Executive Committee Meeting Minutes: June 1994

Appeared in Volume 7/4, November 1994

Keywords: meeting.

Present: (H. Gallaire, M. Hermenegildo, R. Kowalski, G. Levi, D. Miller, P. van Hentenryck, D. S. Warren, plus Maurice Bruynooghe, Maurizio Martelli and David Pearce for the first part of the meeting).

Reports on Conferences: Maurizio Martelli reported on ICLP 94 in Santa Margherita. Attendance was good and the budget should be met. Maurice Bruynooghe, Program chair for ILPS'94, reported briefly on the program for ILPS'94 and that the papers were under review. Koichi Furukawa, general chair of ICLP'95, was not available to report at the meeting.

Possible collaboration between ALP and Compulog-net: David Pearce joined the EC meeting for this discussion. The EC discussed ways in which Compulog-net and ALP could cooperate. It was decided that the ALP would send out the Compulog-net Newsletter with the ALP newsletter for one year (It is planned to produce two issues of the Compulog-net newsletter per year.) Compulog-net has some funds to support workshops, so it was decided that the two organizations should coordinate their suppport for workshops. Other forms of cooperation were also discussed, but because of Compulog-net's official support from the European Community and because of its limited duration, it was not clear what form such further collaboration might take.

Newsletter: It was suggested that a Mosaic/WWW homepage might be set up for the ALP, and coordinated with the newsletter. It was suggested that Andrew Davison, as newsletter editor, might look into this.

Journal: Maurice Bruynooghe, the journal editor, reminded the committee that his five year appointment as editor would terminate soon. He indicated a willingness to continue but suggested that we should consider seriously the implications of having the same editor for ten years.

The visitors left the meeting at this point.

Treasurer's report: Bob Kowalski reported for the treasurer, Fariba Sadri, that the ALP is in a much sounder financial position than it has been recently. See the treasurer's report for details.

The issue of making the ALP membership list available via FTP was discussed. The EC decided that, since members can indicate on the membership forms their wish to have their names excluded from the published membership list, it would be acceptable to make the list available by FTP. (It was later pointed out that with the current distribution mechanism, we had a record of who took a machine readable copy of the membership list. With anonymous FTP, this might not be the case. We should set up the FTP service so that the names of those who take the list are recorded.) For more details see here

ALP sponsorship of other conferences: The ALP will co-sponsor LPNMR'95 in Lexington; no money was asked for. Because of the improved financial position of the ALP, it was agreed that we could sponsor up to three workshops this year, each at the level of US$2000. As usual, such money is intended to support the participation of students and would be reimbursed to the Association if the workshop made a profit.

Review of administrative arrangements: Bob Kowalski noted that Cheryl Anderson has resigned as ALP administrative assistant; and her mother, Valerie Anderson, has taken her place. Fariba Sadri has resigned as ALP Treasurer. Francesca Toni was approved to replace Fariba. Bob asked for advice about other forms of support that the ALP secretariat might provide to conference organizers and members.

Status of Elections: Stefan Holdoebler was nominated by ALP members at large. It was suggested that we remind the membership that with the signatures of ten ALP members, any ALP member's name can be placed in nomination for an ALP election and will appear on the ballot. (Subsequently to the EC meeting, Pierre Deransart was also nominated for the upcoming election.)

Discussion of general conference policy: The EC discussed general Association conference policy. In particular, the question was raised as to whether the Association should continue to depend on conferences making a profit to support its activities or whether the membership dues should be raised. It was generally felt that the current arrangements seemed to be working. It seems that most members renew their membership by paying the full fee at one of the conferences. So in any case, the members are paying the cost. The main reason for including membership in the conference fee is to allow research grants to more easily pay the cost of ALP membership.

It was suggested that for a higher membership fee it might be possible to include "free" subscription to the Journal of Logic Programming for all full-fee paying members. David Warren volunteered to discuss this with the Journal publishers.

A concern was raised about posters being published in conference proceedings, and the consequent possibility of unclear references to them being mistaken for a reference to a complete paper. It was decided that the existence of posters and of a poster session in a conference should remain under the control of the PC chair. It was suggested that a separately bound proceedings of posters could be made available at conferences that do have poster sessions, and that poster abstracts need not appear in the conference paper proceedings.

It was again noted that workshop registration fees would be expected to cover the cost of workshop proceedings (if any.) It was also suggested that future conference PC's look into the possibility of electronic paper submission.

R.A. Kowalski and D.S. Warren