by Eric Monfroy
The Fifth Workshop of the ERCIM Working Group on Constraints, held in Padova, Italy, 19-21 June 2000, gathered some 35 experts from Europe and the United States to discuss issues related to applications of constraints. The workshop was organized by Krzysztof R. Apt (CWI, Amsterdam), Eric Monfroy (CWI, Amsterdam), and Francesca Rossi (University of Padova).
The ERCIM Working Group on Constraints (coordinated by Krzysztof R. Apt) was founded in the fall of 1996. Currently, it comprises 16 ERCIM institutes and associated organizations. This group brings together ERCIM researchers that are involved in research on the subject of Constraints.
The Padova workshop was the fifth meeting of the group. It took place at the Department of Pure and Applied Mathematics of the University of Padova, Italy on 19-21 June 2000. It was the fourth workshop of the group jointly organized with the CompulogNet (Esprit Network of Excellence on Computational Logic) area on ‘Constraint Programming’, coordinated by Francesca Rossi.
This workshop covered all aspects of constraints (solving and propagation algorithms, programming languages, new formalisms, novel techniques for modeling, experiments, etc.), with particular emphasis on applications. The authors of theoretical papers were encouraged to investigate and discuss a possible use of their work in practice.
The workshop attracted some 35 researchers and ran for 3 days. The call for presentations attracted a number of submissions out of which, given the time limitations, we could accept only 20. Besides the accepted papers, we had three invited talks on various application areas for constraints:
• Thom Fruehwirth from the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich gave a presentation on ‘Applications of Constraint Handling Rules’,
• Alan Borning from the University of Washington discussed ‘Applying Constraints to Interactive Graphical Applications’
• Michel Scholl from INRIA gave a presentation on ‘Constraint databases for spatio-temporal applications’.
The workshop was considered to be very successful and led to a number of interesting lively discussions on the topics raised during the presentations. The workshop provided a useful platform that allowed all of us, practitioners as well as researchers involved in theoretical work, to exchange information, learn about each others work, and discuss possible future cooperation.
The detailed program of the workshop, the proceedings in the form of extended abstracts of the presentations, and more information about the Working Group are electronically available through the Web site of the ERCIM Working Group on Constraints.
Links:
ERCIM Working Group on Constraints: http://www.cwi.nl/projects/ercim-wg.html.
Please contact:
Eric Monfroy - CWI
Tel: +31 20 592 4195
E-mail: Eric.Monfroy@cwi.nl