Dear Logic Programmers,

Welcome to the February/March 2009 issue of the ALP Newsletter. 

It has been a long long time... again...

as you may have noticed we have been having quite some delays in the publications of recent issues; the last few months have been a very busy time and I apologize for letting the assembling of the newsletter get delayed -- chairing ICLP and suddenly becoming Department Head indeed made my life more "interesting" than expected...

ICLP in December turned out to be a great success; we had one of the largest number of submissions received in a long time, and the turnout at the conference was beyond expectations. Agostino and his team provided a flawless organization and the conference was fun and informative. I hope everyone enjoyed it (in spite of the rain).
 
I would like to take this opportunity for some ramblings... serving as program chair of ICLP was a truly rewarding and eye-opening experience. I had the opportunity to work with a wonderful team and interacting with so many great researchers.
The submissions received were not only many, but they were also good! It was actually awful having to send out rejection messages to authors that had clearly spent lot of time developing good ideas.
Maria and myself made the point, from the beginning of the selection process, to ensure that papers that contained innovative ideas would receive proper consideration, in spite of possible imperfections, incompletenesses or preliminary nature of the work. I have always viewed conferences as an opportunity for presenting the cutting-edge of a field, bold ideas that deserve to be placed in front of the community. Yet, so often we fall in the trap of looking into conference papers for aspects that really belong to journal publications - the details of the proof, the complete range of benchmarks, the polished and flawless presentation, etc. I really hope that Maria and myself, at least partially, succeded  in ensuring that ICLP'08 would not suffer from this type of situations. One novelty that that we introduced to help in this sense is the removal of the traditional 2-page "poster papers" (too often viewed as a token offered to rejected works) and the introduction of 5-page short papers, which truly present those bold and preliminary ideas. Indeed, the large majority of the short papers submitted to ICLP'08 were new submissions.

In spite of all this, I have to say, I am concerned by the trend that still some reviewers (fortunately a minority) adopt in approaching the task of refereeing papers (and I am not referring specifically to ICLP'08, but in general). Often the good of science requires the strength of putting aside ego and pride, and the willingness to embrace new ideas without preconceptions. There is really nothing wrong in admitting that we are not experts in every possible field, and offering to the authors (that, perhaps, by having conducted a research in a certain field for a while, may have gained some new insights) the benefit of doubt.

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.

                                   Enrico