don't see any problems with using Prolog Beans
> that SISCtus provides. This is very elegant and flexible interface,
> very similar to other interafces we are using.

Most todays Prolog systems have reasonable interfaces to call and be called from a variety of other languages.

> Prolog is good in this what it is doing (for me, this is CLP(FD)
> that is not available in other languages), but this is it. I cannot
> imagine a reason why Prolog could replace Java in providing database
> access, or could repalce Visual Basic or C# in doing GUI.

Many Prolog systems come with good libraries for database access. Some come with good GUI toolkits.  If you have a Prolog minded development team, there is no reason not to use Prolog for these tasks.  Even better, Prolog can do a variety of tasks way better and faster than a relational database.

>>Prolog's powers are far more widespread than logic.  In fact, plain
>>Prolog isn't very good at logic.  Only using extensions such as
>>tabling it becomes a bit better.  Without that and related to logic,
>>I'd say Prolog is good at backtracking, which is a nice building
>>block.

> If Prolog is not good in logic, then, what is the area where Prolog
> is good?...

Databases? GUI development? Prototyping or fast development in general? Scripting? Actually, most things, except for low-level manipulations at the byte-level of large amounts of data.


From: A.L.
Subject: Re: Object Oriented Prolog

Jan Wielemaker wrote:
>I know a development team using SWI-Prolog working on (actually already
>deployed) commercial program of approx. 200,000 lines of code. Most
>likely this is functionally about the same size as 1,000,000 lines in
>the other languages you mention.

This is the mantra that is repeated on comp.lang.prolog, comp.lang.lisp, comp.lang.functional and  other. Unfortunately, the "lines of code" is not the only measure and is not the measure directly associated with development cost. One issue is code readability (Prolog is bettor than Lisp, but not that much), code maintainability as well as availability of skillful programmers. I don't know the team you mentioned, but from my experience million lines of code needs about 30 people who are involved in development, testing, maintenance, QA and deployment. At least half of these people should know the language very well. According to my estimate, I am probably the only person knowing Prolog within 200 miles radius.

In addition, language is not that much the issue. The issue are "add-ons" like libraries and components. There is a huge market for 3rd party components for Java and VB; the cost of component is small fraction of developing similar thing in house. I haven't heard about such market for Prolog.

Regarding writing large application exclusively in Prolog: I wish the team you mentioned good luck, but according to my experience with industrial reality this is pretty risky affair.

Once again: Prolog is what it is: a niche language with rather narrow application domain. Attempt to make it "universal" has the same nature as attempt to convert electric drill into "universal tool". Electric drill is a pretty good drill, but pretty lousy saw.



From: Mauro Di Nuzzo
Subject: Re: Object Oriented Prolog

My experience is based mainly on Web applications, where I think Prolog can say more about the time required to develop an application. Fortunately I am not a "serious" programmer, neither academic nor commercial. I am just a biophysiscist with passion for Prolog. Here you are right. All Prolog programmer have a great passion for this language. Sometimes people pay me to work on a web application. I can decide how. They want the application. So I would be very happy to use Prolog extensions. Please consider to accept that one can do very complex things with  few lines of code in Prolog. At the end... everyone can choose.


From: A.L.
Subject: Re: Object Oriented Prolog

Mauro Di Nuzzo wrote:
>that one can do very complex things with  few lines of code in Prolog.
>At the end... everyone can choose.

... if has the freedom to choose :)


From: Jan Wielemaker
Subject: Re: Object Oriented Prolog

A.L. wrote:
> Jan Wielemaker wrote:
>
>>I know a development team using SWI-Prolog working on (actually already
>>deployed) commercial program of approx. 200,000 lines of code. Most
>>likely this is functionally about the same size as 1,000,000 lines in
>>the other languages you mention.
>
> This is the mantra that is repeated on comp.lang.prolog,
> comp.lang.lisp, comp.lang.functional and  other. Unfortunately, the
> "lines of code" is not the only measure and is not the measure
> directly associated with development cost. One issue is code
> readability (Prolog is bettor than Lisp, but not that much), code
> maintainability as well as availability of skillful programmers. I
> don't know the team you mentioned, but from my experience million
> lines of code needs about 30 people who are involved in development,
> testing, maintenance, QA and deployment. At least half of these people
> should know the language very well. According to my estimate, I am
> probably the only person knowing Prolog within 200 miles radius.

There are less desert-like areas on this planet :-)  Given that condition you're probably doing the right thing.  It may be incorrect to blame the situation on the language though.  The Prolog community has done a lousy job providing a good standard, something I think is essential to support a community sharing resources, such as code and teaching material.

> In addition, language is not that much the issue. The issue are
> "add-ons" like libraries and components. There is a huge market for
> 3rd party components for Java and VB; the cost of component is small
> fraction of developing similar thing in house. I haven't heard about
> such market for Prolog.

You're probably right here, although the use of 3th party components is sometimes overestimated. The cost of selecting, learning its usage, integrating it in your product, deal with license issues, risc of being discontinued by the vendor, track complicated interaction problems, deal with new releases of such components, etc. quickly outweights its benefits. You need to be using a reasonable part of a stable, well tested and well maintained component to gain anything.

> Once again: Prolog is what it is: a niche language with rather narrow
> application domain. Attempt to make it "universal" has the same nature
> as attempt to convert electric drill into "universal tool". Electric
> drill is a pretty good drill, but pretty lousy saw.

Thats what it is *to you*.  To others, it is much more.  This is not really a language issue, but more an issue of the team.



From: A.L.
Subject: Re: Object Oriented Prolog

Jan Wielemaker wrote:
>Thats what it is *to you*.  To others, it is much more.  This is not
>really a language issue, but more an issue of the team.

Agree.


From: Paulo Moura
Subject: Re: Object Oriented Prolog

A.L. wrote:
> ...
> And now, my corrected question: why do you think that OO is useful
> for LOGIC programming?...

Writing large programs in Prolog leads to the same kind of software engineering problems that you face when using other programming languages. Objects provide a solution for some of those problems.


From: Nameless
Subject: Re: Object Oriented Prolog

Mauro Di Nuzzo wrote:
> I wrote this today. It will be appreciated if any serious
> prolog programmer could take a look.
> Thank you.
> http://www.prologonlinereference.org/archives/oop.zip

From the "readme" file:
  1. Purpose
    This is a very BETA implementation of object oriented programming in Prolog. As far I could see, a real OOP in Prolog is missing. This version is entirely programmed in pure prolog, so I think it could be useful (to someone, I hope). It will be great if it will be possible to build a complete Prolog library of classes.
You seem to be poorly informed, you'll find "a real OOP in Prolog" at

http://www.ci.uc.pt/logtalk/logtalk.html

But maybe your definition of "real" differs from mine?


From: Nameless
Subject: Re: Object Oriented Prolog

> You seem to be poorly informed, you'll find "a real OOP in
> Prolog" at
>     http://www.ci.uc.pt/logtalk/logtalk.html

Yes. Unfortunately, logtalk.pl is +9000 source lines. Have you tried to understand something from that? I am referring to NOT-EXPERT prolog programmers, so that they can understand and try to put their hands in a project relatively small.

Logtalk deals with OBJECTS, CLASSES, PROTOCOLS, CATEGORIES... I dont know why, but I think that just classes are enough to implement an OO prolog programming. Perhaps I am so ingenuous...


From: Paulo Moura
Subject: Re: Object Oriented Prolog

Mauro Di Nuzzo wrote:
> > You seem to be poorly informed, you'll find "a real OOP in
> > Prolog" at

> >     http://www.ci.uc.pt/logtalk/logtalk.html

> Yes. Unfortunately, logtalk.pl is +9000 source lines. Have you tried to
> understand something from that? I am referring to NOT-EXPERT prolog
> programmers, so that they can understand and try to put their hands in a
> project relatively small.

You may download from the Logtalk web site my Ph.D thesis, which contains a detailed description of the essential aspects of Logtalk implementation (note that the "+9000 source lines" include a full DCG translator and all the code needed for automatic documentation generation in XML format). Much better than reading source code smile Another good reference on implementing OOP in Prolog is Francis McCabe's book "Logic & Objects".

> Logtalk deals with OBJECTS, CLASSES, PROTOCOLS, CATEGORIES...
> I dont know why, but I think that just classes are enough to implement an OO
> prolog programming.

Prototypes are a much better replacement for Prolog modules when compared with classes. For example, assume that you want to define an object implementing list predicates. With prototypes, you just write, e.g. "list::member(X, L)". With classes, you would need to instantiate your "list" class and then send the messages to the instance. Not to mention that instantiating a "list" class does not make much sense in the first place. Of course, for other applications, specialization and instantiation mechanisms are just what you're looking for. That's way Logtalk supports both prototypes and classes. Categories are there from the start to support component-based programming. In the end, it's a question of the feature set you want for a OOP Prolog extension. Sometimes you need a simple solution, sometimes you need a more powerful solution. Sometimes you need a different, alternative solution smile Thanks for sharing with us your implementation.


From: Mauro Di Nuzzo
Subject: Re: Object Oriented Prolog

Thank you for your answer. My OOP implementation is really embryonal... I require some time to see if it could be useful. However, you said:

> Prototypes are a much better replacement for Prolog modules when
> compared with classes. For example, assume that you want to define an
> object implementing list predicates. With prototypes, you just write,
> e.g. "list::member(X, L)". [...]

But doesnt this require that a list::member/2 predicate exists? In my implementation, this is done via the following code:

list::member(X) :-
    this(L),
    list::member(X, L).

list::member(X, [X|_]).
list::member(X, [_|T]) :-
    list::member(X, T).

And list::member/1 should be used with instances. For example:

:- cards instance_of list.
...
:- cards::member(jolly_p).

and list::member/2 should be used without having an instance. For example:

...
:- list::member(jolly_p, Cards).

That is, I can call both "instantiated" and "uninstantiated" methods. Of course, this/1 is not defined in list::member/2 predicates. In cards::member/1 it is. So, shall examine the following calls:

?- list::member(jolly_p).            % this have no sense, in fact it raises an exception
ERROR: Undefined procedure this/1

?- cards::member(jolly_p, Cards).    % this works, but semantic is lost (probably it should have to raise a warning... I will do that)

Regarding your lgt source code, I was simply said that it is difficult to understand for a newbie. In reality, I think that Prolog source code is, among many languages, very difficult to understand (nothing seems sequential).


From: Paulo Moura
Subject: Re: Object Oriented Prolog

Mauro Di Nuzzo wrote:
> Thank you for your answer. My OOP implementation is really embryonal... I
> require some time to see if it could be useful.
> However, you said:
>
> > Prototypes are a much better replacement for Prolog modules when
> > compared with classes. For example, assume that you want to define an
> > object implementing list predicates. With prototypes, you just write,
> > e.g. "list::member(X, L)". [...]
>
> But doesnt this require that a list::member/2 predicate exists?

Not necessarily. The predicate member/2 could be inherited from some "list" ancestor (not that this makes much sense in this particular case). Note that prototypes can be "stand-alone" objects in the sense that: (1) they may not depend on any other objects; (2) they and can be used directly (no need to first create an instance).

> In my implementation, this is done via the following code:
>
> list::member(X) :-
>     this(L),
>     list::member(X, L).
>
> list::member(X, [X|_]).
> list::member(X, [_|T]) :-
>     list::member(X, T).
>
> And list::member/1 should be used with instances. For example:
>
> :- cards instance_of list.
> ...
> :- cards::member(jolly_p).
>
> and list::member/2 should be used without having an instance. For example:
>
> ...
> :- list::member(jolly_p, Cards).

In this case, "list" plays a dual role. First, it can be used as a class, from which you create instances. As such, "list" defines a set of predicates to be used with its instances. Second, it can be used as an object by itself, be able to receive messages as any other object. However, this raise several issues.

> That is, I can call both "instantiated" and "uninstantiated" methods.

Being "instantiated" or "uninstantiated" is a property of classes, not methods. What you may be looking for is *class methods* and *instances methods* as supported by some OOP languages. However, note that those languages usually provide syntactic support (when writing a program) and semantic support (at runtime) to distinguish between both "types" of methods.

> Of course, this/1 is not defined in list::member/2 predicates. In
> cards::member/1 it is. So, shall examine the following calls:
>
> ?- list::member(jolly_p).            % this have no sense, in fact it raises
> an exception
> ERROR: Undefined procedure this/1
>
> ?- cards::member(jolly_p, Cards).    % this works, but semantic is lost
> (probably it should have to raise a warning... I will do that)

For a user, receiving a warning on this case will probably be confusing, not to mention unfair, if there is nothing in the source code and/or documentation which alerts him to the differences between the two types of methods. After all, in the code above, both kinds of methds are defined in the same way.


From: Mauro Di Nuzzo
Subject: Re: Object Oriented Prolog

Thanks. I am taking a look at your PhD thesis... Just a question for now: feel free to corrext me if I am wrong. A Prolog OOP implementation that satisfy me should permit me to do the following. Suppose I have just launched SWI Prolog... its prompt looks now at me:

1 ?- |

Now I want to consult a file in which my class "birds" is defined. So,

1 ?- consult(cars).
% c:/.../cars.pl compiled ... sec, ... bytes

    -----------------------
    % contents of cars.pl:
    :- class(cars, [], []).
    cars::price(_).
    -----------------------

Now I want to instantiate an object and set the attribute price/1.

1 ?- instance_of(my_bmw, cars), my_bmw<-price(too_much).

So

1 ?- my_bmw::price(Price).
    Price = too_much
yes

Now I want to remove the attribute. I write

1 ?- retractall(my_bmw::price(_)).
yes

So

1 ?- my_bmw::price(Price).
No

Despite of the implementation itself (above I used my syntax, but it could be any other), does LogTalk permit me something like that? In particular:
  1. Can I remain in the domain of SWI Prolog's prompt?
  2. Can I make use of SWI Prolog built-in predicates (assert, retract, etc...), or I must use a thing like:
1 ?- my_bmw::retractall(price(_)).
yes

in order to take into account, for example, private members?
In other words, does the predicate '::'(my_bmw, price(too_much)) exist or not into the prolog database?

Thank you very very much.


From: Paulo Moura
Subject: Re: Object Oriented Prolog

Mauro Di Nuzzo wrote:
> Thanks. I am taking a look at your PhD thesis...
> Just a question for now: feel free to corrext me if I am wrong.
> A Prolog OOP implementation that satisfy me should permit me to do the
> following.

The easy way to find if Logtalk (or any other similar system) may satisfy your needs of OOP in Prolog is to download it and try the included examples.

> Suppose I have just launched SWI Prolog... its prompt looks now at me:
> 1 ?- |
> Now I want to consult a file in which my class "birds" is defined. So,
> 1 ?- consult(cars).
> % c:/.../cars.pl compiled ... sec, ... bytes

The same in Logtalk + SWI-Prolog (see below).

>     -----------------------
>     % contents of cars.pl:
>     :- class(cars, [], []).
>     cars::price(_).
>     -----------------------
>
> Now I want to instantiate an object and set the attribute price/1.
>
> 1 ?- instance_of(my_bmw, cars), my_bmw<-price(too_much).
>
> So
>
> 1 ?- my_bmw::price(Price).
>     Price = too_much
> yes
>
> Now I want to remove the attribute. I write
>
> 1 ?- retractall(my_bmw::price(_)).
> yes
>
> So
>
> 1 ?- my_bmw::price(Price).
> No
>
> ---------------
> Despite of the implementation itself (above I used my syntax, but it could
> be any other), does LogTalk permit me something like that?

Yes. In the case of SWI-Prolog, there is an auxiliary file (provided with the current Logtalk distribution) that you can load that defines some hook predicates that allows you to use consult/1 with Logtalk source files.

> In particular:
> 1) Can I remain in the domain of SWI Prolog's prompt?

Yes.

> 2) Can I make use of SWI Prolog built-in predicates (assert, retract,
> etc...), or I must use a thing like:
>
> 1 ?- my_bmw::retractall(price(_)).
> yes

You must use the database predicates as messages. Logtalk is a pure Prolog implementation. As such, I don't have access to the inner working of Prolog built-in predicates. In this specific case, I don't have access to the internal implementation of a Prolog's retractall/1 predicate.

> in order to take into account, for example, private members?
>
> In other words, does the predicate '::'(my_bmw, price(too_much)) exist or
> not into the prolog database?

Logtalk defines a predicate ::/2 which acts as a *control construct* for sending messages to objects. So, there is a ::/2 predicate on the Prolog database (after loading Logtalk), but not in the sense of your own implementation. The Logtalk ::/2 control construct implements message sending using dynamic binding plus a method lookup cache for performance (besides the necessary error-handling code).



From: Nameless
Subject: Re: Object Oriented Prolog

Mauro Di Nuzzo wrote:
>> You seem to be poorly informed, you'll find "a real OOP in
>> Prolog" at

>>     http://www.ci.uc.pt/logtalk/logtalk.html

> Yes. Unfortunately, logtalk.pl is +9000 source lines. Have you
> tried to understand something from that?

Sure, no problem, although like most well thought out systems, it was somewhat time consuming in the beginning. Besides, as Paulo pointed out, the Logtalk system contains much more than just the essential aspects of OOP.

> I am referring to
> NOT-EXPERT prolog programmers, so that they can understand and
> try to put their hands in a project relatively small.

Make that clear to your users, then. Nothing is more frustrating than using up valuable time on learning a system only to find out that the system falls short when set to do more advanced tasks.

> Logtalk deals with OBJECTS, CLASSES, PROTOCOLS, CATEGORIES...
> I dont know why, but I think that just classes are enough to
> implement an OO prolog programming.
> Perhaps I am so ingenuous...

Or perhaps not. ;) You know, you do users of your system a disservice if you do not from the outset specify the inherent limitations of your toy system, and perhaps even recommend mature systems to those users who may have aspirations of programming complex OO-Logic applications.


From: Mauro Di Nuzzo
Subject: Re: Object Oriented Prolog

A.L. wrote:
> How this differs from existing OO implementations?...

In nothing. Instead, probably, most of other prolog OO implementations are better. I was dealing with simplicity... my source code is only 80 lines. Besides:
  1. other OO implementations, such as Ciao's one, is based on modules. So it is simply not possible to write, for example, class1:class2:method(...).
  2. other OO implementations, such as oopl(TM) for Amzi!, is so complicated that I prefer to play with my gameboy(TM). Just on example took form its manual:
    :- myobject <- a + 1, myobject <- a + ' ,' , myobject <- a + 2.
    :- myobject <- a ? V, write( V ), fail.
    Altough it is de-contextualized, it is not the maximum of simplicity.
  3. I was only talking "hey guys, how my implementations differs from others?"... You have given just the answer I wished: nothing. I wrote oop.pl in 30 minutes. So, Thank you very much.


From: A.L.
Subject: Re: Object Oriented Prolog

Mauro Di Nuzzo wrote:
>3) I was only talking "hey guys, how my implementations differs from
>others?"... You have given just the answer I wished: nothing. I wrote oop.pl
>in 30 minutes. So, Thank you very much.

I don't remember myself giving "answer". I was asking question.
Will have a look.




Papers to appear in TPLP and TOCL
Contents Back to top

Regular papers to appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming
http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~dtai/projects/ALP/TPLP/index.html



Volume 5, Issue 4&5. Special Issue on Constraint Handling Rules

Book reviews:


Volume 5, Issue 6. November 2005 (page numbers tentative)

Regular Papers

Technical Note

 

Special Issues (to appear)

Special Issue on Reactive Systems  

Accepted Regular Papers

Accepted Technical Note

Accepted Programming Pearl

Accepted Book Review

 
 

Back to top


ACM Transactions on Computational Logic (TOCL)
http://www.acm.org/tocl
Accepted papers

The files below are the final versions of the papers submitted by the authors. The definite, published versions of the papers are available from the TOCL home page within the ACM Digital Library.


