ALP Newsletter

Area Editors. Implementation

• Manuel Carro http://www.clip.dia.fi.upm.es/~mcarro/
  Manuel Carro is an associate professor at the Computer Science School of the UPM, where he obtained his PhD, which focused on the concurrent and parallel execution of constraint logic programming languages. He has taken part in more than twenty national and international projects and is the UPM principal investigator in the S-Cube (Software, Services, and Systems) Network of Excellence under the 7th FP. He has published about 50 papers in international journals, conferences, and workshops, and has served as chair, PC member, and reviewer in many of them. He was the UPM deputy representative at the Steering Committee of the NESSI European Technology Platform.His research interests focus on the analysis and implementation of constraint logic programming languages, including abstract machine design, parallelism, tabling, and analysis for parallelism and resource consumption. Additionally, he is interested on the application of logic- and constraint-based techniques to the specification, analysis, and development of complex systems, especially those based on service-oriented computing.
• Ricardo Rocha http://www.dcc.fc.up.pt/~ricroc/
  Ricardo Rocha is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Sciences, University of Porto, Portugal and a researcher at the CRACS & INESC-Porto LA research unit. He received his undergraduate education in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Porto and University of Minho, Portugal and the PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Porto in 2001. His research lies in the general area of the Design and Implementation of Programming Languages with particular focus on Logic Programming. His main research topics are the Design and Implementation of Logic Programming Systems, Tabling in Logic Programming and Parallel and Distributed Computing. Another areas of interest include Inductive Logic Programming, Probabilistic Logic Programming and Deductive Databases. He is also one of the main developers of Yap Prolog system, and in particular of the execution models that support tabling and parallel evaluation.

Constraint Logic Programming

• Roman Barták http://kti.mff.cuni.cz/~bartak
  Roman Barták is an Associate Professor and Head of Department of Theoretical Computer Science and Mathematical Logic at Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University in Prague. His work focuses mainly to the area of constraint-based planning and scheduling which includes problem modelling and reformulation and design of specific constraint satisfaction techniques. He is an author of more than 100 research papers, three book chapters, and two on-line books on Prolog and Constraint Programming. He regularly serves in program committees at international conferences (IJCAI, AAAI, ECAI, FLAIRS, ICAPS, CP-AI-OR, MISTA.) and he is a member of journal editorial boards of CP Letters, Advances in Artificial Intelligence, and Archives of Control Sciences.
• Tom Schrjivers http://people.cs.kuleuven.be/~tom.schrijvers
  Tom Schrijvers is a senior postdoctoral researcher of the Fund for Scientific Research Flanders affiliated to the Department of Computer Science, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. He received his Ph.D. in June 2005 with a thesis on “Analyses, Optimizations and Extensions of Constraint Handling Rules”. His general area of interest is programming languages, and he has made research contributions to Logic, Constraint and Functional Programming on various topics (type inference, program analysis, optimized compilation, refactoring, …).

Applications of Logic Programming

• Marco Gavanelli http://www.ing.unife.it/docenti/MarcoGavanelli
  Marco Gavanelli graduated in Computer Science Engineering at the University of Bologna, he got his PhD in Information Engineering from the University of Modena and Reggio-Emilia, and he is currently Ricercatore (assistant professor) at the department of engineering, university of Ferrara, since 2004. He has been teaching computer science courses at the University of Ferrara and University of Bologna. His research is based on logic programming, mainly constraint and abductive logic programming. He published more than 50 papers in peer-reviewed journals, conferences and book chapters. He is coordinator of the interest group on knowledge representation and automatic reasoning of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence. He is member of the executive board of the Italian group of users and researchers of Logic Programming. He has organized national and international workshops, such as the RCRA series (from 2005 to 2010) and CILC 2009. He has been guest editor for special issues of the Journal of Algorithms, Fundamenta Informaticae, and Intelligenza Artificiale.
• Paolo Torroni http://lia.deis.unibo.it/~pt/
  Paolo Torroni is an Assistant Professor in Computing at the University of Bologna, Italy, since 2004. He has edited several books and authored more than 70 research and vision articles on AI-related topics: mainly declarative, computational logic-based languages, specification and verification of multi-agent interaction, argumentation, Web services, negotiation, dialogue, resource exchange, allocation and planning. He is the secretary of the Italian Logic Programming Interest Group (GULP). In recent years, he was involved in various computational logic-related research projects, he gave tutorials and keynote speeches on theories and applications of computational logic, multi-agent systems and Web services. Paolo has worked in the steering and organization of successful international events such as CLIMA, DALT, and LADS, has organized the first two editions of the GULP Distinguished Dissertations Award, and has served as an international evaluator for FP7 EU projects.

