The ALP Executive Committee had its annual meeting in Seattle (thanks
this time to ICLP'06 and FLoC for getting us all together) with the
usual long agenda which included issues such as the possible creation
of a special interest group on computational logic; funding status;
TPLP status; newsletter report; doctoral consortium report, future
conference's organisational issues, and the ALP website.
The main points discussed/agreed during the meeting can be summarised as follows:
While the ALP EC indicated general support for the idea of
creating Special Interest Group on computational logic (Siglog) in the
ACM, the support had some reservations (including what would exactly
mean for the ALP to be an associated association with the ACM). The
decision was, therefore, to support the exploration of the possibility
of creating an ACM Siglog.
ICLP'07 will be held in Porto, with Veronica Dahl and Ilkka
Niemela as co PC chairs. Possible co-locations and PC chairs for future
conferences were discussed with several proposals received from, among
others, Australia and Italy. It was agreed to publish a formal
call for '08.
There has been some concern regarding the lack of up to date
information in the ALP website on TPLP. It was agreed that either
procedures should be developed to maintain the information on TPLP
activity up to date, or that pointer from the ALP web site should point
to the CUP TPLP home page.
While it was agreed that the Wikipedia entry for Prolog is
not at all representative of the current state of logic programming,
there was acknowledge the significant amount of work involved in
updating it. It was thus suggested that those interested might look
into trying to improve it.
Given the difficulties found in increasing the participation of
PhD students in the doctoral consortium and the the Newsletter's PhD
thesis column, it was also agreed to improve their advertising by
including it in the newsletter summary and drawing advisors' attention
to it.
ICLP 2006 has been quite successful; at the time of the meeting,
there were 105 registered participants (35 of which were students).
There was also a good response to the request for donations to ALP
(through a voluntary $50 increased registration rate); 16 people
contributed to this initiative.