Volume 7, Number 1 (January 2006) (tentative)

Volume 7, Number 2 (April 2006) (tentative)


Future Issues (the order of the papers can change)

Back to top

Accepted Conference Papers

List of Events:


PADL 2006
International Symposium on Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages
Charleston, SC, January 9-10, 2006
http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/pvh/PADL06.html

Accepted Papers

  1. Using CHRs to generate functional test cases for the Java Card Virtual Machine
    Sandrine-Dominique GOURAUD and Arnaud GOTLIEB.
  2. Generic Cut Actions for External Prolog Predicates
    Tiago Soares, Ricardo Rocha and Michel Ferreira.
  3. Controlling search space materialization in a practical declarative debugger
    Ian MacLarty and Zoltan Somogyi.
  4. Automatic Verification of a Model Checker by Reflection
    Bow-Yaw Wang.
  5. Probabilistic-logical Modeling of Music
    Jon Sneyers, Joost Vennekens and Danny De Schreye.
  6. Using Dominators for Solving Constrained Path Problems
    Luis Quesada, Peter Van Roy, Yves Deville and Raphaël Collet.
  7. A Generic Code Browser with a Declarative Configuration Language
    Kris De Volder.
  8. A Hybrid BDD and SAT Finite Domain Constraint Solver
    Peter Hawkins and Peter Stuckey.
  9. Adding constraint solving to Mercury
    Ralph Becket, Maria Garcia de la Banda, Kim Marriott, Zoltan Somogyi, Peter Stuckey and Mark Wallace.
  10. Modeling Genome Evolution with a DSEL for Probabilistic Programming
    Martin Erwig and Steve Kollmansberger.
  11. Tabling in Mercury: Design and Implementation
    Zoltan Somogyi and Konstantinos Sagonas.
  12. Translating Description Logic Queries to Prolog
    Zsolt Nagy, Gergely Lukácsy and Péter Szeredi.
  13. Efficient top-down set-sharing analysis using cliques
    Jorge Navas, Francisco Bueno and Manuel Hermenegildo.
  14. Querying Complex Graphs
    Yanhong A. Liu and Scott D. Stoller.
  15. Incremental Evaluation of Tabled Prolog: Beyond Pure Logic Programs
    Diptikalyan Saha and C. R. Ramakrishnan.


Workshop on Empirically Successful Automated Reasoning in Higher-Order Logics
ESHOL 2005
Montego Bay, Jamaica, December 2, 2005
http://www.ags.uni-sb.de/~chris/ESHOL-05/

Timetable

09:00-10:00 Invited Talk

Joe Hurd (Oxford): First Order Proof for Higher Order Logic Theorem Provers
10:00-10:30 Coffee Break
10:30-12:30 Paper Session I (30min each, chair: TBA)

- Michael Beeson: Implicit Typing in Lambda Logic

- Christoph Benzmüller:

LEO – A Resolution based Higher Order Theorem Prover

- Christoph Benzmüller, Volker Sorge, Mateja Jamnik and Manfred Kerber:

Combining Proofs of Higher-Order and First-Order Automated Theorem Provers
12:30-13:30 Lunch Break
13:30-14:30 Invited Talk

Chad Brown (Saarbrücken): Automated Reasoning in Fragments of Church's Type Theory
14:30-15:30 Paper Session II (30min each, chair: TBA)

- Jutta Eusterbrock: Co-Synthesis of New Complex Selection Algorithms and their Human

Comprehensible XML Documentation

- Alwen Tiu, Gopalan Nadathur and Dale Miller: Mixing Finite Success and Finite Failure in

an Automated Prover
15:30-16:00 Coffee Break
16:00-17:00 System Demonstrations (15min each, chair: TBA):

- λ-Otter (Michael Beeson)

- TPS (Chad Brown)

- Metis (Joe Hurd)

- LEO (Christoph Benzmüller)
17:00-18:00 Discussion: Higher-Order TPTP – Feasible or Not?

Chair and Panelists: TBA




LPAR 2005
Symposium on Logic for Programming, Artificial Intelligence, and Reasoning
Montego Bay, Jamaica, December 2-6, 2005
http://www.cs.miami.edu/~geoff/Conferences/LPAR-12/

Accepted Regular Papers:
  1. Christian Anger, Martin Gebser, Thomas Linke, Andre Neumann and Torsten Schaub
    The nomore++ approach to answer set solving
  2. Jeroen Ketema and Jakob Grue Simonsen
    On Confluence of Infinitary Combinatory Reduction Systems
  3. Yao Wu, Enrico Pontelli and Desh Ranjan
    Computational Issues in Exploiting Dependent And-Parallelism in Logic Programming: Leftness Detection in Dynamic Search Trees
  4. Amine Chaieb and Tobias Nipkow
    Verifying and reflecting quantifier elimination for Presburger arithmetic
  5. Mikhail Sheremet, Dmitry Tishkovsky, Frank Wolter and Michael Zakharyaschev
    Comparative similarity, tree automata, and Diophantine equations
  6. Gopalan Nadathur and Xiaochu Qi
    Optimizing the runtime processing of types in logic programming languages
  7. David Basin, Sebastian Mödersheim and Luca Viganò
    Algebraic Intruder Deductions
  8. Vladimir Aleksic and Anatoli Degtyarev
    Regular Derivations in Basic Superposition-Based Calculi
  9. Galmiche Didier and Méry Daniel
    Characterizing Provability in BI's Pointer Logic through Resource Graphs
  10. Angelo Montanari, Alberto Policriti and Nicola Vitacolonna
    An Algorithmic Account of Winning Strategies in Ehrenfeucht Games on Labeled Successor Structures
  11. Deian Tabakov and Moshe Vardi
    Experimental Evaluation of Classical Automata Constructions
  12. Elaine Pimentel and Dale Miller
    On the specification of sequent systems
  13. Sylvie Coste-Marquis, Caroline Devred and Pierre Marquis
    Inference from controversial arguments
  14. Wolfgang Ahrendt, Andreas Roth and Ralf Sasse
    Automatic Validation of Transformation Rules for Java Verification against a Rewriting Semantics
  15. Hantao Zhang and Haiou Shen
    Another Complete Local Search Method for SAT
  16. Chao Wang, Aarti Gupta, Franjo Ivancic and Malay Ganai
    Deciding Separation Logic Formulae by SAT and Incremental Negative Cycle Elimination
  17. Maarten Mariën, Rudradeb Mitra, Marc Denecker and Maurice Bruynooghe
    Satisfiability checking for PC(ID)
  18. Allen Van Gelder
    Pool Resolution and its Relation to Regular Resolution and DPLL with Clause Learning
  19. Jürgen Dix, Wolfgang Faber and V. Subrahmanian
    The Relationship between Reasoning about Privacy and Default Logics
  20. Salvador Lucas and José Meseguer
    Termination of Fair Computations in Term Rewriting
  21. Christoph Walther and Stephan Schweitzer
    Reasoning about Incompletely Defined Programs
  22. Matthias Hölzl and John Newsome Crossley
    Disjunctive Constraint Lambda Calculi
  23. Florina Piroi and Temur Kutsia
    The Theorema Environment for Interactive Proof Development
  24. Magnus Bjork
    A First Order Extension of Stalmarck's Method
  25. Matthias Baaz and Rosalie Iemhoff
    On interpolation in existence logics
  26. Larchey-Wendling Dominique
    Bounding resource consumption with Gödel-Dummett logics
  27. Carsten Fritz
    Concepts of Automata Construction from LTL
  28. Laura Bozzelli, Aniello Murano and Adriano Peron
    Pushdown Module Checking
  29. Lidia Tendera and Wieslaw Szwast
    On the Finite Satisfiability Problem for the Guarded Fragment with Transitivity
  30. Laura Giordano, Valentina Gliozzi, Nicola Olivetti and Gian Luca Pozzato
    Analytic Tableaux for KLM Preferential and Cumulative Logics
  31. Temur Kutsia and Mircea Marin
    Matching with Regular Constraints
  32. Harvey Tuch and Gerwin Klein
    A Unified Memory Model for Pointers
  33. Mehdi Dastani, Guido Governatori, Antonino Rotolo and Leendert van der Torre
    Programming Cognitive Agents in Defeasible Logic
  34. Dal Alessandro, Dovier Agostino and Pontelli Enrico
    A New Constraint Solver for 3-D Lattices and its Application to the Protein Folding Problem
  35. Bernhard Beckert and Kerry Trentelman
    Second-Order Principles in Specification Languages for Object-Oriented Programs
  36. Annabelle McIver and Tjark Weber
    Towards automated proof support for probabilistic distributed systems
  37. Guillem Godoy and Mirtha-Lina Fernandez
    Recursive Path Orderings can also be Incremental
  38. Jianjun Duan, Joe Hurd, Guodong Li, Scott Owens, Konrad Slind and Junxing Zhang
    Functional Correctness Proofs of Encryption Algorithms
  39. Calvin Kai Fan Tang and Eugenia Ternovska
    Model Checking Abstract State Machines with Answer Set Programming
  40. Henning Christiansen and Davide Martinenghi
    Incremental integrity checking: limitations and possibilities
  41. Marc Bezem and Thierry Coquand
    Automating Geometric Logic
  42. Nachum Dershowitz
    Penrose and the Four Sons
  43. Daniel Dougherty, Silvia Ghilezan, Pierre Lescanne and Silvia Likavec
    Strong normalization of the dual classical sequent calculus
  44. Andrea Ferrara, Guoqiang Pan and Moshe Vardi
    Treewidth in Verification: Local vs. Global
  45. Matthias Daum, Stefan Maus, Norbert Schirmer and Mohamed Nassim Seghir
    Integration of a Software Model Checker into Isabelle
  46. Hitoshi Ohsaki, Jean-Marc Talbot, Yves Roos and Sophie Tison
    Monotone AC-Tree Automata
Accepted Short Papers:




POPL 2006
International Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages
Charleston, SC, January 11-13, 2006
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~dpw/popl/06/

POPL 2006 Preliminary Program

Wednesday January 11, 2006
 08:30 Invited talk
 Martin Odersky
 Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
 
 10:00 Staged Allocation: A Compositional Technique for Specifying and Implementing Procedure Calling Conventions
 Reuben Olinsky, Christian Lindig and Norman Ramsey
 Harvard University
 
 10:25 A Hierarchical Model of Data Locality
 Chengliang Zhang, Yutao Zhong, Mitsunori Ogihara, Chen Ding
 University of Rochester
 
 10:50 Simplifying Reductions
 Gautam Gupta and Sanjay Rajopadhye
 Colorado State University

 11:40 Formal certification of a compiler back-end, or: programming a compiler with a proof assistant
 Xavier Leroy
 INRIA Rocquencourt
 
 12:05 Engineering with Logic: HOL Specification and Symbolic-Evaluation Testing for TCP Implementations
 Steve Bishop, Matthew Fairbairn, Michael Norrish, Peter Sewell, Michael Smith and Keith Wansbrough
 University of Cambridge
 
 14:00 Decidability and Proof Systems for Language-Based Noninterference Relations
 Mads Dam
 KTH
 
 14:25 On Flow-Sensitive Security Types
 Sebastian Hunt and David Sands
 City University
 
 14:50 A Logic for Information Flow Analysis of Pointer Programs
 Torben Amtoft, Sruthi Bandhakavi and Anindya Banerjee
 Kansas State University
 
 15:45 Polymorphic Regular Tree Types and Patterns
 Jérôme Vouillon
 CNRS and Université Paris 7
 
 16:10 Verifying Properties of Well-Founded Linked Lists
 Shuvendu K. Lahiri and Shaz Qadeer
 Microsoft Research
 
 16:35 Environmental Analysis via Delta-CFA
 Matthew Might and Olin Shivers
 Georgia Institute of Technology
 
 17:25 Small Bisimulations for Reasoning About Higher-Order Imperative Programs
 Vasileios Koutavas and Mitchell Wand
 Northeastern University
 
 17:50 A Fixpoint Calculus for Local and Global Program Flows
 Rajeev Alur, Swarat Chaudhuri, and P. Madhusudan
 University of Pennsylvania
 
 
Thursday January 12, 2006
 08:30 Invited talk
 Tim Sweeney
 Epic Games Inc
 
 10:00 Adventures in Time and Space
 James S. Royer
 Syracuse University
 
 10:25 N-Synchronous Kahn Networks
 Albert Cohen, Christine Eisenbeis, Mard Duranton, Claire Pagetti, Florence Plateau, and Marc Pouzet
 INRIA Futurs
 
 10:50 Compiler-Directed Channel Allocation for Saving Power in On-Chip Networks
 Guangyu Chen, Feihui Li, and Mahmut Kandemir
 Pennsylvania State University
 
 11:40 Fast and Loose Reasoning is Morally Correct
 Nils Anders Danielsson, Jeremy Gibbons, John Hughes, and Patrik Jansson
 Chalmers University of Technology
 
 12:05 Modular Set-Based Analysis from Contracts
 Philippe Meunier, Robert Bruce Findler, and Matthias Felleisen
 Northeastern University
 
 14:00 Stratified type inference for generalized algebraic data types
 François Pottier and Yann Régis-Gianas
 INRIA
 
 14:25 Hybrid Type Checking
 Cormac Flanagan
 UCSC

 14:50 A Polymorphic Modal Type System for Lisp-like Multi-Staged Languages
 Ik-Soon Kim, Kwangkeun Yi and Cristiano Calcagno
 Seoul National University
 

Friday January 13, 2006
 08:30 Invited talk
 James McKinna
 St Andrews University
 
 10:00 A Virtual Class Calculus
 Erik Ernst, Klaus Ostermann and William R. Cook
 University of Aarhus
 
 10:25 Interruptible Iterators
 Jed Liu, Aaron Kimball and Andrew C. Myers
 Cornell University
 
 10:50 Specifying C++ concepts
 Gabriel Dos Reis Bjarne Stroustrup
 Texas A&M University

 11:40 Frame rules from answer types for code pointers
 Hayo Thielecke
 University of Birmingham
 
 12:05 Certified Assembly Programming with Embedded Code Pointers
 Zhaozhong Ni and Zhong Shao
 Yale University
 
 14:00 Associating Synchronization Constraints with Data in an Object-Oriented Language
 Mandana Vaziri, Frank Tip and Julian Dolby
 IBM Research
 
 14:25 Autolocker: Synchronization Inference for Atomic Sections
 Bill McCloskey, Feng Zhou, David Gay and Eric Brewer
 UC Berkeley
 
 14:50 Protecting Representation with Effect Encapsulation
 Yi Lu and John Potter
 UNSW

 15:45 A Verifiable SSA Program Representation for Aggressive Compiler Optimization
 Vijay S Menon, Neal Glew, Brian R Murphy, Andrew McCreight, Tatiana Shpeisman, Ali-Reza Adl-Tabatabai and Leaf Petersen
 Intel Corporation
 
 16:10 The Essence of Command Injection Attacks in Web Applications
 Zhendong Su and Gary Wassermann
 University of California, Davis
 
 16:35 Harmless Advice
 Daniel Dantas and David Walker
 Princeton University
 
 17:00 The Next 700 Data Description Languages
 Kathleen Fisher, Yitzhak Mandelbaum and David Walker
 AT&T Research and Princeton University




EUMAS 2005
European Workshop on Multi-Agent Systems
Brussels, Belgium, December 7-8, 2005
http://como.vub.ac.be/eumas2005/

