(DBWORLD) Logic Programming Organizational Announcement

Gopal Gupta (gupta@cs.nmsu.edu)
Fri, 11 Apr 1997 12:57:59 -0500 (CDT)

Attn: Researchers of Logic Programming in the Western Hemisphere
Apologies to all others. Apologies if you receive multiple
copies of this message.

Dear LP researchers/practitioners,

For some time there has been a discussion among LP researchers (in North America,
or in western hemisphere, if you wish) to get organized. By getting organized
we mean forming an association of some sort. We organized an informal meeting
at JICSLP to discuss some of the issues. This sparked some
further discussion over email. (The transcript of the discussion can
be found at Marek's home page:
http://www.cs.engr.uky.edu/~marek/opinions.html.)

The reasons for N. Amer. LP'ers to get organized are several:
(i) Better communication among LP research groups
(ii) Better dissemination of information about LP and related things
(iii) The organization can arrange area meetings/workshops/summer schools etc.
resulting in (i) and (ii)
(iv) The organization will enable the LP community to present a unified front
that will help us in getting noticed better in the CS
community. Even lobby funding agencies and attract their
attention to benefits of LP.
etc.

In general, the organization will help us in getting more noticed. We seriously
feel that LP has a public relations problem, and getting organized will be a
step towards alleviating it.

We could organize either as a sub-chapter of ALP or follow the footsteps
of Compulog (The European Network in Computational Logic). Personally, we favor
the latter as it will involve less bureaucracy.

As a first step, suggested by Marek, is that we create a website where a short
description of each group and its activities can be found. The ideas is that an
interested person should be able to get a quick view of what's going on in LP
by browsing these pages. We would like to solicit these short descriptions NOW from
research groups active in LP (in Northern + Latin America) in order to create
this website. It would be best perhaps if you created this description on your
site and our main organization web pages point to it. Send the pointer to
jlpspi@cs.nmsu.edu. (send only the pointer to your web-page at this address;
all other email should be addressed to gupta@cs.nmsu.edu or ram@cs.sunysb.edu).

We would like to organize our Compulog organization also along the lines of European
Compulog. So our suggestion is to have several broad areas under which research
projects/activities will be categorized:

(i) Constraint and Concurrent Logic Programming
(ii) Parallelism and Implementation Technologies (incl. compilation)
(iii) Language Design and Semantics
(iv) Logic based Databases
(v) Knowledge Representation and Reasoning
(vi) Program Development (program synthesis/transformation, applications
to software engineering etc.)
(vii) Practical Applications of LP
(viii) LP and AI (Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, etc.)

These broach areas may be changed over time to reflect interests of our LP community.

Some of our Future plans are:

(i) Once all research descriptions are in, ask some people (yes, this may mean you)
to be area coordinators.

(ii) Try for a modest grant from funding agencies. The funding will be used
for publishing a yearly newsletter, as well as for various activities.

(iii) Organize summer schools/workshops/area meetings etc.

(iv) Publish a yearly newsletter of activities (of various groups involved).

We are following the model of the European Compulog organization, which we think is
a tremendous success.

So for now, LP researchers, please send a pointer to a short description (2-5 pages)
of your project(s), outlining what are the problems your group is working on, what
are the challenges, what problems have been solved, what remains to be solved etc.
+ related references. You can also include a list of people working in your project.
Write it at a level that a non-expert in your area, but someone well-versed in
Computer Science and moderately-versed in LP, can understand it. Let's aim for
all these research descriptions to come to us by end of April.

Also, PLEASE DISSEMINATE THIS MESSAGE AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE TO LP RESEARCHERS IN
NORTH AND LATIN AMERICA.

Best regards,

Gopal Gupta & I.V. Ramakrishnan
gupta@cs.nmsu.edu ram@cs.sunysb.edu

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