Inductive Logic Programming

• Luc De Raedt http://people.cs.kuleuven.be/~luc.deraedt/
  Luc De Raedt is currently a full professor at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, where he also obtained his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science (1991). From 1999 till 2006 he was a full professor (C4) of Computer Science of the Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg and chair of the Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing Lab research group. His research interests are in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Data Mining, as well as their applications. He has made many contributions, especially to the field of inductive logic programming, on which he has recently also written a textbook (Logical and Relational Learning, Springer, 2008). He is currently working on probabilistic logic learning (sometimes called statistical relational learning), which combines probabilistic reasoning methods with logical representations and machine learning, constraint based data mining and inductive databases, where one aims at devising a general inductive query language for supporting data mining, and analyzing graph and network data. He is also interested in applications of these methods to chemo- and bio-informatics and action- and activity learning. In 2005, he was elected as an ECCAI fellow.
• Vitor Santos Costa http://www.dcc.fc.up.pt/~vsc/
  Vitor Santos Costa is an associate professor at Faculdade de Ciencias, Universidade do Porto. He received a bachelor’s degree from the UPorto in 1984 and was granted a PhD in CS from the University of Bristol in 1993. He has previously held a position as Assistant Professor at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, and he is a Visiting Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research interests include sequential and parallel logic programming and machine learning, namely inductive logic programming and statistical relational learning with applications to Bioinformatics and to Intelligence Analysis. He has published more than 90 refereed papers in Journals and International Conferences, has been the main developer of several systems, such as YAP Prolog, has chaired two conferences, and has supervised 5 PhD students and 10 MSc students.

Database & Semantic Web

• Michael Kifer http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~kifer/
  Michael Kifer is a Professor with the Department of Computer Science, State University of New York at Stony Brook. His work spans the areas of Web information systems, knowledge representation, and databases. He has published four text books and numerous articles in these areas. He co-invented F-logic, HiLog, Annotated Logic, and Transaction Logic, which are among the most widely cited works in Computer Science and, especially, in Semantic Web research. Twice, in 1999 and 2002, he was a recipient of the prestigious ACM-SIGMOD “Test of Time” awards for his works on F-logic and object-oriented database languages. In 2006, he was a Plumer Fellow at Oxford University’s St. Anne’s College and in 2008 he received SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship.
• Axel Polleres http://www.polleres.net/
  Axel Polleres obtained his doctorate in Computer Science at the Vienna University of Technology in 2003. He worked at University Innsbruck from 2003-2006; at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid from 2006-2007; and joined the National University of Ireland, Galway, in 2007 where he leads DERI’s Semantic Search research stream and heads the research unit for reasoning and querying. His research is focused on querying and reasoning about Ontologies, rules languages, logic programming, Semantic Web technologies and their applications. He actively contributes to international Web standardisation efforts such as the W3C’s Rule Interchange Format (RIF) working group and the W3C SPARQL working group, which he co-chairs.

KR & Non-monotonic Reasoning

• Marcello Balduccini http://marcy.cjb.net/
  Marcello Balduccini is a Research Scientist with Kodak Research Laboratories, currently leading the research on the use of automated reasoning for the industrial printing workflow. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Texas Tech University in 2005. His main research interests are knowledge representation, automated reasoning, and intelligent agents.
• Tran Cao Son http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/~tson/
  Tran Cao Son received a Diplom Mathematiker from the Technial University of Dresden (Germany), a M.Sc. in Computer Science from the Asian Institute of Technology (Thailand), and a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at El Paso (USA). He is currently an Associate Professor of Computer Science at New Mexico State University (Las Cruces, New Mexico, USA) and is the associate director of the Knowledge representation, Logic, and Advanced Programming (KLAP) Laboratory, a federally-funded laboratory dedicated to research on foundations, development, and pragmatics of logic and constraint programming and knowledge representation and reasoning. His research interests are in the areas of logic programming, knowledge representation, intelligent agents, and planning. He has published over 80 papers in these areas. He has served as reviewer for various conferences and journals, served in proposal review panels, and as committee member of various conferences.