PROGRAM

1 Bernard-Joseph M. Roche, Eleni E. Mangina University College Dublin (Ireland) ABITS FIPA Messenger
2 Talal Rahwan, Nicholas R. Jennings Southampton University (UK) Distributing coalitional value calculations among cooperative agents
3 Luigi Bozzo, Viviana Mascardi, Davide Ancona, Paolo Busetta DISI - Univ. di Genova () COOWS: ADAPTIVE BDI AGENTS MEET SERVICE-ORIENTED COMPUTING (extended version)
4 Pavlos Moraitis, Eleftheria Petraki, Nikolaos I. Spanoudakis University RENE DESCARTES-Paris 5 (France) An Agent-based System for Infomobility Services
5 Ariel D. Procaccia, Jeffrey S. Rosenschein The Hebrew University (Israel) Junta Distributions and the Average-Case Complexity of Manipulating Elections
6 Ariel D. Procaccia, Jeffrey S. Rosenschein The Hebrew University (Israel) The Communication Complexity of Coalition Formation Among Autonomous Agents
7 Ariel D. Procaccia, Jeffrey S. Rosenschein The Hebrew University (Israel) Learning to Identify Winning Coalitions in the PAC model
8 Ariel D. Procaccia, Jeffrey S. Rosenschein The Hebrew University (Israel) Abstract Argumentation Games
9 Guy De Pauw University of Antwerp (Belgium) Agent-Based Unsupervised Grammar Induction
10 Bel-Enguix, Gemma, Jiménez-López, M. Dolores Rovira i Virgili University (Spain) A Multi-Agent System Model of Dialogue
11 jean-paul sansonnet, erika valencia limsi (France) terminological heterogeneity between agents using a generalized simplicial representation
12 Mano Jean Pierre, Glize Pierre Equipe SMAC - IRIT - Université Paul Sabatier (France) Cellular collective resolution in artificial neuro-agent networks
13 Katie Atkinson, Trevor Bench-Capon, Peter McBurney Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool (UK) Multi-Agent Argumentation for eDemocracy
14 Matthias Nickles, Felix Fischer Department of Informatics, Technical University of Munich (Germany) Communication Attitudes: A Formal Account of Ostensible Beliefs and Intentions
15 Andrea Giovannucci, Juan A. Rodríguez-Aguilar, Jesús Cerquides IIIA-CSIC (Spain) MULTI-UNIT COMBINATORIAL REVERSE AUCTIONS WITH TRANSFORMABILITY RELATIONSHIPS AMONG GOODS
16 Shaheen Fatima, Michael Wooldridge, Nicholas R. Jennings University of Liverpool (UK) An analysis of the Shapley Value and its Uncertainty for the Voting Game
17 Gauthier Picard, Marie-Pierre Gleizes IRIT - Université Paul Sabatier (France) Cooperative Self-Organization to Design Robust and Adaptive Robotic Collectives
18 Gauthier Picard, Pierre Glize IRIT - Université Paul Sabatier (France) Cooperative Self-Organization: Modeling and Experiments of Local Decision to Solve Distributed Problems
19 Christopher D. Walton Informatics, University of Edinburgh (UK) AGENT PROTOCOLS FOR PEER-TO-PEER ARCHITECTURES
20 Danny Weyns, Nelis Boucke, Tom Holvoet, Wannes Schols Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium) Gradient Field-Based Task Assignment in an AGV Transportation System
21 Arnaud Doniec, Stéphane Espié, René Mandiau, Sylvain Piechowiak INRETS (France) Dealing with multi-agent coordination by anticipation: application to the traffic simulation at junctions
22 Nardine Osman, David Robertson, Christopher Walton School of Informatics, The University of Edinburgh (United Kingdom) Run-Time Model Checking of Interaction and Deontic Models for Multi-Agent Systems
23 Jarred McGinnis, David Robertson, Chris Walton University of Edinburgh (Scotland) Protocol Synthesis with Dialogue Structure Theory
24 Demetrios G. Eliades, Andreas L. Symeonidis, Pericles A. Mitkas Electrical and Computer Engineering Dept., Thessaloniki (Greece) GeneCity: A Multi Agent Simulation Environment for Hereditary Diseases
25 Carlos Chesñevar, Guillermo Simari, Lluis Godo, Teresa Alsinet University of Lleida (Lleida) Expansion Operators for Modelling Agent Reasoning in Possibilistic Defeasible Logic Programming
26 Osnat Shapira, Zinovi Rabinovich, Jeffrey S. Rosenschein School of Computer Science and Engineering, Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel) Simulation of Cooperative Behavioral Trends by Local Interaction Rules
27 Andrés Garcia-Camino, Pablo Noriega B.V., Juan Antonio Rodríguez-Aguilar IIIA-CSIC (Spain) Implementing Norms in Electronic Institutions
28 Thorsten Scholz, Ingo J. Timm, Rainer Spittel University of Bremen, TZI (Germany) An Agent Architecture for Ensuring Quality of Service by Dynamic Capability Certification
29 Jorge J. Gómez-Sanz, Juan Pavón Universidad Complutense Madrid (Spain) A Discussion on the MDA Approach for Agent Development
30 Roberto Montagna, Giorgio Delzanno, Maurizio Martelli, Viviana Mascardi Università di Genova Dipartimento di Informatica e Scienze dell`informazione (Italy) BDI^ATL : An Alternating-time BDI Logic for Multiagent Systems
31 David Sanchez, Antonio Moreno Department of Computer Science and Mathematics - University Rovira i Virgili (Spain) A Multi-agent System for Distributed Ontology Learning
32 Peter Gradwell, Julian Padget University of Bath, Computer Science (UK) Markets vs Auctions: Approaches to Distributed
33 Karl Tuyls, Bart Kuijpers University of Maastricht (The Netherlands) Privacy in Multi-Agent Learning: Securely Inducing a Multi-Agent Decision Tree
34 Marco Mamei, Franco Zambonelli Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia (Italy) Pervasive Pheromone-based Interactions with RFID Tags
35 Zinovi Rabinovich, Jeffrey S. Rosenschein School of Computer Science and Engineering, Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel) Dynamics Based Control: An Introduction
36 Natasha Alechina, Brian Logan School of CS, Univ. of Nottingham (UK) Verifying bounds on deliberation time in multi-agent systems
37 Stijn Meganck, Sam Maes, Bernard Manderick, Philippe Leray Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium) A Learning Algorithm for Multi-Agent Causal Models
38 Nico Roos, Cees Witteveen Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands) DIAGNOSIS OF PLAN EXECUTION AND THE EXECUTING AGENT
39 Benjamin Gateau, Olivier Boissier, Djamel Khadraoui, Eric Dubois ENSM Saint-Etienne (FRANCE) MoiseInst: An Organizational Model for Specifying Rights and Duties of Autonomous Agents
40 Peter Vrancx, Ann Nowe, Kris Steenhaut Como (Dinf) (Belgium) Multi-type ACO for light path protection
41 Owen Cliffe, Marina De Vos, Julian Padget Dept. Computer Science, University of Bath (United Kingdom) Specifying and Analysing Agent-based Social Institutions using Answer Set Programming
42 Alessandro Ricci, Andrea Omicini, Mirko Viroli, Luca Gardelli, Enrico Oliva DEIS (Italy) Cognitive Stigmergy: A Framework Based on Agents and Artifacts
43 Federico Bergenti CNIT (Italy) Privacy and Legal Validity in MASs? It is not just a matter of Security and Trust
44 Roman van der Krogt, Mathijs de Weerdt Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands) Coordination through Plan Repair
45 Davy Capera, Jean Fanchon, Jean-Pierre Georgé, Valérie Camps IRIT (France) A generic model based on automata for multi-agent systems
46 D.R.A. de Groot, M.L. Boonk, F.M.T. Brazier, A. Oskamp Computer Systemen, Faculteit der Exacte Wetenschappen, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (The Netherlands) Issues in a Mobile Agent-based Multimedia Retrieval Scenario
47 Martin Rehak, Michal Pechoucek, Jan Tozicka Dept. of Cybernetics, FEE, CTU in Prague (Czech Republic) Adversarial Behavior in Multi-Agent Systems
48 Mario Verdicchio, Marco Colombetti Politecnico di Milano (Italy) A commitment-based communicative act library
49 Armando Robles P., Pablo Noriega B-V. Instituto de Investigación en Inteligencia Artificial (Spain) A Framework for building EI-Enabled Intelligent Organizations using MAS technology
50 Antonio Castro, Eugenio Oliveira LIACC-NIADR, Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto (Portugal) A MULTI-AGENT SYSTEM FOR INTELLIGENT MONITORING OF AIRLINE OPERATIONS
51 Predrag Tosic, Gul Agha Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA) Computational Complexity of Predicting Some Properties of Large-Scale Agent Ensembles` Dynamical Evolution
52 Jan A. Persson, Paul Davidsson, Stefan J. Johansson, Fredrik Wernstedt Blekinge Institute of Technology (Sweden) Combining Agent-Based Approaches and Classical Optimization Techniques
53 Juan Manuel Serrano, Sascha Ossowski University Rey juan Carlos (Spain) A compositional framework for the specification of interaction protocols in multiagent organizations
54 Onn Shehory, Eran Dror IBM Haifa Research Lab (Israel) Optimizing Auctioneer's Revenues in Expanding Auctions
55 Manuel Fehler, Franziska Kluegl, Frank Puppe University of Wuerzburg (Germany) Approaches for resolving the dilemma between model structure refinement and parameter calibration in agent-based simulations
56 Alexander Yip, Jeremy Forth, Kostas Stathis, Antonis Kakas Department of Computing, Imperial College London (UK) SOFTWARE ANATOMY OF A KGP AGENT
57 D.G.A. Mobach, B.J. Overeinder, F.M.T. Brazier, F.P.M. Dignum Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (The Netherlands) A Two-tiered Model of Negotiation Based on Web Service Agreements
58 Marina De Vos, Owen Cliffe, Richard Watson, Tom Crick, Julian Padget, Jonathan Needham Dept. of Computer Science (United Kingdom) T-LAIMA: Answer Set Programming for Modelling Agents with Trust
59 Philippe MATHIEU, Sébastien PICAULT LIFL Université de Lille 1 (France) Towards an interaction-based design of behaviors
60 Paul Valckenaers, Hadeli , Bart Saint Germain , Paul Verstraete, Hendrik Van Brussel K.U.Leuven (Belgium) MAS Coordination and Control Based on Stigmergy
61 Vito Morreale, Susanna Bonura, Giuseppe Francaviglia, Massimo Cossentino, Salvatore Gaglio ENGINEERING Ingegneria Informatica S.p.A. (Italy) PRACTIONIST: a New Framework for BDI Agents
62 Bourgne, Maudet, Pinson LAMSADE, Univ Paris-Dauphine (France) Efficient Propagation of Uncertain Information (A rumor-based approach)
63 E. Platon, Nicolas Sabouret, Shinichi Honiden National Institute of Informatics, Laboratoire d`informatiquede Paris 6 (Japan) Oversensing interactions in Multi-Agent Systems: Environment Support
64 Hossein Sharif, David Brée, Armin Shams University of Manchester (U.K.) Introducing an Agent-based Simulation Platform for Group Buying Models





Call for Papers

List of Events:
International Conference on Logic Programming
ICLP 2006
Seattle, USA, August 17-20, 2006
http://www.cs.uky.edu/iclp06/

CONFERENCE SCOPE
Since the first conference held in Marseilles in 1982, ICLP has been the premier international conference for presenting research in logic programming. Contributions (papers and posters) are sought in all areas of logic programming including but not restricted to:
  • Theory: Semantic Foundations, Formalisms, Non-monotonic Reasoning, Knowledge Representation.
  • Implementation: Compilation, Memory Management, Virtual Machines, Parallelism.
  • Environments: Program Analysis, Program Transformation, Validation and Verification, Debugging, Profiling.
  • Language Issues: Concurrency, Objects, Coordination, Mobility, Higher Order, Types, Modes, Programming Techniques.
  • Alternative Paradigms: Constraint Logic Programming, Abductive Logic Programming, Inductive Logic Programming, Answer Set Programming.
  • Applications: Deductive Databases, Data Integration, Software Engineering, Natural Language, Web Tools, Internet Agents, Artificial Intelligence.
The three broad categories for submissions are: (1) technical papers, where specific attention will be given to work providing novel integrations of the areas listed above, (2) application papers, where the emphasis will be on their impact on the application domain as opposed to the advancement of the the state-of-the-art of logic programming, and (3) posters, ideal for presenting and discussing current work not yet ready for publication, for PhD thesis summaries and research project overviews. In addition to papers and posters, the technical program will include invited talks and advanced tutorials. We also plan to have Doctoral Student Consortium and several workshops. The workshops will be held on August 16 and August 21, 2006. Details, as they become available will be posted at http://www.cs.uky.edu/iclp06/

PAPERS AND POSTERS
Papers and posters must describe original, previously unpublished research, and must not be simultaneously submitted for publication elsewhere. They must be written in English. Technical papers and application papers must not exceed 15 pages in the Springer LNCS format (cf. http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/index.html). The limit for posters is 2 pages in that format. The primary means of submission will be electronic. More information on the submission procedure will be available at http://www.cs.uky.edu/iclp06/

PUBLICATION
The proceedings of the conference will be published by Springer-Verlag in the LNCS series. The proceedings will include the accepted papers and the abstracts of accepted posters.

SUPPORT SPONSORING AND AWARDS
The conference is sponsored by the Association for Logic Programming. The ALP has funds to assist financially disadvantaged participants. The ALP is planning to sponsor two awards for ICLP’06: for the best technical paper and for the best student paper.

IMPORTANT DATES

 Papers Posters
Abstract Submission Deadline 14 February
Submission Deadline 21 February 14 March
Notification of Authors 7 April 14 April
Camera-ready Copy 2 May 2 May
ICLP’2006 ORGANIZATION
General Chair:
Manuel Hermenegildo (herme@fi.upm.es)
Program Co-Chairs:
Sandro Etalle (s.etalle@utwente.nl)
Mirek Truszczynski (mirek@cs.uky.edu)
Workshop Chair:
Christian Schulte (schulte@imit.kth.se)
Doctoral Student Consortium:
Enrico Pontelli (epontell@cs.nmsu.edu)
Publicity Chair:
Alexander Serebrenik (a.serebrenik@tue.nl)

CONFERENCE VENUE
The conference will be a part of the fourth Federated Logic Conference (FLoC’06) to be held August 10-21, 2006, in Seattle, Washington (http://research.microsoft.com/floc06/). Other participating conferences are: Computer-Aided Verification (CAV), Rewriting Techniques and Applications (RTA), Logic in Computer Science (LICS), Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing (SAT), and Int’l Joint Conference on Automated Reasoning (IJCAR). Plenary events involving multiple conferences are planned.


Federated Logic Conference
FLoC 2006
Seattle, USA, August 10-22, 2006
http://research.microsoft.com/projects/FLoC2006/home.html
http://research.microsoft.com/floc06/

 
In 1996, as part of its Special Year on Logic and Algorithms, DIMACS hosted the first Federated Logic Conference (FLoC). It was modeled after the successful Federated Computer Research Conference (FCRC), and synergetically brought together conferences that apply logic to computer science. The second Federated Logic Conference (FLoC'99) was held in Trento, Italy, in 1999, and the third (FLoC'02) was held in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2002.

We are pleased to announce the fourth Federated Logic Conference (FLoC'06) to be held in Seattle, Washington, in August 2006, at the Seattle Sheraton (http://www.sheraton.com/seattle).

The following conferences will participate in FLoC.
  • Int'l Conference on Computer-Aided Verification (CAV)
  • Int'l Conference on Rewriting Techniques and Applications (RTA)
  • IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS)
  • Int'l Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP)
  • Int'l Conference on Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing (SAT)
  • Int'l Joint Conference on Automated Reasoning (IJCAR)
Pre-conference workshops will be held on August 10-11. LICS, RTA, and SAT will be held in parallel on August 12-15, to be followed by mid-conference workshops and excursions on August 15-16. CAV, ICLP, and IJCAR will be held in parallel on August 16-21, to be followed by post-conference workshops on August 21-22. 
Plenary events involving all the conferences are planned.

Calls for papers and call for workshop proposals will be issued in the near future. For additional information regarding the participating meetings, please check the FLoC web page (see above) later this summer.

FLoC'06 Steering Committee:
  • Moshe Y. Vardi (General Chair)
  • Jakob Rehof (Conference Chair)
  • Edmund Clarke (CAV)
  • Reiner Hahnle (IJCAR)
  • Manuel Hermenegildo (ICLP)
  • Phokion Kolaitis (LICS)
  • Henry Kautz (SAT)
  • Aart Middeldorp (RTA)
  • Andrei Voronkov (IJCAR)


International Workshop on Rewriting Logic and its Applications
WRLA 2006
Vienna, Austria, April 1-2, 2006
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/clt/WRLA06/ 

The workshop will be held in conjunction with

 ETAPS 2006 
 9th European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software
 March 26 - April 2, 2006
 http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/etaps06/

IMPORTANT DATES
November 21, 2005 Deadline for submissions
January 16, 2006 Notification of acceptance
February 16, 2006 Final version in electronic form
April 1-2, 2006 Workshop in Vienna

 
AIMS AND SCOPE
Rewriting logic (RL) is a natural model of computation and an expressive semantic framework for concurrency, parallelism, communication and interaction. It can be used for specifying a wide range of systems and languages in various application fields. It also has good properties as a metalogical framework for representing logics. In recent years, several languages based on RL (ASF+SDF, CafeOBJ, ELAN, Maude) have been designed and implemented. The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers with a common interest in RL and its applications, and to give them the opportunity to present their recent works, discuss future research directions, and exchange ideas. 

The topics of the workshop comprise, but are not limited to,
PAST EVENTS
Previous WRLA workshops have been organized in
The proceedings of the WRLA workshops have been published as volumes 4, 15, 36, 71, and 117 in the Elsevier ENTCS series, available at 
 
 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/15710661

Selected papers from WRLA'96 have been published in a special issue of Theoretical Computer Science, Volume 285(2), 2002, and selected papers from WRLA 2004 will appear in a special issue of Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation.

LOCATION
WRLA 2006 will be held in Vienna, Austria in March 25-26, 2006. It is a satellite workshop of ETAPS 2006, the European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software. For venue, registration and suggested accommodation see the ETAPS 2006 web page 
 
 http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/etaps06


SUBMISSIONS
Submissions will be evaluated by the Program Committee for inclusion in the proceedings, which will be available at the time of the workshop and are expected to be published in the Elsevier ENTCS series.

Papers must contain original contributions, be clearly written, and include appropriate reference to and comparison with related work. They must be unpublished and not submitted simultaneously for publication elsewhere. Papers (of at most 15 pages, at least 10 point font) should be submitted electronically, preferably as PDF files, to the workshop email address

 wrla06@csl.sri.com

providing also a text-only abstract, and detailed contact information of the corresponding author. 

The final program of the workshop will also include system demonstrations and invited presentations to be determined.

Based on the quality and interest of the accepted papers, the program committee will consider the possibility of preparing a special issue of a scientific journal in the field.

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Carolyn Talcott and Grit Denker
SRI International
Menlo Park, CA 94025


PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Roberto Bruni Universita` di Pisa
Manuel Clavel Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Grit Denker SRI International, Menlo Park (co-Chair)
Francisco Duran Universidad de Malaga
Steven Eker SRI International, Menlo Park
Kokichi Futatsugi JAIST, Nomi
Claude Kirchner INRIA & LORIA, Nancy
Salvador Lucas Universidad Politecnica de Valencia
Narciso Marti-Oliet Universidad Complutense de Madrid 
Jose Meseguer University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Ugo Montanari Universita` di Pisa
Pierre-Etienne Moreau INRIA & LORIA, Nancy
Peter Olveczky University of Oslo
Grigore Rosu University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Mark-Oliver Stehr University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Carolyn Talcott SRI International, Menlo Park (Chair)
Martin Wirsing Ludwig-Maximillian University, Munich


CONTACT INFORMATION
For more information, please contact the organizers
 
 wrla06@csl.sri.com

or visit the workshop web page

 http://www-formal.stanford.edu/WRLA06/
International Joint Conference on Automated Reasoning
IJCAR 2006
Seattle, USA, August 16-21, 2006
http://ijcar06.uni-koblenz.de/ 

The Third International Joint Conference on Automated Reasoning (IJCAR) is the fusion of several major conferences in Automated Reasoning:
IJCAR 2006 will be part of the Federated Logic Conference, FLoC'06 (http://research.microsoft.com/floc06/), to be held in Seattle during August 10--22, 2006.

Scope:
IJCAR 2006 invites submissions related to all aspects of automated reasoning, including foundations, implementations, and applications. Original research papers and descriptions of working automated deduction systems are solicited.

Logics of interest include:
Propositional, first-order, classical, equational, higher-order, non-classical, constructive, modal, temporal, many-valued, substructural, description, metalogics, type theory, and set theory.

Methods of interest include:
Tableaux, sequent calculi, resolution, model-elimination, connection method, inverse method, paramodulation, term rewriting, induction, unification, constraint solving, decision procedures, model generation, model checking, semantic guidance, interactive theorem proving, logical frameworks, AI-related methods for deductive systems, proof presentation, efficient data-structures and indexing, integration of computer algebra systems and automated theorem provers, and combination of logics or decision procedures.

Applications of interest include:
Hardware and software verification, formal methods, program analysis and synthesis, computer arithmetic, metatheory of languages and logics, declarative programming, deductive databases, knowledge representation, computer security, natural language processing, linguistics, robotics, and planning.

Submissions:
Submitted research papers and system descriptions must be original and not submitted for publication elsewhere. Research papers can be up to 15 pages long, and system descriptions can be up to 5 pages long. In the research paper category, submissions of theoretical, practical and experimental nature are equally encouraged. Abstracts must be registered by Feb 27, 2006. All submissions must be received by March 6, 2006. Submissions that arrive late or are too long will not be considered.

Submission Details:
The proceedings of IJCAR 2006 will be published by Springer-Verlag in the LNAI/LNCS series.

Authors are strongly encouraged to use LaTeX and the Springer "llncs" format, that can be obtained from
http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html

Best Paper Awards:
Awards will be given for the best paper and the best paper written solely by one or more students. The selection will be done by the program committee. A submission is eligible for the best student paper award if all authors are full-time students at the time of submission. The program committee may decline to make the awards or may split it among several papers.

Important Dates:
February 27, 2006: Paper registration
March 6, 2006: Paper submissions
April 24, 2006: Acceptance notification
May 29, 2006: Camera-ready copy due
August 16--21, 2006: IJCAR, Seattle, USA

Program Chairs:
Ulrich Furbach, University of Koblenz, uli@uni-koblenz.de
Natarajan Shankar, SRI International, shankar@csl.sri.com

Program Committee:

Conference Chair:
John Harrison
Intel Semiconductors, johnh@ichips.intel.com

Workshop Chair:
Maria Paola Bonacina
Univ. of Verona, mariapaola.bonacina@univr.it

Publicity Chair:
Sergey Berezin
Synopsys, berezin@synopsys.com

Steering Committee:
Franz Baader
Peter Baumgartner
Ulrich Furbach
John Harrison
Reiner Haehnle
Tobias Nipkow
Natarajan Shankar
Cesare Tinelli
Toby Walsh






International Conference on Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling
  PATAT 2006
Brno, Czech Republic, August 30-September 1, 2006
http://patat06.muni.cz

This conference is the sixth in a series of conferences that serve as a forum for an international community of researchers, practitioners and vendors on all aspects of computer-aided timetable generation. For more information about the series of conferences see
 
http://www.asap.cs.nott.ac.uk/patat/patat-index.shtml
 
The themes of the conference include (but are not limited to):
   o  Educational Timetabling
   o  Transport Timetabling
   o  Employee Timetabling and Rostering
   o  Sports Timetabling
   o  Complexity Issues
   o  Distributed Timetabling Systems
   o  Experiences
   o  Implementations
   o  Commercial Packages
   o  Interactive vs Batch Timetabling
   o  Timetable Updating
   o  Standard Data Formats
   o  Relationship with Other Scheduling Problems
   o  Timetabling Research Areas, including:
                  Constraint-Based Methods
                  Evolutionary Computation
                  Artificial Intelligence
                  Graph Colouring
                  Expert Systems
                  Heuristic Search
                  Knowledge Based Systems
                  Operational Research
                  Simulated Annealing
                  Local Search
                  Mathematical Programming
                  Soft Computing
                  Tabu Search
                  Meta-Heuristics
                  Hyper-Heuristics
                  Very Large Neighborhood Search
                  Ant Colony Methods
                  Hybrid Methods
                  Multi-Criteria Decision Making
                  Fuzzy Reasoning
 
The Featured Keynote Speakers for this conference are:
       Michel Gendreau (Centre de Recheche sur les Transports, Montréal, Canada)
       James Orlin (MIT, USA)
       Andrea Schaerf (Universita di Udine, Italy)
 
Submissions:
 Authors are invited to submit presentations in one of three categories:
 
(a) Full Papers
 Authors should submit papers describing significant, original and unpublished work.  Such papers are expected to be approximately 10-20 pages in length but this guideline is not strict. These papers will be fully refereed by the programme committee and the accepted ones will appear in a conference proceedings (ISBN 80-210-3726-1). As in previous years, a selection of the papers will appear in a post conference volume published in the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.  The second round of refereeing for this volume will take place shortly after the conference.
 
(b) Abstracts
Authors can submit abstracts of up to 1000 words. Abstracts will be fully refereed. The accepted ones will appear in the conference proceedings. Abstracts will not go forward to the second round of refereeing for the post-conference volume. However, authors of accepted abstracts will have the opportunity to write a full paper based on their abstract and submit it for the selected papers volume. People who wish to give a talk (e.g. practitioners, researchers with preliminary or incomplete papers) but do not want to submit  a full paper can submit under this category.
 
(c) System Demonstrations:
Authors can submit an abstract, describing the major properties and contribution of implemented and/or commercial timetabling systems. Abstracts should not exceed 1000 words (3-4 pages). Authors of accepted submissions in this category would be expected to provide a demonstration of their software during the conference. Demonstration submissions will be evaluated on the basis of their innovation, relevance and scientific contribution.  The abstracts will be published in the conference proceedings but they will not be forwarded to the second round of refereeing for the post-conference volume.  However, authors of accepted system demonstration abstracts are welcome to submit a full paper to the post-conference volume if they so wish.
 
Submission Instructions:
Papers for all three categories must be formatted using instructions which will be published on the conference web site.  These instructions will appear by the end of September 2005. The length of the paper should fulfill the requirements given for each category.
 
All submissions should be made through our online system available at
http://patat06.muni.cz
 
Authors who have problems with the online system should contact one of the co-chairs of the Programme Committee for instructions. Please note that all participants will need to register for the conference and pay the registration fee in order for accepted submissions to appear in the conference proceedings.
 
Deadlines:
Paper/abstract submissions     January 27th 2006
Notification                             April 28th 2006 (at the latest)
 
Programme Committee:
 
Edmund Burke (co-chair) University of Nottingham, UK
Hana Rudová (co-chair) Masaryk University, Czech Republic
 
Hesham Alfares   King Fahd University, Saudi Arabia
Viktor Bardadym  Noveon Inc., Belgium
James Bean   University of Michigan, USA
Peter Brucker   University of Osnabrück, Germany
Michael Carter   University of Toronto, Canada
Peter Cowling   University of Bradford, UK
Patrick De Causmaecker  KaHo St.-Lieven, Gent, Belgium
Kathryn Dowsland  Gower Optimal Algorithms Ltd. UK
Andreas Drexl   University of Kiel, Germany
Moshe Dror   University of Arizona, USA
Wilhelm Erben  FH Konstanz - University of Applied Sciences, Germany
Jacques A. Ferland  University of Montreal, Canada
Michel Gendreau  Centre de Recherche sur les Transports, Montréal, Canada
Alain Hertz   Ecole Polytechnique de Montréal, Canada
Jeffrey Kingston  University of Sydney, Australia
Raymond Kwan   University of Leeds, UK
Gilbert Laporte  Université de Montréal, Canada
Vahid Lotfi   University of Michigan-Flint, USA
Amnon Meisels   Ben-Gurion University, Beer-Sheva, Israel
Thiruthlall Nepal  Durban Institute of Technology, South Africa
Jim Newall  eventMAP Ltd, UK
Ben Paechter   Napier University, Edinburgh, UK
Gilles Pesant   Ecole Polytechnique de Montréal, Canada
Sanja Petrovic   University of Nottingham, UK
Jean-Yves Potvin  Université de Montréal, Canada
Rong Qu   University of Nottingham, UK
Andrea Schaerf   Universita di Udine, Italy
Jan Schreuder   University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands
Jonathan Thompson  Cardiff University, UK
Paolo Toth   University of Bologna, Italy
Michael Trick   Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Greet Vanden Berghe  KaHo St.-Lieven, Belgium
Stefan Voss  University of Hamburg, Germany
Dominique de Werra  EPF-Lausanne, Switzerland
George White   University of Ottawa, Canada
Michael Wright  Lancaster University, UK
Jay Yellen  Rollins College, USA
 
About the Venue:
Brno is the Czech Republic's second largest city.  It lies in the middle of South Moravia and is a thriving centre of commerce and culture.  The city has a rich history and a wide variety of architectural styles dating back almost a thousand years. Lying right at the heart of Europe, Brno is well placed to attract visitors from around the world. The city is a major trade fair centre, a grand prix motorcycle venue, and is the home of six universities and a number of research institutes.
 
The conference will be held at the Hotel International (which is a member of the Best Western Premier network of hotels). The hotel is located in a pleasant area of the city between the Cathedral of St. Peter and Paul and the 13th century Špilberk fortress.  Parks surrounding the fortress and cathedral provide a very convenient and quiet walking area.  Adjacent areas of the old city offer excellent opportunities for shopping and a wide range of restaurants, pubs, and bars. The conference hotel is reasonably priced and includes excellent conference facilities.
 
Conference organizers can also provide details on how to book accommodations in a nearby student hostel. It is located within 5-10 minutes walking distance from the conference hotel.
 
Brno has a growing international airport. There are regular train and bus  connections to large international airports at Prague and Vienna (Austria).  Detailed travel instructions will be placed on the conference web site.
You can find more information about Brno at http://www.brno.cz/
and more about the hotel at http://www.hotelinternational.cz/
 
For more information, contact info@patat06.muni.cz
 
Conference Organisers are:
 Edmund Burke
Automated Scheduling, Optimisation and Planning Research Group
School of Computer Science and Information Technology
University of Nottingham
University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD
United Kingdom
e-mail: ekb@cs.nott.ac.uk
 
and
 
Hana Rudová
Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University
Botanická 68a
Brno 602 00
Czech Republic
e-mail: hanka@fi.muni.cz









International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technology
  WEBIST 2006
Setubal, Portugal, April 10-13, 2006
http://www.webist.org/index.htm

SCOPE

The purpose of the 2nd International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST-2006) is to bring together researchers, engineers and practitioners interested in the technological advances and business applications of web-based information systems. The conference has four main track, covering different aspects of Web Information Systems, including Internet Technology, Web Interfaces and Applications, Society, e-Communities, e-Business and, last but not least, e-Learning.
WEBIST focuses on real world applications; therefore authors should highlight the benefits of Web Information Systems and Technologies for industry and services, in addition to academic applications. Ideas on how to solve business problems, using web based information systems and technologies, will arise from the conference. Papers describing advanced prototypes, systems, tools and techniques and general survey papers indicating future directions are also encouraged. Both technological and social-oriented papers are accepted. All papers must describe original work, not previously published or submitted to another conference. Accepted papers, presented at the conference by one of the authors, will be published in the Proceedings of WEBIST. Acceptance will be based on quality, relevance and originality. Both full research reports and work-in-progress reports are welcome. There will be both oral and poster sessions.
Special sessions, dedicated to case-studies and commercial presentations, as well as tutorials dedicated to technical/scientific topics are also envisaged: companies interested in presenting their products/methodologies or researchers interested in holding a tutorial, workshop or special session are invited to contact the conference secretariat or visit the conference website (http://www.webist.org).


CONFERENCE AREAS

Each of these topic areas is expanded below but the sub-topics list is not exhaustive. Papers may address one or more of the listed sub-topics, although authors should not feel limited by them. Unlisted but related sub-topics are also acceptable, provided they fit in one of the following main topic areas:
    1. Internet Technology
    2. Web Interfaces and Applications
    3. Society, e-Business and e-Government
    4. e-learning

AREA 1 - INTERNET TECHNOLOGY
AREA 2 - WEB INTERFACES AND APPLICATIONS
AREA 3: SOCIETY, e-COMMUNITIES and e-BUSINESS
AREA 4: e-LEARNING 
PAPER SUBMISSION

Authors should submit a paper in English of up to 8 A4 pages, carefully checked for correct grammar and spelling, using the submission procedure indicated below.
The guidelines for paper formatting provided at the conference web site must be strictly used for all submitted papers.
The submission format is the same as the camera-ready format. Please check and carefully follow the instructions and templates provided.
The program committee will review all papers and the contact author (the author that submit the paper) of each paper will be notified of the result, by e-mail.
Each paper should clearly indicate the nature of its technical/scientific contribution, and the problems, domains or environments to which it is applicable.

Due to space limitations in the Proceedings, the camera-ready versions of accepted papers will be limited to 8 (eight) pages for long oral presentations, 6 (six) for short oral presentations (progress reports) and 4 (four) for poster presentations. If absolutely needed, the number of pages may be increased up to a maximum of 12. However, for each page in excess of the maximum allowed, the author will have to pay an additional fee.

Submission procedure:
A "double-blind" paper evaluation method will be used. To facilitate that, the authors are kindly requested to produce and provide the full paper, WITHOUT any reference to any of the authors. The manuscript must contain, in its first page, the paper title, an abstract and a list of keywords but NO NAMES OR CONTACT DETAILS WHATSOEVER are to be included in any part of this file. The file to be uploaded must be a zip containing two files: author(s) information in one and the paper, without any author(s) information, in another. LaTeX/PS/PDF/DOC format are accepted.
The web submission facility automatically sends an acknowledgement, by e-mail, to the contact author. Please contact the secretariat if no acknowledgement is received.

If the author is unable to use the web-based procedure then he/she can send the paper by e-mail to the secretariat attaching an additional file containing: the title, author(s), affiliation(s), contact details, a list of keywords and an abstract. Authors must also indicate the conference area (including the topics) or the workshop, to which the paper is submitted.


IMPORTANT DATES

Full Paper Submission: 29th November 2005
Author Notification: 15th January 2006
Final Camera-Ready Submission and Registration: 7th February 2006
Conference Date: 10-13 April 2006


SECRETARIAT

WEBIST Secretariat
Address: Av. D.Manuel I, 27 r/c esq.
                2910-595 Setúbal - Portugal
Tel.: +351 265 520 185
Fax: +351 265 520 186
e- mail:
Web: http://www.webist.org


VENUE

The conference will be held at the School of Business of Setúbal.


CONFERENCE CHAIR

Joaquim Filipe, INSTICC/E.S.T. Setúbal, Portugal


PROGRAM CHAIR

José Cordeiro, INSTICC/ E.S.T. Setúbal, Portugal


PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Cristina Baroglio, Università degli Studi di Torino, Italy
Christos Bouras, University of Patras and RACTI, Greece
Amy Bruckman, Georgia Tech, United States
Ku-Ming Chao, Coventry University, United Kingdom
Christophe Claramunt, Naval Academy Research Institute, France
Daniel Cunliffe, University of Glamorgan, United Kingdom
John Philip Cuthell, MirandaNet Academy; Bath Spa University College; University of Huddersfield, United Kingdom
Alessandro D'Atri, CeRSI - Luiss Guido Carli, Italy
Josep Domingo-Ferrer, Rovira i Virgili University of Tarragona, Spain
Chyi-Ren Dow, Feng Chia University, Taiwan, Taiwan
Barry Eaglestone, The University of Sheffield, United Kingdom
Ali El Kateeb, University of Michigan, United States of America
Filomena Ferrucci, University of Salerno, Italy
Begoña Gros, University of Barcelona, Spain
Aaron Gulliver, University of Victoria, Canada
Kathleen Hornsby, University of Maine, United States of America
Brian Hudson, Sheffield Hallam University, United Kingdom
Kai Jakobs, Aachen University, Germany
Anne James, Coventry University, United Kingdom
Jussi Kangasharju, Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany
Heiko Ludwig, IBM TJ Watson Research Center, United States of America
Anna Maddalena, DISI - University of Genoa, Italy
Johannes Mayer, University of Ulm, Germany
Alessandro Micarelli, University of "Roma Tre", Italy
Kia Ng, ICSRiM - University of Leeds, United Kingdom
David Nichols, University of Waikato, New Zealand
Jun Pang, INRIA Futurs, France, France
Guenther Pernul, University of Regensburg, Germany
Bhanu Prasad, Florida A & M University, United States of America
Kimmo Raatikainen, University of Helsinki, Finland
Danguole Rutkauskiene, Kaunas University of Technology, Lithuania
Abdolhossein Sarrafzadeh, Massey University, New Zealand
Anthony Savidis, ICS-FORTH, Greece
Alexander Schatten, Vienna University of Technology: Institute for Software Technology and Interactive Systems, Austria
Alexander Schill, TU Dresden, Germany
Heiko Schuldt, UMIT, Austria
Charles A. Shoniregun, University of East London, United Kingdom
J. Michael Spector, FSU-LSI, United States of America
Aixin Sun, University of New South Wales, Australia
Junichi Suzuki, University of Massachusetts, Boston, United States of America
Jianying Zhou, Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore






International Conference on Computing Frontiers
  
Ischia, Italy, May 3-5, 2006
http://www.computingfrontiers.org/

The increasing needs of present and future computation-intensive applications have stimulated research in new and innovative approaches to the design and implementation of high-performance computing systems. These challenging boundaries between state of the art and innovation constitute the computing frontiers, which must push forward and provide the computational support required for the advancement of all science domains and applications. This conference focuses on a wide spectrum of advanced technologies and radically new solutions, and is designed to foster communication between the various scientific areas and disciplines involved.

Authors are invited to submit papers on all areas of innovative computing systems that extend the current frontiers of computer science and engineering and that will provide advanced systems for current and future applications.

Papers are sought on theory, methodologies, technologies, and implementations concerned with innovations in computing paradigms, computational models, architectural paradigms, computer architectures, development environments, compilers, and operating environments. Papers should be submitted to one of the following areas:

Selected papers will be published in special issues of the ACM Journal of Emerging Technology in Computing Systems or the Journal of Instruction Level Parallelism.

If you are interested in proposing a special session or workshop, please contact the program chair (sam at csl dot cornell dot edu) by September 15, 2005.

Important Dates

Paper submissions due:
December 9, 2005		 Author notification:
January 20, 2006		 Final papers due:
February 24, 2006		 












International
Symposium on Formal Methods

FM 2006

Hamilton, Canada, August
21-27, 2006 

http://fm06.mcmaster.ca/





FM'06 is the fourteenth in a series of symposia organized by Formal Methods Europe, http://www.fmeurope.org, an independent association whose aim is to stimulate the use of, and research on, formal methods for software development. The symposia have been notably successful in bringing together innovators and practitioners in precise mathematical methods for software development, industrial users as well as researchers. Submissions are welcomed in the form of original papers on research and industrial experience, proposals for workshops and tutorials, entries for the exhibition of software tools and projects, and reports on ongoing doctoral work.

FM'06 welcomes all aspects of formal methods research, both theoretical and practical. We are particularly interested in the experience of applying formal methods in practice. The broad topics of interest of this conference are:





TECHNICAL PAPERS
Full papers should be submitted via the web site. Papers will be evaluated by the Program Committee according to their originality, significance, soundness, quality of presentation and relevance with respect to the main issues of the symposium. Accepted papers will be published in the Symposium Proceedings, to appear in Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science series, http://www.springeronline.com/lncs . Submitted papers should have not been submitted elsewhere for publication, should be in Springer's format, (see Springer's web site), and should not exceed 16 pages including appendices. A prize for the best technical paper will be awarded at the symposium.

INDUSTRIAL USAGE REPORTS
One day will be dedicated to sharing the experience -- both positive and negative -- with using formal methods in industrial environments. The Industry Day is organized by ForTIA, the Formal Techniques Industry Association, http://www.fortia.org . This year's Industry Day investigates the use of formal methods in security and trust. Invited papers on organizational and technical issues will be presented. Inquiries should be directed to the Industry Day Chairs; see the web site for details.

WORKSHOPS
We welcome proposals for one-day or one-and-a-half-day workshops related to FM'06. In particular, but not exclusively, we encourage proposals for workshops on various application domains. Proposals should be directed to the Workshop Chair.

TUTORIALS
We are soliciting proposals for full-day or half-day tutorials. The tutorial contents can be selected from a wide range of topics that reflect the conference themes and provide clear utility to practitioners. Each proposal will be evaluated on importance, relevance, timeliness, audience appeal and past experience and qualification of the instructors. Proposals should be directed to the Tutorial Chair.

POSTER AND TOOL EXHIBITION
An exhibition of both research projects and commercial tools will accompany the technical symposium, with the opportunity of holding scheduled presentations of commercial tools. Proposals should be directed to the Poster and Tools Exhibition Chair.

DOCTORAL SYMPOSIUM
For the first time, FM'06 will feature a doctoral symposium. Students are invited to submit work in progress and to defend it in front of "friendly examiners". Participation for students who are accepted will be subsidized. Submissions should be directed to the Doctoral Symposium Chair.

SUBMISSION DATES
Technical Papers, Workshops, Tutorials: Friday, February 24, 2006
Posters and Tools, Doctoral Symposium: Friday, May 26, 2006

NOTIFICATION DATES
Technical Papers: Friday, April 28, 2006
Workshops, Tutorials: Friday, March 10, 2006
Posters and Tools, Doctoral Symposium: Friday, June 9, 2006

ORGANIZATION
General Chair: Emil Sekerinski (McMaster)
Program Chairs: Jayadev Misra (U. Texas, Austin), Tobias Nipkow (TU Munich)
Workshop Chair: Tom Maibaum (McMaster)
Tutorial Chair: Jin Song Dong (NUS)
Tools and Poster Exhibition Chair: Marsha Chechik (U. Toronto)
Industry Day Chairs: Volkmar Lotz (SAP France), Asuman Suenbuel (SAP US)
Doctoral Symposium Chair: Augusto Sampaio (U. Pernambuco)
Sponsorship Chair: Juergen Dingel (Queens U.)