Analysis & Verification

• John Gallagher http://akira.ruc.dk/~jpg/
  John Gallagher received the B.A. (Mathematics with Philosophy) and Ph.D. (Computer Science) degrees from Trinity College Dublin in 1976 and 1983 respectively. He held a research assistantship in Trinity College (1983-4), and post-doc appointments at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel (1987-1989) and Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium (1989). From 1984-1987 he was employed in research and development in a software company in Hamburg, Germany. Between 1990 and 2002 he was a lecturer and later senior lecturer at the University of Bristol, UK. Since 2002 he has been a professor at the University of Roskilde, Denmark, where he is leader of the research group Programming, Logic and Intelligent Systems. His research interests focus on program transformation and generation, program analysis, constraint logic programming, rewrite systems, temporal logics, semantics-based emulation of languages and systems, and verification using abstraction. He is a member of the executive committee of the Association of Logic Programming and of the steering committee of the ACM SIGPLAN workshop series on Partial Evaluation and Program Manipulation (PEPM). He is an editorial advisor to the journal Theory and Practice of Logic Programming. He has published approximately 50 peer-reviewed papers.
• Michael Leuschel http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mal/
  Michael Leuschel is head of the programming languages and software engineering group (STUPS) at the Univerisity of Düsseldorf. Previously, he was professor at the University of Southampton and obtained his PhD at the KU Leuven. He is on editorial board of the Journal of Theory and Practice of Logic Programming. He is leading the development of the ProB toolset for the validation of B specifications. Outside of formal methods, his main research areas are automatic program analysis and optimization (notably partial evaluation and abstract interpretation), and has developed several tools, such as the ECCE and LOGEN partial evaluation systems. He is also involved in the PyPy project.

Foundations

• Pedro Cabalar http://www.dc.fi.udc.es/~cabalar/
  Pedro Cabalar is an associate professor of the Department of Computing at the University of Corunna, Spain, and organizes the MSc and PhD degrees in Computing research offered by that department. He graduated in 1993 in Computer Science in the Politechnic University of Madrid and received his PhD degree from the University of Corunna in 2001, on the topic of causality in action domains. His research is mostly related to logical approaches for Knowledge Representation in Artificial Intelligence, being particularly interested in Nonmonotonic Reasoning and Logic Programming under the Answer Set semantics. He has both published and actively participated as Program Committee or reviewer in main conferences (ICLP, LPNMR, KR, AAAI, ECAI, JELIA), journals (TPLP, AIJ, AMAI) and specialized workshops (NMR, ASP, ASPOCP) of these areas. He has also conducted several research projects in Answer Set Programming, in coordination with other groups in Spain.
• Stefan Woltran http://www.dbai.tuwien.ac.at/staff/woltran/
  Stefan Woltran studied Computer Science at Vienna University of Technology and received his diploma in February 2001. In May 2003, he obtained his PhD in Computer Science. From July 2001 to May 2007, Stefan Woltran worked as a project research assistant in the Knowledge-Based Systems Group (Head: Thomas Eiter) at Vienna University of Technology, and then moved to the Database and Artificial Intelligence Group (Head: Georg Gottlob), where he is currently working as an assistant professor. In November 2008, he received his Habilitation in the area of “Information Systems” at the Faculty of Computer Science of the Vienna University of Technology. Stefan Woltran has published more than 60 articles in journals, books, and conference and workshop proceedings. He has co-organised several international workshops in the areas of Logic Programming (WLP, CENT, ASPOCP) and served in programme committees of several international conferences, such as IJCAI, AAAI, ECAI, ICLP and LPNMR.

Games & Puzzles

• Paolo Baldan http://www.math.unipd.it/~baldan
  Paolo Baldan is an associate professor at the Department of Pure and Applied Mathematics of the University of Padova. He received a laurea degree in Computer Science from the University of Udine in 1994 and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Pisa in 2000. From 2001 to 2006 he has been an assistant professor at Computer Science Department of the University Ca’ Foscari of Venice. His research focuses on formalisms for the specification of concurrent and distributed systems, in particular (graph) rewriting systems, Petri nets and process calculi, and in the development of analysis and verification techniques for such formalisms.