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Jean-Raymond Abrial (ETH Zurich)
Alex Aiken (Stanford U.)
Keijiro Araki (Kyushu U.)
Ralph Back (Abo Akademi)
Gilles Barthe (INRIA)
David Basin (ETH Zurich)
Ed Brinksma (U. Twente)
Michael Butler (U. Southampton)
Rance Cleaveland (U. Stony Brook)
Jorge Cuellar (Siemens)
Werner Damm (U. Oldenburg)
Frank de Boer (U. Utrecht)
Javier Esparza (U. Stuttgart)
Jose Fiadeiro (U. Leicester)
Susanne Graf (VERIMAG)
Ian Hayes (U. Queensland)
Gerard Holzmann (JPL)
Cliff Jones (U. Newcastle)
Gary T. Leavens (Iowa State U.)
Rustan Leino (Microsoft)
Xavier Leroy (INRIA)
Dominique Mery (LORIA)
Carroll Morgan (UNSW)
David Naumann (Stevens)
E.-R. Olderog (U. Oldenburg)
Paritosh Pandya (TIFR)
Sriram Rajamani (Microsoft)
John Rushby (SRI)
Steve Schneider (U. Surrey)
Vitaly Shmatikov (U. Texas, Austin)
Bernhard Steffen (U. Dortmund)
P.S. Thiagarajan (NUS)
Axel van Lamsweerde (U. Louvain)
Martin Wirsing (LMU Munich)
Pierre Wolper (U. Liege)

LOCAL ORGANIZATION
Publicity: Wolfram Kahl, Alan Wassyng, Jeff Zucker
Tools, Posters, Book Exhibition: Spencer Smith
Social Events: Ridha Khedri
Local Arrangements:: William Farmer, Mark Lawford
Events Co-ordinator: Ryszard Janicki









Pacific
Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence

PRICAI 2006

Guilin, China, August 7-11,
2006 

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/pricai06/Header.htm






The
Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence
(PRICAI) is a  biennial international event which concentrates
on AI theories, technologies and their applications in the areas of
social and economic importance for countries in the Pacific
Rim.  In the past conferences have been  held in
Nagoya (1990),  Seoul (1992), Beijing (1994),  Cairns
(1996),  Singapore (1998), Melbourne (2000), Tokyo (2002) and
Auckland (2004)

The Program Committee invites
technical papers on substantial, original, and unpublished research in
all aspects of Artificial Intelligence (AI). PRICAI 
aims  to bring together a large and diverse community, which
includes practitioners, researchers, educators, and users. Topics of
PRICAI-06 include, but are by no way limited to:





  
    

      Abduction
      Agents 
      AI architectures 
    

    

      AI foundations 
      Artificial life 
      Automated modeling
    

    

      Automated reasoning
       
       
    

    

      Bayesian
networks 
      Belief revision and
updates
       
    

    

      Case-based
reasoning
      Cognitive Modeling
      Cognitive Robotics
    

    

      Common-sense reasoning
      Computational complexity
      Computer-aided education
      
    

    

      Conceptual graphs
      Configuration
      Constraint satisfaction 
    

    

      Creativity support 
      Customer relationship
management
      Cyberspace intelligence 
    

    

      Data
mining
      Data quality management
      Decision theory
    

    

      Description logics
      Discourse modeling
      Distributed AI 
    

    

      E-commerce
and AI
      Emergent computation
      Entertainment and AI 
    

    

      Environment sensing /
understanding 
      Evolutionary computing
(genetic
algorithm, genetic programming) 
      Expert Systems
    

    

      Game
playing
      Geometric reasoning
       
    

    

      Heuristics
      Human computer
interaction
       
    

    

      Industrial
applications of AI 
      Inductive logic
programming
      Information enhancement
    

    

      Information retrieval 
      Intelligent databases
      Intelligent data analysis
    

    

      Intelligent e-mail
processing
      Internet / WWW
intelligence
       
    

    

      Knowledge
acquisition 
      Knowledge discovery
       Knowledge
engineering
    

    

      Knowledge representation
       
       
    

    

      Lifelike
characters
      Logic programming 
      Logics (inductive /
description / fuzzy,
etc.) 
    

    

      Machine
learning 
      Machine translation
      Mobile agents 
    

    

      Mobile / Wearable
intelligence
      Multiagent systems 
      Multimedia and AI 
    

    

      Multimodal systems 
      Multiple data source
mining
      Music, Art and AI 
    

    

      Natural
language processing 
      Neural networks 
       
    

    

      Ontology
      
       
       
    

    

      Planning
& plan recognition
      Post data mining
      Problem solving
    

    

      Reasoning
about actions & change
      Reinforcement learning 
      Robotics 
    

    

      Scheduling
      Scientific discovery 
      Search 
    

    

      Semantic web
      Simulation
      Social intelligence 
    

    

      Spatial/temporal
reasoning
      Speech processing
       
    

    

      Theorem
proving
       
       
    

    

      User
modelling 
       
       
    

    

      Virtual
reality
      Vision
       
    

    

      Web
mining
      Web search
       
    

  







Submission


Paper Submission: 22nd
February, 2006

Acceptance
Date: 5th May, 2006

Camera-ready:
22nd May, 2006


Submission
Guidelines

Papers should be no longer than
10 pages including all tables, figures and references.  Fonts
should not be smaller than 10pt. As in the past, the proceedings
of  PRICAI 2006 will be published as Lecture Notes in
Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) by Springer.  Submission
conforming to the LNAI style [http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html]
is recommended.

All papers should be submitted
electronically in PDF format via this site.  A link will be
provided shortly.

Multiple Submission Policy


Papers that are being submitted
to other AI conferences, whether verbatim or in other form, must
reflect this fact on the first page. If a paper is accepted at
another conference (with the exception  of specialised
workshops), it must be withdrawn from PRICAI-06. Papers that do not
meet these
requirements are subject to rejection without review.


Review

All submissions will be
reviewed by an international program committee on the basis of
relevance, originality, significance, soundness, clarity and standard
of English expression. Papers will be reviewed in two
rounds.  In the first round, all papers will be reviewed by a
single reviewer.  Papers assessed as unpublishable in the
first round will be rejected.  All remaining papers will be
reviewed by two further reviewers.  Final acceptance decisions
will be made by the program committee chairs on the basis of all three
reviews.

Publication


Papers accepted for
presentation at PRICAI 2006  will be published in Lecture
Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) by Springer.


In addition to full papers,
some papers will be accepted as poster presentations.  Authors
of poster papers will be given an opportunity to present their research
briefly (a few minutes) at designated sessions.


Queries regarding paper
submission may be directed to the
Program
Committee chairs.












International Conference on Integration of AI and OR
Techniques in Constraint Programming for Combinatorial Optimization
Problems

CP-AI-OR 2006

Cork, Ireland, May 31-June 2, 2006 

http://tidel.mie.utoronto.ca/cpaior





After a successful series of five international workshops (Ferrara, Paderborn, Ashford, Le Croisic, and Montreal) and two international conferences (Nice, Prague), the third international conference devoted to integration of Constraint Programming, Artificial Intelligence, and Operations Research techniques will be held in Cork, Ireland, in 2006.

The aim of the conference is to bring together interested researchers from AI and OR, and to give them the opportunity to show how the integration of techniques from AI and OR can lead to interesting results on large scale and complex problems. We explicitly welcome new ideas and methods for integrating OR and AI techniques that have arisen from real-world applications. CP-AI-OR is intended primarily as a forum to focus on the integration and hybridization of the approaches of CP, AI, and OR technologies. A secondary aim is to provide an opportunity for researchers in one area to learn about techniques in others. Therefore, papers that actively combine, integrate or contrast approaches from more than one of the areas are solicited. High quality papers from a single area are eligible provided that they are of interest to other communities involved.

CP-AI-OR'06 will be preceded by a Master Class where leading researchers give introductory and overview talks. This year, the topic of the Master Class will be "Modelling and Solving for Uncertainty and Change." The Master Class is intended for PhD students, researchers, and practitioners.

The program committee invites submissions that include but are not limited to the following topics:



Papers should be at most 15 pages in length, and should be prepared in the format used for the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science series (http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html). It is planned that the proceedings will be published in the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science series (http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/index.html). All papers are to be submitted electronically in a PDF or PS format by following the instructions at the URL http://tidel.mie.utoronto.ca/cpaior/.

Following the conference, authors of all accepted papers will be invited to submit substantially extended versions of their papers to a special issue of the Annals of Operations Research devoted to papers from CP-AI-OR'06. These papers will undergo an additional, very thorough refereeing process and a selection of the best papers will be published.

IMPORTANT DATES FOR AUTHORS

Deadline for paper submissions January 9, 2006
Notification of acceptance     February 24, 2006
Camera-ready copy              March 7, 2006
Master Class                   May 30, 2006
CP-AI-OR'06                    May 31-June 2, 2006

ORGANIZATION
Program Chairs
Chris Beck, University of Toronto, Canada
Barbara Smith, Cork Constraint Computation Centre, Ireland

Conference Chair
Barry O'Sullivan, Cork Constraint Computation Centre, Ireland

Master Class Chairs
Ken Brown, Cork Constraint Computation Centre, Ireland
Armagan Tarim, Cork Constraint Computation Centre, Ireland

Publicity Chair
Ian Miguel, University of St. Andrews, Scotland

Sponsorship Chair
Michela Milano, Universita di Bologna, Italy

Program Committee
Gautamkumar Appa, London School of Economics, UK
Philippe Baptiste, Ecole Polytechnique, France
Roman Bartak, Charles University, Czech Republic
Mats Carlsson, SICS, Sweden
Ondrej Cepek, Charles University, Czech Republic
Hani El Sakkout, CISCO, UK
Bernard Gendron, CRT and Univ. of Montreal, Canada
Carmen Gervet, Brown University USA/Imperial College UK
Carla Gomes, Cornell University, USA
Narendra Jussien, Ecole des Mines de Nantes, France
Stefan Karisch, Carmen Systems, Canada
Francois Laburthe, Bouygues, France
Andrea Lodi, Univ. of Bologna, Italy
Michela Milano, Univ. of Bologna, Italy
Gilles Pesant, CRT and Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, Canada
Jean-Francois Puget, ILOG, France
Jean-Charles Regin, ILOG, France
Michel Rueher, Univ. of Nice-Sophia Antipolis, France
Meinolf Sellmann, Brown University, USA
Helmut Simonis, IC-Parc, UK
Gilles Trombettoni, Univ. of Nice-Sophia Antipolis, France
Michael Trick, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Pascal van Hentenryck, Brown University, USA
Mark Wallace, Monash University, Australia
Weixiong Zhang, Washington University, USA










Workshop on Quantitative Aspects of Programming
Languages

QAPL 2006

Vienna, Austria, April 1-2, 2006 

http://www.di.unipi.it/~qapl06/





Scope

Quantitative aspects of computation are important and sometimes
essential in characterising the behaviour and determining the
properties of systems. They are related to the use of physical
quantities (storage space, time, bandwidth, etc.)  as well as
mathematical quantities (e.g. probability and measures for reliability,
risk and trust). Such quantities play a central role in defining both
the model of systems (architecture, language design, semantics) and the
methodologies and tools for the analysis and verification of system
properties.



The aim of this workshop is to discuss the explicit use of quantitative
information such as time and probabilities either directly in the model
or as a tool for the analysis of systems. In particular, the workshop
focuses on


Topics

Topics include (but are not limited to) probabilistic, timing and
general quantitative aspects in:


Submission

We encourage submissions of two forms:


    
  
  1. Full papers of at most 15 pages in A4 format. The use of the
ENTCS style files is strongly recommended.
    2. 
  
  2. Extended abstracts of ongoing work of at most 5 pages.
    3. 


On the basis of available time a selection of these will be invited for
presentation at the workshop.

Information on electronic submission is available on the workshop web
site.



Important dates

Submission (Full
papers):          15
December, 2005

Submission (Extended abstracts):    5 February, 2006

Notification to
authors:           
20 January, 2006

Final
version:                    
10 February, 2006



Proceedings

Accepted papers will be published in Elsevier's ENTCS. 
Publication of a selection of the papers in a special issue of a
journal is under consideration.



Program Committee

A. Aldini (Urbino)

F. de Boer (Utrecht)

F. van Breugel (Toronto)

A. Cerone (UNU-IIST)

L. de Alfaro (Santa Cruz)

A. Di Pierro (Pisa, co-chair)

M. Gabbrielli (Bologna)

I. Hayes (Queensland)

D.V. Hung (UNU-IIST)

M. Huth (IC London)

S.D. Johnson (Indiana)

J.P. Katoen (RWTH Aachen)

P. Malacaria (QMUL, London)

M. Massink (CNR, Pisa)

P. Mateus (IST, Lisbon)

A. McIver (Macquarie)

C. Morgan (UNSW/NICTA)

P. Panangaden (McGill, Quebec)

A.K. Seda (UC Cork,Ireland)

R. Segala (Verona)

H. Wiklicky (IC London, co-chair)

W. Yi (Uppsala)



Organising Committee

A. Cerone (UNU-IIST)

A. Di Pierro (Pisa, chair)

H. Wiklicky (London)



Invited Speakers

Rocco De Nicola (Florence)

Joel Ouaknine (Oxford)

Birgit Pfitzmann (IBM Zurich)










Workshop on Emerging Applications of Abstract
Interpretation

EAAI 2006

Vienna, Austria, March 26, 2006 

http://www.math.unipd.it/EAAI06





Scope

Abstract interpretation is  almost  30 
years   old. These   30  years witnessed 
a  great  success  of this  
methodology,  in particular in analysis and verification of
programming languages and systems: static program analysis, 
program   compilers, program  verification, program
transformation, program semantics.  This workshop focusses on
emerging applications of abstract   interpretation in 
nontraditional  or  even innovative  areas,  
like  security,   model checking,   
embedded and real-time systems,   systems   
biology, software   watermarking   and
obfuscation,    hardware verification,
etc.    The  workshop aim is to spread the
methods  of abstract  interpretation towards nontraditional
areas and to share common experiences in using abstract interpretation
as an approximation technique.



Topics    of  interest include  
all     the applications of  abstract
interpretation in nontraditional fields, like:


IMPORTANT DATES

Paper submission: 8 January 2006

Notification: 27 January 2006

Camera-ready: 9 February 2006



PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Anindya Banerjee (US)

Bruno Blanchet (FR)

Radhia Cousot (FR)

Saumya Debray (US)

Roberto Giacobazzi (IT, co-chair)

David Monniaux (FR)

Alan Mycroft (UK)

Francesco Ranzato (IT, co-chair)

Hanne Riis Nielson (DK)

Helmut Veith (DE)



SUBMISSION AND PUBLICATION

Authors are invited to submit papers  up to 15  pages in
ENTCS format. Contributions should report  about  ongoing
research in the   emerging applications of 
abstract  interpretation according  to the scope  and
objectives of the  workshop. Position papers are  also
encouraged. Electronic submissions in  pdf or postscript format
should be sent via email to: <eaai06@math.unipd.it>.



As in  previous years ETAPS'06 workshop proceedings  are
planned to be published as a volume of  Elsevier's 
Electronic Notes in  Theoretical Computer Science (ENTCS).



ORGANIZERS:


Roberto Giacobazzi

University of Verona

email: roberto.giacobazzi[AT]univr.it






Francesco Ranzato

University of Padova

email: franz[AT]math.unipd.it












Synchronous Languages, Applications, and Programming

SLAP 2006

Vienna, Austria, March 25, 2006 

http://www-verimag.imag.fr/SYNCHRONE/SLAP06/





IMPORTANT DATES

Submission of full papers  :  december 11th, 2005

Notification of authors    :  january 20th, 2006

Final copy of paper        : 
february 10th, 2006

Workshop                  
:  march 25th, 2006



CHAIR and ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Florence Maraninchi, VERIMAG/INPGrenoble, France

Marc Pouzet, LRI, Paris-sud, France



PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

Joaquin     Aguado - University of Bamberg, Germany

Luca        Carloni - Columbia
Univ., NYC, USA

Stephen A.  Edwards - Columbia Univ., NYC, USA

Florence    Maraninchi (co-chair) - VERIMAG/INPG,
Grenoble, France

Michael     Mendler - University of Bamberg, Germany

Gordon J.   Pace - University of Malta, Msida, Malta

Alessandro  Pinto - UC Berkeley, USA

Marc        Pouzet (co-chair) -
LRI/Paris Sud, France

Klaus       Schneider - University of
Kaiserslautern, Germany

Jean-Pierre Talpin - IRISA, Rennes, France

Daniel      Weil - ATHYS  / Dassault
Systèmes, France



OVERVIEW

SLAP is a workshop dedicated to synchronous languages. Such languages
have emerged in the 80s as a new method to design real-time embedded
critical systems. There exists now a strong interest for them in
industry: Lustre, Esterel, and Signal are used with success to program
real-time and safety critical applications, from nuclear power plant
management layer to Airbus air flight control systems. The purpose of
the SLAP workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners
who work in the field of reactive systems. The workshop topics are
covering all these issues: synchronous model of computation,
synchronous languages and programming formalisms, compiling techniques,
formal verification, test and validation of programs, case-studies,
education, etc.



TOPICS OF INTEREST

After SLAP2002 in Grenoble, SLAP2003 in Porto, SLAP2004 in Barcelona,
and SLAP2005 in Edinburgh, SLAP'06 will be the fifth workshop devoted
entirely to synchronous languages, applications, and programming. It
will be a satellite event of ETAPS'2006. Its purpose is to bring
together researchers and practitioners who work in the field of
reactive systems.



The workshop topics cover the following issues:




FORMAT OF THE WORKSHOP

1 invited talk (to be announced) + regular submissions.



PUBLICATION

The proceedings will be published by ENTCS.



SUBMISSION

Send a pdf file to  Florence.Maraninchi@imag.fr. For any other format, please
contact us in advance. 












International Conference on Virtual Execution
Environments

VEE 2006

Ottawa, Canada, June 14-16, 2006 

http://www.veeconference.org/vee06





VEE is a forum that brings together leading practitioners and
researchers in the broad area of virtualization, which includes topics
such as high-level language virtual machines (JVM, CLR, etc.), process
and system virtual machines, translators, machine emulators, and
simulators. VEE'06 will be co-located with PLDI'06 in Ottawa, Ontario
from June 14-16, 2006. 



Important Dates

  Submission deadline: Thursday, December 15, 2005 11:59PM UTC-11

  Author Notification: Friday, February 17, 2006

  Conference: June 14-16, 2006.



The VEE conference seeks original papers in areas including, but
not  limited to the following:


For more information on VEE'06, including submission details, and
conference organization see http://www.veeconference.org/vee06.


VEE is sponsored by ACM SIGPLAN in cooperation with USENIX and ACM
SIGOPS. 










European Semantic Web Conference

ESWC 2006

Budva, Montenegro, June 11-14, 2006 

http://www.eswc2006.org/





The vision of the Semantic Web is to enhance today's web via the 
exploitation of machine-processable meta data. The explicit 
representation of the semantics of data, accompanied with domain 
theories (Ontologies), will enable a web that provides a 
qualitatively new level of service. It will weave together an 
incredibly large network of human knowledge and will complement
it  with machine processability. Various automated services will
help the  user to achieve goals by accessing and providing
information in  machine-understandable form. This process may
ultimately create truly  knowledgeable systems with various
specialized reasoning services  systems. Many technologies and
methodologies are being developed  within Artificial Intelligence,
Human Language Technology, Machine  Learning, Databases,
Multimedia Systems, Distributed Systems,  Software Engineering and
Information Systems that can contribute  towards the realization
of this vision.

The 3rd Annual European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2006) will 
present the latest results in research and application in
semantic  web technologies (including knowledge mark-up languages,
semantic web  services, ontology management and more). ESWC 2006
will also feature  a special industry-oriented event providing
European industry with an  opportunity to become even more
familiar with these technologies. It  will offer a tutorial
program to get up to speed with European and  global developments
in this exciting new area.

ESWC 2006 is co-located with general assembly of the Knowledge
Web  Network of Excellence. Workshops and meetings of other
European  Commission 6th Framework Programme projects involved in
the semantic  web and semantic web technologies will be able to
showcase their  developments. In particular we will welcome the
new projects accepted  at the EU IST 4th Call.

ESWC 2006 is sponsored by SDK - a group of three European
Commission  6th Framework Programme projects known as SEKT, DIP
and Knowledge  Web. Together these projects aim to improve
world-wide research and  standardisation in the area of the
Semantic Web. For more information  on SDK, please visit www.sdk-cluster.org.



SUBMISSIONS

ESWC 2006 welcomes the submission of excellent original research
and  application papers dealing with all aspects of the semantic
web,  particularly those relating to the subject areas indicated
by the  topics below. We particularly encourage the submission of
papers  relating to industrial efforts and experiences with
semantic web  projects. We also encourage theoretical,
methodological, empirical  and applications papers. The
proceedings of this conference will be  published in Springer's
Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.

Paper submission and reviewing for ESWC 2006 will be electronic,
via  the conference WWW site: http://www.eswc2006.org/. Papers,
due to  November 28th, 2005, should not exceed fifteen (15) 
pages in  Springer LNCS format.



IMPORTANT DATES

Full Paper Submission:        
November 28, 2005

Camera-Ready Papers due:   March 31, 2006

Conference:                        
June 11 - 14, 2006



CONFERENCE TOPICS OF INTEREST AND AREA
KEYWORDS

Topics of interest to the conference include (but are not
restricted  to):


We particularly welcome application papers which clearly show 
benefits of semantic web technologies in practical settings.



PROGRAM CHAIR

York Sure (University of Karlsruhe, DE), sure@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de



PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Andreas Abecker (FZI Karlsruhe, DE)

Dean Allemang (TopQuadrant Inc., US)

Jürgen Angele (Ontoprise, DE)

Anupriya Ankolekar (University of Karlsruhe, DE)

Sean Bechhofer (University of Manchester, UK)

Richard Benjamins (iSOCO, ES)

Abraham Bernstein (University of Zurich, CH)

Walter Binder (EPFL, CH)

Kalina Bontcheva (University Sheffield, UK)

Paolo Bouquet (University of Trento, IT)

Jeen Broekstra (Technical University Eindhoven and Aduna, NL)

Francois Bry (University of Munich, DE)

Paul Buitelaar (DFKI Saarbruecken, DE)

Christoph Bussler (DERI Galway, IE)

Liliana Cabral (Open University, UK)

Nigel Collier (National Institute of Informatics, JP)

Oscar Corcho (University of Manchester, UK)

Isabel Cruz (University Illinois at Chicago, US)

Hamish Cunningham (University Sheffield, UK)

Paulo da Pinheiro (Stanford University, US)

John Davies (BT, UK)

Jos de Bruijn (DERI Innsbruck, AT)

Grit Denker (SRI, US)

Ying Ding (University of Innsbruck, AT)

Martin Dzbor (Open University, UK)

Andreas Eberhart (Hewlett Packard, DE)

Jerome Euzenat (INRIA Rhone-Alpes, FR)

Boi Faltings (EPFL Lausanne, CH)

Dieter Fensel  (University of Innsbruck and DERI, AT)

Enrico Franconi (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, IT)

Aldo Gangemi  (CNR, IT)

Mari Georges (ILOG, FR)

Fausto Giunchiglia (University of Trento, IT)

Carole Goble (University of Manchester, UK)

Christine Golbreich (University of Rennes, FR)

Asun Gomez-Perez (Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, ES)

Marko Grobelnik (J. Stefan Institute, SL)

Nicola Guarino (CNR, IT)

Volker Haarslev (Concordia University, CA)

Siegfried Handschuh (FZI Karlsruhe, DE)

Jeff Heflin (Lehigh University, US)

Nicola Henze (University of Hannover, DE)

Pascal Hitzler (University of Karlsruhe, DE)

Masahiro Hori (Kansai University, JP)

Andreas Hotho (University of Kassel, DE)

Jane Hunter (University of Queensland, AU)

Eero Hyvönen (University of Helsinki, FI)

Vipul Kashyap (Clinical informatics R&D, US)

Atanas Kiryakov (Sirma AI, BG)

Matthias Klusch (DFKI Saarbruecken, DE)

Manolis Koubarakis (Technical University of Crete, GR)

Ruben Lara (Tecnologia, Informacion y Finanzas, ES)

Alain Leger (France Telecom, FR)

Maurizio Lenzerini (Universita di Roma "La Sapienza", IT)

Mihhail Matskin (KTH Stockholm, SE)

Diana Maynard (University Sheffield, UK)

Brian McBride (Hewlett Packard, UK)

Vibhu Mittal (Google Research, US)

Riichiro Mizoguchi (Osaka University, JP)

Dunja Mladenic (J. Stefan Institute, SL)

Ralf Moeller (Hamburg University of Technology, DE)

Boris Motik (FZI Karlsruhe, DE)

Enrico Motta (The Open University, UK)

John Mylopoulos (University of Toronto, CA)

Wolfgang Nejdl (University of Hannover and L3S, DE)

Leo Obrst (MITRE, US)

Jeff Z. Pan (University of Aberdeen, UK)

Terry Payne (University of Southampton, UK)

Sofia Pinto (Technical University of Lisbon, PT)

Marco Pistore (University of Trento, IT)

Aleksander Pivk (J. Stefan Institute, SL)

Dimitris Plexousakis (University of Crete, GR)

Chris Preist (HP Labs, UK)

Jinghai Rao (Carnegie Mellon University, US)

Marie-Christine Rousset (University Orsay, FR)

Stefan Schlobach (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, NL)

Guus Schreiber (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, NL)

Daniel Schwabe (PUC-Rio, BR)

Amit Sheth (University of Georgia and Semagix, US)

Michael Sintek (DFKI Kaiserslautern, DE)

Derek Sleeman (University of Aberdeen, UK)

Kavitha Srinivas (IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, US)

Steffen Staab (University of Koblenz, DE)

Ljiljana Stojanovic (FZI Karlsruhe, DE)

Michael Stollberg (DERI Innsbruck, AT)

Heiner Stuckenschmidt (University of Mannheim, DE)

Rudi Studer (University of Karlsruhe, DE)

Gerd Stumme (University of Kassel, DE)

Vojtech Svatek (University of Economics, CZ)

Katia Sycara (Carnegie Mellon University, US)

Marko Tadic (University of Zagreb, HR)

Hideaki Takeda (National Institute of Informatics, JP)

Valentina Tamma (University of Liverpool, UK)

Herman ter Horst (Philips Research, NL)

Sergio Tessaris (Free University Bozen, IT)

Robert Tolksdorf (Free University Berlin, DE)

Paolo Traverso (Automated Reasoning Systems Division at ITC/IRST, IT)

Frank van Harmelen (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, NL)

Ubbo Visser (University of Bremen, DE)

Holger Wache (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, NL)

Krzysztof Wecel (Poznan University of Economics, PL)

Steve Willmott (Universidad Politecnica de Cataluna, ES)

Michael Wooldridge (University of Liverpool, UK)










International Conference on Coordination Models and
Languages

COORDINATION 2006

Bologna, Italy, June 14-16, 2006 

http://www.cs.unibo.it/discotec06/Coordination06





IMPORTANT DATES

* Submission of
abstract:          
10 January 2006

* Submission of
papers:            
17 January 2006

* Notification of acceptance:       
7 March 2006

* Final
version:                   
28 March 2006

*
Conference:                      
14-16 June 2006





CONFERENCE GOALS

Modern information systems rely increasingly on combining concurrent,
distributed, mobile, reconfigurable and heterogenous components. New
models, architectures, languages, verification techniques are necessary
to cope with the complexity induced by the demands of today's software
development. Coordination languages have emerged as a successful
approach, in that they provide abstractions that cleanly separate
behavior from communication, therefore increasing modularity,
simplifying reasoning, and ultimately enhancing software development.



Building on the success of the previous editions, this conference
provides a well-established forum for the growing community of
researchers interested in models, languages, architectures, and
implementation techniques for coordination.



PREVIOUS EDITIONS

The previous editions of COORDINATION took place in Cesena (Italy),
Berlin (Germany), Amsterdam (Netherlands), Limassol (Cyprus), York
(UK), Pisa (Italy) and Namur (Belgium). More details are available at http://music.dsi.unifi.it/coordination.



TOPICS OF INTEREST

They include but are not limited to:




PROCEEDINGS

Proceedings of previous editions of this conference were published by
Springer, in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series and
are available as LNCS volumes 1061, 1282, 1594, 1906, 2315, 2949 and
3454. The intention is to continue this series.



SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS

Authors are invited to submit full papers electronically in PostScript
or PDF using a two-phase online submission process. Registration of the
paper information and abstract (max. 250 words) must be completed
before 10 January 2006. Submission of the full paper is due no later
than 17 January 2006. Further instructions on the submission procedure
will be published at http://www.cs.unibo.it/discotec06/Coordination06.



Submissions must be formatted according to the LNCS guidelines (see http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html)
and must not exceed 15pages in length. Papers that are not in the
requested format or significantly exceed the mandated length may be
rejected without going through the review phase.



Submissions should explicitly state their contribution and their
relevance to the theme of the conference. Other criteria for selection
will be originality, significance, correctness, and clarity.

Simultaneous or similar submissions to other conferences or journals
are not allowed.



CONFERENCE LOCATION

The conference will be hosted by the Department of Computer Science of
the University of Bologna.



PROGRAM COMMITTEE

(Provisional)



Co-Chairs

Paolo Ciancarini        
University of Bologna, Italy

Herbert Wiklicky        
Imperial College London, UK



Members

Farhad
Arbab                     
CWI Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Antonio
Brogi                    
University of Pisa, Italy

Wolfgang
Emmerich                
University College London, UK

Frank de
Boer                    
CWI & Utrecht University, The Netherlands

Jean-Marie
Jacquet               
University of Namur, Belgium

Josst
Kok                        
Leiden University, The Netherlands

Toby
Lehman                      
IBM Almaden, US

D.C.
Marinescu                   
University of Central Florida, US

Ronaldo
Menezes                  
Florida Institute of Technology, US

Andrea
Omicini                   
University of Bologna, Italy

Paolo
Petta                      
OeFAI, Austria

Gian Pietro
Picco                
Politecnico di Milano, Italy

Ernesto
Pimentel                 
University of Malaga, Spain

Rosario
Pugliese                 
University of Florence, Italy

Gruia Catalin
Roman              
Washington Univeeristy, USA

Robert
Tolksdorf                 
FU Berlin, Germany

Emilio
Tuosto                    
University of Leicester, UK

Carlos
Varela                    
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, US

Alan
Wood                        
University of York, UK










Computer Science Logic

CSL 2006

Szeged, Hungary, September 25-29, 2006 

http://www.inf.u-szeged.hu/~csl06/





Computer Science Logic (CSL) is the annual conference of the European
Association for Computer Science Logic (EACSL). The conference is
intended for computer scientists whose research activities involve
logic, as well as for logicians working on issues significant for
computer science. CSL'06, the 15th annual EACSL conference will be
organized by the Institute of Informatics, University of Szeged.



Suggested topics of interest include: automated deduction and
interactive theorem proving, constructive mathematics and type theory,
equational logic and term rewriting, automata and formal logics, modal
and temporal logic, model checking, logical aspects of computational
complexity, finite model theory, computational proof theory, logic
programming and constraints, lambda calculus and combinatory logic,
categorical logic and topological semantics, domain theory, database
theory, specification, extraction and transformation of programs,
logical foundations of programming paradigms, verification of security
protocols, linear logic, higher-order logic, nonmonotonic reasoning,
logics and type systems for biology.



Programme Committee:      


Krzysztof Apt (Amsterdam/Singapore) 

Matthias Baaz
(Vienna)            


Michael Benedikt
(Chicago)         

Pierre-Louis Curien (Paris)        

Rocco De Nicola
(Florence)         

Zoltan Esik (Szeged, chair)

Dov Gabbay (London)

Fabio Gadducci
(Pisa)             


Neil Immerman (Amherst)

Michael Kaminski (Haifa)

Bakhadyr Khoussainov (Auckland)    

Ulrich Kohlenbach (Darmstadt)      

Marius Minea
(Timisoara)          


Damian Niwinski
(Warsaw)           

R. Ramanujam
(Chennai)            


Philip Scott
(Ottawa)             


Philippe Schnoebelen (Cachan)      

Alex Simpson
(Edinburgh)          




Invited speakers:

Martin Escardo (Birgmingham)

Paul-Andre Mellies (Paris)

Luke Ong (Oxford)

Luc Segoufin (Orsay)

Miroslaw Truszczynski(Lexington,KY)



Organizing Committee:

Zoltan Esik (Szeged, co-chair)

Zsolt Gazdag (Szeged)

Eva Gombas (Szeged, co-chair)

Szabolcs Ivan (Szeged)

Zsolt Kakuk (Szeged)

Zoltan L. Nemeth (Szeged)

Sandor Vagvolgyi (Szeged, workshop-chair)



It is anticipated that the proceedings will be published in the LNCS
series. Each paper accepted by the Programme Committee must be
presented at the conference by one of the authors, and final copy
prepared according to Springer's guidelines.



Submitted papers must be in Springer's LNCS style and of no more than
15 pages, presenting work not previously published. They must not be
submitted concurrently to another conference with refereed proceedings.
The PC chair should be informed of closely related work submitted to a
conference or journal by 1 April, 2006. Papers authored or coauthored
by members of the Programme Committee are not allowed.



Submitted papers must be in English and provide sufficient detail to
allow the Programme Committee to assess the merits of the paper. Full
proofs may appear in a technical appendix which will be read at the
reviewer's discretion. The title page must contain: title and
author(s), physical and e-mail addresses, identification of the
corresponding author, an abstract of no more than 200 words, and a list
of keywords.



The submission deadline is in two stages. Titles and abstracts must be
submitted by 24 April, 2006 and full papers by 1 May, 2006.
Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 12 June, 2006, and final
versions are due 3 July, 2006. A submission server will be available
from 1 April, 2006.



The Ackermann Award for 2006 will be presented to the recipients at
CSL'06.



Important Dates:

Submission


title & abstract: 24 April, 2006

full paper:        1
May,   2006



Notification:       12 June,  2006

Final papers:        3 July, 
2006



Conference address:

              
CSL'06

              
c/o Prof. Zoltan Esik

              
Institute of Informatics,

              
University of Szeged

              
H-6701, Szeged, P.O.B. 652,

              
Hungary 












Workshop on Agent Based Modeling and Simulation

ABModSim 2006

Vienna, Austria, April 18-21, 2006 

http://www.lintar.disco.unimib.it/ABModSim/





The notions of agents and multi-agent systems have been widely adopted
for the modelling of complex systems in most various contexts, ranging
from social sciences, to urban modelling and planning, biology,
logistics and production, and many other more. However the concepts
behind the term agent are often quite different, as well as the goals
of the modelling and simulation activities. This leads to different
approaches, methodologies and developed computational systems
supporting simulation of the modeled realities. The aim of this
workshop is to bring together experiences related to agent based
modelling and simulation in different contexts and thus to try to
identify common goals and research issues, and to possibly define
common methodologies and requirements for computational supports to
agent based modelling and simulation.



Topics of interest

We invite papers on all aspects relating to agent based modeling and
simulation, with particular attention to interdisciplinary experiences.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:


Important dates

Deadline for submission (extended!):     November
18, 2005

Notification of acceptance/rejection:    December 16,
2005

Final
papers:                           
January 30, 2006



After the workshop, extended versions of selected accepted contributions

will be included in a special issue of an international journal.



Program Committee (Further members to
be announced)

- Stefania Bandini (University of Milano-Bicocca - Italy)

- Michael Batty (Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) - UK)

- Rafael Bordini (University of Durham - UK)

- Bastien Chopard (University of Geneva - Switzerland)

- Paul Davidsson (Blekinge Institute of Technology - Sweden)

- Jan Dijkstra (Eindhoven University of Technology - Netherlands)

- Giovanna Di Marzo Serugendo (University of Geneva - Switzerland)

- Samira El Yacoubi (University of Perpignan - France)

- Nigel Gilbert (University of Surrey - UK)

- Nabeel Koshak (Umm Al-Qura University - Saudi Arabia)

- Markus Knoflacher (Austrian Research Centre - Austria)

- Sara Manzoni (University of Milano-Bicocca - Italy)

- Fabien Michel (LIRMM - France)

- Andrea Omicini (University of Bologna - Italy)

- Paolo Petta (Medical University of Vienna and OFAI - Austria)

- Andreas Pyka (University of Augsburg - Germany)

- Keith Sawyer (Washington University - USA)

- Andreas Schadschneider (University of Cologne - Germany)

- Flavio Soares Correa da Silva (University of S. Paulo - Brazil)

- Harry Timmermans (Eindhoven University of Technology - Netherlands)

- Marco Valente (University of L'Aquila - Italy)

- Giuseppe Vizzari (University of Milano-Bicocca - Italy)

- Danny Weyns (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven - Belgium)

- Franco Zambonelli (Università di Modena-Reggio Emilia - Italy)



Further Information

For more information on the workshop please contact Giuseppe Vizzari
(giuseppe.vizzari [at) disco.unimib.it). For information about paper
formatting, registration, and accomodation please see the EMCSR06
website (http://www.osgk.ac.at/emcsr/). 










International Workshop on Non-Monotonic Reasoning

NMR 2006

Lake District, UK, May 30-June 1, 2006 

http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/a.hunter/nmr/





This is the 11th workshop in the NMR series. Its aim is to bring
together active researchers in the broad area of nonmonotonic
reasoning, including belief revision, reasoning about actions,
planning, logic programming, argumentation, causality, probabilistic
and possibilistic approaches to KR, and other related topics.



As part of the program of the 11th workshop, we will assess the status
of the field and discuss issues such as: Significant recent
achievements in the theory and automation of NMR; Critical short and
long term goals for NMR; Emerging new research directions in NMR;
Practical applications of NMR; Significance of NMR to knowledge
representation and AI in general.



The workshop programme will be chaired by Juergen Dix and Anthony
Hunter, and the provisional programme will include the following
sessions (with session chairs).


Authors are invited to submit papers directly to any of the above
sessions. Click on the above links for the CFP for each session.
Informal proceedings for the workshop including accepted papers will be
published on the web. Each paper should be no longer than 9 pages using
the KR paper format.



Below are the important dates for the workshop.


Details on the workshop location, programme, invited talks,
registration, accommodation, etc will be presented on this website soon.












International Workshop on Logic for Automated
Reasoning and Automated Reasoning for Logic

LARARL 2006

St. Petersburg, Russia, June 8-12, 2006 

http://www.cs.miami.edu/~geoff/Conferences/LARARL/





This workshop will bring together practioners and researchers who are
concerned with the logics that underlie automated reasoning, and the
use of automated reasoning to investgate logics and their applications.
Reasoning in all forms (automated, interactive, etc) and all logics
(classical, non-classical, all orders, etc) is of interest to the
workshop. The workshop will be divided into two tracks:



Logic for Automated Reasoning


Automated Reasoning for Logic


Submission of papers for presentation at the workshop, and proposals
for system and application demonstrations at the workshop, are now
invited. Submissions  will be reviewed (using this review form),
and a balanced program of high-quality contributions will be selected.
There is a 20 page limit. Full details of the workshop and submission
requirements are on the WWW page.



Submission deadline - 6th March 2006










International Symposium on Methodologies for
Intelligent Systems

ISMIS 2006

Bari, Italy, September 27-29, 2006 

http://www.di.uniba.it/ismis2006/





ISMIS has established a  prestigious tradition by organizing a
leading international  conference  on  intelligent 
systems.   The  conference provides a  unique
opportunity for exchanging  scientific research and
technological   achievements  
accomplished   by   the   international
community.   The previous  events  were held 
in Knoxville,  Tennessee (1986, 1990), Charlotte, North Carolina
(1987, 1989, 1991, 1994, 1997, 2000), Turin (1988), Trondheim (1993),
Zakopane (1996), Warsaw (1999), Lyon (2002), Maebashi City (2003),
Saratoga Springs (2005).



Important Dates

    Paper submission:.................. March 18

    Notification of acceptance:........ May 15

    Camera-ready copy due:............. June 30



Conference Theme

ISMIS is  intended to represent a  wide range of topics 
of concern to scholars applying advanced techniques  to areas as
diverse as decision support,  automated  deduction, 
reasoning, knowledge  based  systems, machine 
learning,  computer  vision, robotics,  planning, 
databases, information retrieval,  etc.  ISMIS  provides
a medium  for exchanging scientific research and technological
achievements accomplished by the international  community.
The  focus of  the  work is  on research  in
Intelligent  systems.   The  conference 
addresses   issues  involving solutions  of 
problems  which   are  complex  to 
be  solved  through conventional   approaches 
and   which  require   the  
simulation  of intelligent   thought 
processes,   heuristics  and  
applications  of knowledge.  The integration  of
these  multiple approaches  in solving complex problems 
is of particular importance. ISMIS  provides a forum and a means
for exchanging  information for those interested purely in
theory,  those  interested  primarily  in 
implementation,  and  those interested in specific research
and industrial applications.



Topics of Interest

ISMIS 2006 invites submissions  of original research
contributions, as well  as  proposals  for 
panels  and  workshops.   Contributions  for
industry  and applications sessions  and software 
demonstrations also are  solicited.   The 
conference  covers  a broad  range  of 
topics, including  the  use  of  
conventional  approaches,  as  well  as  new
challenges  for advanced  techniques  for
intelligent  systems in  any possible domain.  
This Symposium  is intended to  attract individuals who are
actively engaged both  in theoretical and practical aspects of
intelligent systems.  The  goal is to provide a 
platform for a useful exchange between  theoreticians and 
practitioners, and to  foster the cross-fertilization of ideas in
the following areas:


In  addition,   we  solicit  
papers  dealing  with   Applications  of
Intelligent  Systems in  complex/novel domains, 
e.g.  bioinformatics, global change, manufacturing, health care,
etc.



Submission

Proceedings will be published by Springer-Verlag in LNCS/LNAI (Lecture
Notes  in  Artificial  Intelligence)  and 
will be  available  at  the symposium.   Any
necessary information  concerning typesetting  can be
obtained directly from Springer-Verlag page at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html.



Authors are invited to submit  their manuscript in the LNCS/LNAI
style (maximum   10  pages).    All 
paper   submissions  will   be  handled
electronically. Detailed  instructions are provided  on the
conference homepage at http://www.di.uniba.it/ismis2006/



A selected number  of ISMIS 2006 accepted papers  will be
expanded and revised for  possible inclusion in Journal  of
Intelligent Information Systems  (http://www.wkap.nl/journal/)  
by  Springer,  Knowledge  and Information Systems 
journal (http://www.cs.uvm.edu/~xwu/kais.html)
by Springer-Verlag,   Web  
Intelligence   and  Agent  
Systems   journal (http://wi-consortium.org/)
by IOS Press, Annual Review of Intelligent Informatics  (http://wi-consortium.org/) by
World  Scientific, Journal

of  Experimental  & Theoretical  Artificial 
Intelligence (Taylor  and Francis) (http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/0952813X.asp).



Conference Officers

General Chair:

  Zbigniew W. Ras, University of North Carolina (USA)

Program Chair:

  Floriana Esposito, University of Bari (Italy)

Program Co-Chairs:

  Donato Malerba, University of Bari (Italy)

  Giovanni Semeraro, University of Bari (Italy)



Steering Committee:

 Floriana Esposito (Univ. Bari, Italy)

 Mohand-Said Hacid (Univ. Lyon 1, France)

 David Hislop (ARL/ARO, USA)

 Setsuo Ohsuga (Waseda Univ., Japan)

 Zbigniew W. Ras (UNC-Charlotte) (Chair)

 Robert Meersman (Vrije Univ. Brussels, Belgium)

 Neil Murray (SUNY at Albany, USA)

 Lorenza Saitta (Univ. Piemonte Orientale, Italy)

 Shusaku Tsumoto (Shimane Medical Univ., Japan)

 Maria Zemankova (NSF, USA)

 Djamel Zighed (Univ. Lyon 2, France)

 Ning Zhong (Maebashi Institute of Tech., Japan)



Program Committee:

 Luigia Carlucci Aiello (Univ. Roma, Italy)

 Troels Andreasen (Roskilde Univ., Denmark)

 Stefania Bandini (University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy)

 Salima Benbernou (University Lyon 1, France)

 Petr Berka (Univ. of Economics, Prague, Czech Republic)

 Elisa Bertino (Purdue Univ., USA)

 Alan Biermann (Duke Univ., USA)

 Jacques Calmet (Univ. of Karlsruhe, Germany)

 Sandra Carberry (Univ. of Delaware, USA)

 Juan Carlos Cubero (Univ. de Granada, Spain)

 Agnieszka Dardzinska (Bialystok Technical Univ., Poland)

 Ian Davidson (SUNY at Albany, USA)

 Robert Demolombe (ONERA/CERT, France)

 Eric Dietrich (SUNY at Binghamton, USA)

 Tapio Elomaa (Tampere Univ. of Technology, Finland)

 Attilio Giordana (Univ. Piemonte Orientale, Italy)

 Marco Gori (University of Siena, Italy)

 Jerzy Grzymala-Busse (Univ. of Kansas, USA)

 Mirsad Hadzikadic (Univ. of North Carolina, Charlotte, USA)

 Janusz Kacprzyk (Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland)

 Joost N. Kok (Leiden University, The Netherlands)

 Jacek Koronacki (Polish Acad. Sci., Poland)

 T.Y. Lin (San Jose State Univ., USA)

 David Maluf (NASA Ames)

 Simone Marinai (University of Florence, Italy)

 Stan Matwin (Univ. of Ottawa, Canada)

 Paola Mello (University of Bologna, Italy)

 Maria Teresa Pazienza (Università degli Studi di Roma,
Italy)

 Witold Pedrycz (Univ. of Alberta, Canada)

 Luís Moniz Pereira (Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal)

 James Peters (Univ. of Manitoba, Canada)

 Enric Plaza (CSIC - Spanish Scientific Research Council, Spain)

 Vijay Raghavan (Univ. of Louisiana, USA)

 Jan Rauch (Univ. of Economics, Prague, Czech Rep.)

 Gilbert Ritschard (Univ. of Geneva, Switzerland)

 Marie-Christine Rousset (University Paris-Sud, France)

 Nahid Shahmehri (Linkoping Univ., Sweden)

 Andrzej Skowron (Univ. of Warsaw, Poland)

 Dominik Slezak (Univ. of Regina, Canada)

 Steffen Staab (University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany)

 V.S. Subrahmanian (Univ. of Maryland, USA)

 Einoshin Suzuki (Yokohama National Univ., Japan)

 Piero Torasso (University of Turin, Italy)

 Li-Shiang Tsay (Hampton Univ., USA)

 Athena Vakali (Thessaloniki University, Greece)

 Christel Vrain (The Orleans Univ., France)

 Alicja Wieczorkowska (Polish-Japanese Institute of IT, Poland)

 Xindong Wu (Univ. of Vermont, USA)

 Xintao Wu (Univ. of North Carolina

 Yiyu Yao (Univ. of Regina, Canada)



 For additional information contact:



     Professor Zbigniew W. Ras (ISMIS 2006)

     University of North Carolina

     Dept. of Computer Science

     Charlotte, NC 28226

     Fax: 704-547-3516

     E-mail: ras@uncc.edu



     Professor Floriana Esposito (ISMIS 2006)

     Department of Computer Science

     University of Bari

     Via Orabona, 4 - 70125, Bari, Italy

     Telephone & Fax: +39 080 544 32 64

     E-mail: esposito@di.uniba.it














International Workshop on Term Graph Rewriting

TERMGRAPH 2006

Vienna, Austria, April 1, 2006 

http://www.dcs.kcl.ac.uk/events/TERMGRAPH2006/





Term graph rewriting is concerned with the representation of functional
expressions as graphs and the evaluation of these expressions by
rule-based graph transformation. The advantage of using graphs rather
than strings or trees is that common subexpressions can be shared,
which improves the efficiency of computations in space and time.
Sharing is ubiquitous in implementations of functional and logic
programming languages, systems for automated reasoning, and symbolic
computation systems, etc.



The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers working in
these different domains and to foster their interaction, to provide a
forum for presenting new ideas and work in progress, and to enable
newcomers to learn about current activities in term graph rewriting.
TERMGRAPH 2006 will be a one-day satellite event of the ETAPS 2006,
which will take place in Vienna, 2006. The first TERMGRAPH workshop
took place in Barcelona in 2002 and the second in Rome in 2004.



Topics of interest include all aspects of term graphs and sharing of
common subexpressions in rewriting, programming, automated reasoning
and symbolic computation. This includes (but is not limited to): Theory
of first-order and higher-order term graph rewriting; Graph rewriting
in lambda calculus (sharing graphs, interaction nets, optimality);
Applications in functional, logic and functional-logic programming;
Applications in automated reasoning and symbolic computation;
Implementation issues; System descriptions.



Invited Speaker

Ugo Montanari, University of Pisa, Italy



Submissions and Publication

Authors are invited to submit an extended abstract (max. 10 pages) by
e-mail to ian.mackie@kcl.ac.uk by 7 January, 2006. Preliminary
proceedings will be available at the workshop. Submissions should be in
PostScript or PDF format, using ENTCS style files. After the workshop
authors are invited to submit a full paper of their presentation.
Accepted contributions will appear in an issue of Elsevier's Electronic
Notes in Theoretical Computer Science.



Important Dates

Submission deadline for Extended Abstracts:  7 January, 2006

Notification: 10 February, 2006

Pre-proceedings version due: 15 March, 2006

Workshop: 1 April, 2006

Submission deadline for ENTCS: 15 June, 2006.

Notification: 15 September, 2006.

Final Versions: 15 October, 2006.



Programme Committee

Zena Ariola,  University of Oregon, USA

Fabio Gadducci, University of Pisa, Italy

Pierre Lescanne, ENS Lyon, France

Ian Mackie, King's College London, UK (Chair)

Aart Middeldorp, University of Innsbruck, Austria

Rinus Plasmeijer,   Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands

Detlef Plump, University of York, UK

Vladimiro Sassone,  University of Sussex, UK



Organizing Committee

Maribel Fernandez, King's College London, UK

Bernhard Gramlich, Vienna University of Technology, Austria












International Conference on Relational Methods in
Computer Science

RelMiCS 2006

Manchester, UK, August 29-September 2, 2006 

http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/relmics06/





GENERAL INFORMATION:

The RelMiCS Conference is the main forum for the relational calculus as
a conceptual and methodological tool.  The AKA Workshop is a forum
on topics related to Kleene algebras. As in previous years, the two
events are co-organised; they have a joint programme committee and
joint proceedings.  RelMiCS/AKA 2006 will be held from 29 August
to 2 September 2006 in Manchester.

Visit the conference website www.cs.man.ac.uk/relmics06/ for more
information.



TOPICS:

We invite submissions on the general topics of relations and Kleene
algebra in computer science.  Special focus will be on formal
methods for software engineering, logics of programs and links with
neighbouring disciplines.  Particular topics of the conference
cover, but are not limited to the theory of 


and their applications in areas such as 


IMPORTANT DATES:

A paper title and a short abstract of about 100 words must be submitted
before the paper. All submissions will be electronic. 

  Abstract Submission:  27 February 2006

  Paper Submission:     6 March 2006

  Author Notification:  2 May 2006

  Camera-ready papers:  2 June 2006

  RelMiCS/AKA 2006:     29 August - 2
September 2006

  

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS:

Submissions must be in English, in postscript or pdf format and provide
sufficient information to judge their merits.  They must be
unpublished and not submitted for publication elsewhere.  They may
not exceed 15 pages in Springer LNCS style. Additional material may be
provided by a clearly marked appendix or a reference to a manuscript on
a website.  This may be considered at the discretion of the PC.
Deviation from these requirements may cause immediate rejection. One
author of each accepted paper is expected to present the paper at the
conference.  

Detailed instructions for electronic submission will appear on the
conference web site in December/January.



PUBLICATION DETAILS:

The proceedings of the conference will most probably be published in
the Springer LNCS series.  The proceedings will be available at
the conference.



STUDENT PROGRAMME:

A PhD training programme will be co-organised with the conference.
Details will be published in a special call and on the conference
website.



COMMITTEES: 

  General Chair:

    Renate Schmidt, Manchester, UK, schmidt@cs.man.ac.uk



  Programme Chair:

    Georg Struth, Sheffield, UK, g.struth@dcs.shef.ac.uk



  Programme Committee:

    Roland Backhouse, Nottingham, UK

    Brandon Bennett, Leeds, UK

    Rudolf Berghammer, Kiel, Germany

    Stephane Demri, Cachan, France

    Jules Desharnais, Laval, Canada

    Zoltan Esik, Szeged, Hungary & Tarragona, Spain

    Marcello Frias, Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Hitoshi Furusawa, AIST, Japan

    Stephane Gaubert, INRIA, France

    Steven Givant, Mills College, USA

    Valentin Goranko, Witwatersrand, South Africa

    Martin Henson, Essex, UK

    Ali Jaoua, Quatar

    Peter Jipsen, Chapman University, USA

    Wolfram Kahl, McMaster, Canada

    Yasuo Kawahara, Kyushu, Japan

    Zhiming Liu, UNU-IIST Macao, China

    Bernhard Moeller, Augsburg, Germany

    Damian Niwinski, Warsaw, Poland

    Ewa Orlowska, Warsaw, Poland

    Alban Ponse, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Ingrid Rewitzky, Stellenbosch, South Africa

    Ildiko Sain, Hungarian Academy of Sciences

    Holger Schlingloff, Berlin, Germany

    Gunther Schmidt, Muenchen, Germany

    Renate Schmidt, Manchester, UK

    Giuseppe Scollo, Verona, Italy

    Harrie de Swart, Tilburg, The Netherlands

    Michael Winter, St.Catharines, Canada



   Local Organisation: 

    Renate Schmidt, Manchester, UK, schmidt@cs.man.ac.uk

    Zhen Liz, Manchester, UK

    David Robinson, Manchester, UK

    Iain Hart & ACSO, Manchester, UK












International Conference on Computational Science

ICCS 2006

Reading, UK, May 28-31, 2006 

http://www.iccs-meeting.org/iccs2006





You are invited to submit a paper with unpublished original work and/or
a proposal to organise a workshop at ICCS 2006, Reading, UK, May 28-31,
2006.

Please, see http://www.iccs-meeting.org/iccs2006/
for more information.



ICCS 2006 is the sixth in the series of highly successful conferences.



The theme for ICCS, "Advancing Science through Computation", marks the
continued progress in computational science theory and practice,
leading to greatly improved applications in science. This conference
will be a unique event focusing on recent developments in novel methods
and modelling of complex systems for diverse areas of science, on
scalable scientific algorithms, advanced software tools, computational
grids, advanced numerical methods, and on novel application areas where
the above novel models, algorithms and tools can be efficiently applied
such as physical systems, computational and systems biology,
environmental systems, finance, and others. We look forward to
welcoming you to this exciting event!



The ICCS 2006 Proceedings will be published in Springer's Lecture Notes
in Computer Science (LNCS) series.



Important dates:

Proposals for
Workshops               
November 1, 2005

Full papers
submission                
December 2, 2005

Notification of acceptance of papers   January 31, 2006

Camera ready
papers                   
February 10, 2006

Early
registration                    
March 30, 2006



Contact:

ICCS Local Organizing Committee

ACET Centre

School of Systems Engineering

Whiteknights, P.O. Box 225

Reading, RG6 6AY

Phone     +44 118 378 6372

FAX:      +44 118 378 5224

Email:    iccs2006@reading.ac.uk



Vassil Alexandrov.... Scientific Chair

Dick van Albada...... Workshop Chair

Jack Dongarra........ Overall Co-chair

Peter M.A. Sloot..... Overall Chair










Workshop on Logic, Models, and Computer Science

LMCS 2006

Camerino, Italy, April 20-22, 2006 

http://www.unicam.it/matinf/lmcs06





AIMS OF THE WORKSHOP

Mathematical Logic has been contributing in a relevant way to the birth
and the development of Computer Science. Accordingly the AILA Logic,
Models and Computer Science workshop  LMCS06 just aims at bringing
together researchers interested in the interactions between
Mathematical Logic and several fields in Computer Science. LMCS06
wishes also to honour the memory of Sauro Tulipani, who so largely and
brilliantly, and for so many years contributed to this research area.
Hence the workshop will focus in particular on Sauro's main research
interests


but it will also deal with other topics such as


and further themes concerned with the relationship between Mathematical
Logic and Computer Science.



SUBMISSIONS:

Submissions may be of two forms:


Simultaneous submission to other conferences or journals is only
allowed for short papers. Submissions may already use the ENTCS-style
format.



PUBLICATION OF THE PROCEEDINGS:

The proceedings will be published after the workshop in the ENTCS
(Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science).



A printed preliminary version of the proceedings will be available at
the workshop. Authors will be asked to prepare their final version
using the ENTCS-style format.



Authors of selected papers will be invited after the workshop to submit
for publication of a full version in a Special  Issue of the
Mathematical Structures in Computer Science; those submissions will
then be subject to a separate reviewing procedure matching the
standards of the journal.



IMPORTANT DATES:

Deadline for Paper Submission: February 4, 2006

Notification to Authors: March 15, 2006

Final Version of Accepted Papers due: April 1, 2006



INVITED SPEAKERS (PROVISIONAL LIST)

Luca Aceto (Aalborg, Denmark/Reykjavik, Iceland)

Riccardo Camerlo (Polytechnic Turin, Italy)

Andrea Capotorti/Marco Baioletti (Perugia, Italy)

Rocco De Nicola (Florence, Italy)

Mariangiola Dezani (Turin, Italy)

Wilfrid Hodges (QMUL London, UK)

Giuseppe Longo (ENS Paris, France)

Angus Macintyre (QMUL London, UK)

Johann Makowski (Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel)

Daniele Mundici (Florence, Italy)

Giovanni Sambin (Padua, Italy)



PROGRAM CO-CHAIRS:

Flavio Corradini (University of Camerino, Italy)

Carlo Toffalori (University of Camerino, Italy)



PROGRAM COMMITTEE:

Rajeev Alur, Pennsylvania, USA

Flavio Corradini (co), Camerino, Italy

Zoltan Esik, Szeged, Hungary/Tarragona, Spain

Annalisa Marcja, Florence, Italy

Simone Martini, Bologna, Italy

Alberto Policriti, Udine, Italy

Simona Ronchi Della Rocca, Turin, Italy

Carlo Toffalori (co), Camerino, Italy



ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:

Patrizio Cintioli, Camerino, Italy

Flavio Corradini, Camerino, Italy

Stefano Leonesi, Camerino, Italy

Sonia L'Innocente, Camerino, Italy

Emanuela Merelli, Camerino, Italy

Carlo Toffalori, Camerino, Italy












Computability in Europe: Logical Approaches to
Computational Barriers

CiE 2006

Swansea, Wales, June 30-July 5, 2006 

http://www.cs.swansea.ac.uk/cie06/







CiE 2006 is the second of a new conference series on Computability
Theory and related topics which started in Amsterdam in 2005.  CiE
2006 will focus on (but not be limited to) logical approaches to
computational barriers:


Tutorials will be given by:

   Samuel R. Buss (San Diego)

   Julia Kempe (Paris)



Invited Speakers include:

   Jan Bergstra (Amsterdam)

   Luca Cardelli (Microsoft Cambridge)

   Jan Krajicek (Prague)

   Elvira Mayordomo Camara (Zaragoza)

   Istvan Nemeti (Budapest)

   Helmut Schwichtenberg (Munich)

   Andreas Weiermann (Utrecht)



The Programme Committee cordially invites all researchers (European and
non-European) in the area of Computability Theory to submit their
papers (in PDF-format, at most 10 pages) for presentation at CiE 2006.
We particularly invite papers that build bridges between different
parts of the research community.  Since women are underrepresented
in mathematics and computer science, we emphatically encourage
submissions by female authors.



The proceedings are intended to be published within Springer's LNCS
series. Important dates are:



Submission Deadline:        
December 15th, 2005.

Notification of Authors:     February 15th, 2006.

Deadline for Final Version:     March 15th, 2006.



Programme Committee:

   Samson Abramsky  (Oxford)

   Klaus Ambos-Spies (Heidelberg)

   Arnold Beckmann (Swansea, co-chair)

   Ulrich Berger (Swansea)

   Olivier Bournez (Nancy)

   Barry Cooper (Leeds)

   Laura Crosilla (Firenze)

   Costas Dimitracopoulos (Athens)

   Abbas Edalat (London)

   Fernando Ferreira (Lisbon)

   Ricard Gavalda (Barcelona)

   Giuseppe Longo (Paris)

   Benedikt Loewe (Amsterdam)

   Yuri Matiyasevich (St.Petersburg)

   Dag Normann (Oslo)

   Giovanni Sambin (Padova)

   Uwe Schoening (Ulm)

   Andrea Sorbi (Siena)

   Ivan Soskov (Sofia)

   Leen Torenvliet (Amsterdam)

   John Tucker (Swansea, co-chair)

   Peter van Emde Boas (Amsterdam)

   Klaus Weihrauch (Hagen)



Confirmed sponsors:

   British Logic Colloquium (BLC)

   Kurt Goedel Society (KGS)

   Welsh Development Agency (WDA)



For more information about the conference please check the CiE
conference series http://www.illc.uva.nl/CiE/
and our web page http://www.cs.swansea.ac.uk/cie06/.












International Conference on Rewriting Techniques and
Applications

RTA 2006

Seattle, WA, August 12-14, 2006 

http://rta06.csl.sri.com/





The 17th International Conference on Rewriting Techniques and
Applications (RTA'06) is organized as part of the Federated Logic
Conference (FLoC), collocated with CAV, ICLP, IJCAR, LICS, SAT, and
several affiliated workshops.



IMPORTANT DATES:

 Feb 15, 2006: Deadline for electronic submission of title and
abstract

 Feb 22, 2006: Deadline for electronic submission of papers

 May 01, 2006: Notification of acceptance of papers

 Jun 01, 2006: Deadline for final versions of accepted papers





RTA is the major forum for the presentation of research on all aspects
of rewriting. Typical areas of interest include (but are not limited
to):


The following workshops are affiliated with RTA'06:


Please refer to the RTA'06 web site for further information on the
workshops.



INVITED SPEAKERS:

Randy Bryant will be the joint plenary speaker of LICS, RTA and SAT.
More RTA invited speakers will be announced later.



BEST PAPER AWARDS AND TRAVEL GRANTS: 

An award is given to the best paper or papers as decided by the program
committee. A limited number of travel grants may be available for
students who are (co-)authors of RTA-papers. To apply for grants,
students should send an e-mail to the PC chair together with their
submission.



RTA'06 PROGRAM COMMITTEE CHAIR:

  * Frank Pfenning, Carnegie Mellon University



RTA'06 PROGRAM COMMITTEE:

 * Zena Ariola, University of Oregon

 * Franz Baader, Technical University Dresden

 * Gilles Dowek, Ecole Polytechnique and INRIA

 * Guillem Godoy, Technical University of Catalonia

 * Deepak Kapur, University of New Mexico

 * Delia Kesner, University Paris 7

 * Denis Lugiez, University of Provence

 * Claude Marche, University Paris-Sud

 * Jose Meseguer, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

 * Frank Pfenning, Carnegie Mellon University (Chair)

 * Ashish Tiwari, SRI International

 * Yoshihito Toyama, Tohoku University

 * Eelco Visser, Utrecht University 

 * Hans Zantema, Eindhoven University of Technology



RTA'06 CONFERENCE CHAIR:

  * Ashish Tiwari, SRI International



RTA'06 SUBMISSIONS:

Submissions must be original and not submitted for publication
elsewhere. Submission categories include regular research papers and
system descriptions. Problem sets and submissions describing
interesting applications of rewriting techniques are also welcome. The
page limit for submissions is 15 pages in Springer Verlag LNCS style
(10 pages for system descriptions).



Please consult http://rta06.csl.sri.com/ for further instructions.



LOCATION, TRAVEL, ACCOMMODATION, AND
REGISTRATION:

RTA'06 will be part of the 2006 Federated Logic Conference (FLoC 2006)
which will be held August 10-22, 2006, at the Seattle Sheraton Hotel
and Towers, in Seattle, Washington state, USA. Further information will
be made available at the FLoC 2006 home page http://research.microsoft.com/floc06/index.htm.












International Conference on Computer Aided
Verification

CAV 2006

Seattle, WA, August 16-21, 2006 

http://research.microsoft.com/floc06/cav.htm





Aims and Scope: 

CAV'06 is the 18th in a series dedicated to the advancement of the
theory and practice of computer-assisted formal analysis methods for
hardware and software systems.  This year, CAV is part of the 4th
International Federated Logic Conference (FLoC 2006), which includes
CAV and five other conferences/symposia.



Topics of interest include:
algorithms and tools for verifying models and implementations; hardware
verification techniques; program analysis and software verification;
modeling and specification formalisms; deductive, compositional, and
abstraction techniques for verification; testing and runtime analysis
based on verification technology; applications and case studies;
verification in industrial practice.



Special Symposium: 

The first day of CAV is traditionally a tutorial day.  This year,
the tutorial will be replaced with a special symposium entitled "25
Years of Model Checking".



Affiliated workshops:


Submission: 

There are two categories of submissions: regular papers (not to exceed
13 pages) and tool presentations (not to exceed 4 pages). 
Information concerning the procedure for submissions will be available
on the conference home page:



Submission Deadline:  

January 27, 2006 (firm)



Program Committee: 

Thomas Ball (Microsoft) (Co-chair), 

Clark Barrett (NYU), 

Karthik Bhargavan (Microsoft), 

Per Bjesse (Synopsys), 

Ahmed Bouajjani (Univ. Paris 7), 

Randy Bryant (CMU), 

Rance Cleaveland (Univ. Maryland), 

Werner Damm (Univ. Oldenberg), 

Ganesh Gopalakrishnan (Univ. Utah), 

Steve German (IBM Research), 

Patrice Godefroid (Bell Labs), 

Mike Gordon (Univ. Cambridge), 

Orna Grumberg (Technion), 

Holger Hermanns (Saarland Univ.), 

Ranjit Jhala (UC San Diego), 

Robert Jones (Intel) (Co-chair), 

Roope Kaivola (Intel), 

Ken McMillan (Cadence), 

Tom Melham (Oxford Univ.), 

Corina Pasareanu (NASA Ames), 

Amir Pnueli (NYU), 

Thomas Reps (Univ. Wisconsin),

Sanjit Seshia (UC Berkeley), 

Prasad Sistla (Univ. Illinois - Chicago), 

Fabio Somenzi (Univ. Colorado).










Workshop on Logic Programming

WLP 2006

Vienna, Austria, February 22-24, 2006 

http://www.kr.tuwien.ac.at/wlp06





General

The series of workshops on (constraint) logic programming serve as the
annual meeting of the Society of Logic Programming (GLP e.V.) and bring
together researchers interested in logic programming, constraint
programming, and related areas like databases and artificial
intelligence. Previous workshops have been held in Germany, Austria and
Switzerland. The workshops provide a forum for exchanging ideas on
declarative logic programming, nonmonotonic reasoning and knowledge
representation, and facilitate interactions between research in
theoretical foundations and in the design and implementation of
logic-based programming systems. The technical program of the workshop
will include invited talks, presentations of refereed papers, and
system demonstrations.



Topics

Contributions are welcome on all theoretical, experimental, and
application aspects of constraint and logic programming, including, but
not limited to the following areas (the order does not reflect any
priorities):







The primary focus is on new and original research results but
submissions describing innovative products, prototypes under
development or interesting experiments (e.g., benchmarks) are also
encouraged.



Submission

Authors are invited to submit an extended abstract (no longer than 10
pages including figures and references) or a system description (no
longer than 3 pages) in PDF or Postscript format (11pt) before November
14, 2005. Submissions should include the title, authors' names,
affiliations, addresses, and e-mail information. All submissions must
be written in English. Authors are strongly encouraged to use LaTeX2e
and the Springer llncs class file (in A4 format), available at the
Springer LNCS/LNAI homepage.



More information about the submission procedure will be available at
the workshop homepage http://www.kr.tuwien.ac.at/wlp06



If you have any problems with submitting papers, please send an email
to wlp06@kr.tuwien.ac.at.



All accepted papers will be published as a technical report.



Committees

Program Chair

Hans Tompits (TU Wien)



Program Committee

Slim Abdennadher (German University Cairo)

Gerd Brewka (University of Leipzig)

François Bry (LMU München)

Marc Denecker (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven)

Jürgen Dix (TU Clausthal)

Thom Frühwirth (University of Ulm)

Ulrich Geske (FhG FIRST)

Michael Hanus (Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel)

Steffen Hölldobler (TU Dresden)

Gabriele Kern-Isberner (University of Dortmund)

Axel Polleres (University of Innsbruck)

Sebastian Schaffert (Salzburg Research)

Dietmar Seipel (University of Würzburg)

Hans Tompits (TU Wien)

Armin Wolf (FhG FIRST)



Local Organization

Michael Fink

Hans Tompits (Chair)

Stefan Woltran



Important Dates

Submission of papers:     November 14, 2005

Notification of acceptance:     December 19, 2005

Camera-ready papers:     January 23, 2006

Workshop:     February 22-24, 2006



Contact

Hans Tompits

Knowledge-Based Systems Group E184/3

Institute of Information Systems

Vienna University of Technology

Favoritenstrasse 9-11

A-1040 Vienna

Austria

Phone: +43-1-58801-18463

Fax: +43-1-58801-18493

Email: wlp06@kr.tuwien.ac.at












European Conference on Logics in Artificial
Intelligence

JELIA 2006

Liverpool, UK, September 13-15, 2006 

http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~jelia





JELIA'06 will bring together researchers interested in all aspects
concerning the use of logics in AI to discuss current research,
results, problems and applications of both a theoretical and practical
nature. Authors are invited to submit papers presenting original and
unpublished research in all areas related to the use of Logics in AI.



Proceedings will be published by Springer-Verlag in the Lecture Notes
on Artificial Intelligence series.  All submissions must be
received (in PS or PDF only) by 1st May, 2006, and should be submitted
via the form available at the JELIA-06 web page. Papers should be
written in English, and should be formatted according to the Springer
LNCS style (with standard margins). There are two categories of
submission:


IMPORTANT DATES

                  
Deadline for submission:     1st May, 2006

                  
Notification of acceptance: 8th June, 2006

                  
Camera Ready Copy:         26th
June, 2006



For further details, including lists of Conference Officials and
Programme Committee, see http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~jelia




Send your questions and comments to jelia06@csc.liv.ac.uk












International Static Analysis Symposium

SAS 2006

Seoul, Korea, August 29-31, 2006 

http://ropas.snu.ac.kr/sas06





IMPORTANT DATES


Submission: 7 April 2006

Notification: 26 May 2006

Camera-ready: 10 June 2006





SUMMARY

Static Analysis is increasingly recognized as a fundamental tool for
program verification, bug detection, compiler optimization, program
understanding, and software maintenance. The series of Static Analysis
Symposia has served as the primary venue for presentation of
theoretical, practical, and application advances in the area. The
Thirteenth International Static Analysis Symposium (SAS'06) will be
held in Seoul, hosted by the Seoul National University.  Previous
symposia were held in London, Verona, San Diego, Madrid, Santa Barbara,
Venice, Pisa, Paris, Aachen, Glasgow and Namur.



The technical program for SAS'06 will consist of invited lectures,
tutorials, presentations of refereed papers, and software
demonstrations. Contributions are welcome on all aspects of Static
Analysis, including, but not limited to



  
    

      abstract domains 
      abstract interpretation
    

    

      abstract testing 
      bug detection      
    

    

      data flow analysis
      model checking
    

    

      program specialization
      security analysis
    

    

       theoretical frameworks 
      type checking
    

    

      verifications
      new applications
    

  




Submissions can address any programming paradigm, including concurrent,
constraint, functional, imperative, logic and object-oriented
programming. Survey papers, that present some aspect of the above
topics with a new coherence, and application papers, that describe
experience with industrial applications, are also welcomed.



SUBMISSIONS INFORMATION


PROGRAM CHAIR:


 Kwangkeun Yi  (Seoul
National U., Korea)

 Email: kwang@ropas.snu.ac.kr





PROGRAM COMMITTEE:

 Anindya  Banerjee    (Kansas State U., USA)

 Wei-Ngan Chin        (National
U. of Singapore, Singapore)

 Patrick  Cousot      (ENS Paris,
France)

 Roberto  Giacobazzi  (U. of Verona, Italy)

 Chris    Hankin     
(Imperial College, UK)

 Luddy    Harrison    (U. of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)

 Naoki    Kobayashi   (Tohoku U., Japan)

 Oukseh  
Lee         (Hanyang U., Korea)

 Alan     Mycroft     (U.
of Cambridge, UK)

 Kedar    Namjoshi    (Bell Labs.,
USA)

 Jens     Palsberg    (UCLA,
USA)

 Andreas  Podelski    (Max-Planck-Institut,
Germany)

 Ganesan  Ramalingam  (IBM T.J.Watson, USA)

 Radu     Rugina     
(Cornell U., USA)

 Harald   Sondergaard (U. of Melbourne, Australia)

 Zhendong Su         
(UC Davis, USA)

 Reinhard Wilhelm     (U. des Saarlandes,
Germany)

 Kwangkeun Yi        
(Seoul National U., Korea)










Colloquium on Implementation of Constraint Logic
Programming Systems

CICLOPS 2006

Seattle, USA, August 21 or 22, 2006 

http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/lldap/CICLOPS06





Workshop Description



The workshop aims at discussing and exchanging experience on the
design, implementation, and optimization of logic and constraint
(logic) programming systems, or systems intimately related to logic as
a means to express computations. Preference will be given to the
analysis and description of implemented (or under implementation)
systems and their associated techniques, problems found in their
development or design, and steps taken towards the solutions.



The workshop topics include, but are not limited to:


Workshop Motivation

The last years have witnessed continuous progress in the technology
available both for academic and commercial computing environments.
Examples include more processor performance, increased memory capacity
and bandwidth, faster networking technology, and operating system
support for cluster computing. These improvements, combined with recent
advances in compilation and implementation technologies, are causing
high-level languages to be regarded as good candidates for programming
complex, real world applications. Techniques aiming at achieving
flexibility in the language design make powerful extensions easier to
implement; on the other hand, implementations which reach good
performance in terms of speed and memory consumption make declarative
languages and systems amenable to develop non-trivial applications.



Logic Programming and Constraint Programming, in particular, seem to
offer one of the best options, as they couple a high level of
abstraction and a declarative nature with an extreme flexibility in the
design of their implementations and extensions and of their execution
model. This adaptability is key to, for example, the implicit
exploitation of alternative execution strategies tailored for different
applications (e.g., for domain-specific languages) without
unnecessarily jeopardizing efficiency.



This workshop continues a tradition of successful workshops on
Implementations of Logic Programming Systems, previously held with in
Budapest (1993) and Ithaca (1994), the Compulog Net workshops on
Parallelism and Implementation Technologies held in Madrid (1993 and
1994), Utrecht (1995) and Bonn (1996), the Workshop on Parallelism and
Implementation Technology for (Constraint) Logic Programming Languages
(ParImp) held in Port Jefferson (1997), Manchester (1998), Las Cruces
(1999), and London (2000), and more recently the Colloquium on
Implementation of Constraint and LOgic Programming Systems (CICLOPS) in
Paphos (Cyprus, 2001), Copenhagen (2002), Mumbai (2003), Saint-Malo
(France, 2004), and Sitges (Spain, 2005), and the CoLogNet Workshops on
Implementation Technology for Computational Logic Systems held in
Madrid (2002), Pisa (2003) and Saint-Malo (France, 2004).



Important Dates

Submission Deadline:       June 1st, 2006
(strict)

Notifications to Authors:  July 1st, 2006

Final Version Deadline:    July 20th, 2006

CICLOPS 2006 Workshop:     August 21st or 22nd, 2006



Submission Guidelines

Participants  should  submit a paper  (maximum 15
pages,  PDF format),  describing  their work  in
topics  relevant  to the workshop.  Accepted
papers  will be presented  during the workshop. At least one
author  of an accepted contribution  is expected to register
for the workshop, and present the paper.

All  submissions   should  
include   the  author's  name(s), affiliation,
complete mailing address, and email address.



Authors are requested to prepare their submissions, following the
LNCS/LNAI Springer format. Please see: http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html
for further details.



The submission should be submitted through the electronic submission
site, accessible via the workshop web page. The deadline for receipt of
submissions is June 1, 2006. Papers received after this date may not be
reviewed. Eligible  papers  will  be 
peer-reviewed  by  at least three members of the Program
Committee. Authors will be notified via email of the results by July 1,
2006.   Authors  of accepted papers  are
expected  to improve their paper based on reviewers' comments and
to send a camera ready version of their manuscripts by July 20, 2006.



Accepted papers will be included in the workshop proceedings, which
will be distributed to the participants.



Questions about submissions may be directed to haifengguo <AT>
mail <DOT> unomaha <DOT> edu



Organizing Committee

Hai-Feng Guo        (University of
Nebraska at Omaha)

Enrico Pontelli     (New Mexico State University)



Program Committee

Manuel Carro        (Polytechnic
University of Madrid)

Bart Demoen         (KUL Leuven)

Michel Ferreira     (University of Porto)

Hai-Feng Guo        (University of
Nebraska at Omaha)

Gopal Gupta         (University
of Texas at Dallas)

Enrico Pontelli     (New Mexico State University)

Vitor Santos Costa  (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro)

Tom Schrijvers      (KUL Leuven)

Christian Schulte   (University of Uppsala)

Neng-Fa Zhou        (City University
of New York)



Contact Information

Hai-Feng Guo

University of Nebraska at Omaha

Department of Computer Science

6001 Dodge Street

Omaha, NE 68182, USA

haifengguo <AT> mail <DOT> unomaha <DOT> edu



Enrico Pontelli

New Mexico State University

Department of Computer Science

Box 30001, MSC CS

Las Cruces, NM 88003, USA

epontell <AT> cs <DOT> nmsu <DOT> edu










First International Workshop on Preferences and
Their Applications in Logic Programming Systems

PREFS'06

Seattle, USA, August 21 or 22, 2006 

http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/lldap/Prefs06





Workshop Description

This workshop attempts to address all aspects of describing,
modelling, computationally handling, and application of
preferences, within the context of logic programming. In
particular, we seek contributions that create cross-fertilization
between different approaches to preferences and different flavors
of logic programming (e.g., constraint logic programming, answer set
programming) -- hopefully leading to new, more general, approaches for
handling preferences in logic programming.



The workshop topics include, but are not limited to:


The purpose of this workshop is to bring together
researchers interested in modeling and implementing preferences in
logic programming. The objective is to promote exchange of ideas
and possible integration between the different approaches
proposed so far.



Workshop Motivation

The concept of preference has played an important role in
various aspects of computer science. For example, preferences play
a key role in the design of practical and efficient reasoning
systems dealing with real-world knowledge. The concept of
preference has been investigated by many researchers  in different
fields, both within Computer Science (e.g., Artificial 
Intelligence, Optimizations, Scheduling) and outside of
Computer Science (e.g., Economics, Decision Theory).



In recent years we have witnessed a growing interest in studying
the integration of preferences in the context of logic-based and
logic programming systems. These directions of research are of
great importance, considering that preferences are considered a
vital component of reasoning with real-world knowledge, and logic
programming is one of the most widely used programming paradigms
employed in knowledge representation and reasoning.



Workshop Format

This workshop is open to all members of the CP and ICLP
communities.  The workshop will emphasize discussion and
cross-fertilization, so presentations will be balanced with discussion
time.  In this direction, the workshop is seeking high quality
papers that address cutting-edge research in this field, and that can
contribute to the discussion. The agenda will include paper
presentations, and possibly an invited speaker. At least one author of
each accepted submission must attend the workshop, and all participants
must pay the workshop fee (which covers both CP'05 and ICLP'05
workshops).



Important Dates

   Submission Deadline: June 1

   Notifications to Authors: July 1

   Final Version Deadline: July 20

   Worksop: August 21-22



Submission Guidelines

Participants  should  submit a paper  (maximum 15
pages,  PDF  format),  describing  their work 
in topics  relevant  to the workshop. Accepted papers 
will be presented  during the workshop.   At least
one author  of an accepted contribution  is expected to
register for the workshop, and present the paper.

All  submissions   should  
include   the  author's  name(s), affiliation,
complete mailing address, and email address.



Authors are requested to prepare their submissions, following the
LNCS/LNAI Springer format. Please see:


       http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html



for further details.



The submission should be sent in PDF format, using the submission web
site:


     http://www.easychair.org/PREFS2006/submit/





WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS  


Enrico Pontelli and Tran Cao Son

Department of Computer Science

New Mexico State University

Email: epontell aT cs DOT nmsu DOT edu, tson aT cs DOT nmsu DOT edu





PROGRAM COMMITTEE 


Marcello Balduccini, Texas Tech
University, USA 

Gerhard Brewka, University of Leipzig, Germany 

Ulrich Junker, ILOG, France

Enrico Pontelli, New Mexico State University, USA 

Torsten Schaub, University of Potsdam, Germany 

Tran Cao Son, New Mexico State University, USA 

Mirek Truszczynski, University of Kentucky, USA