ALP Newsletter

This is the electronic newsletter of the Association for Logic Programming. It contains news, net postings, call for papers, comments, conference announcements and humour, all related to Computational Logic.

The newsletter is a quarterly publication, in the months March, June, September, and December a new issue is posted.  Issues up to 2009 can be found HERE.

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• João Leite http://centria.di.fct.unl.pt/~jleite/  is Associate Professor at the Computer Science Department of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal, and member of the Nova Laboratory for Computer Science and Informatics (NOVA LINCS).
  His main research interests include Knowledge Representation and Non-Monotonic Reasoning, Multi-Agent Systems, Semantic Web, and Argumentation for the Social Web. He has authored one book, edited several books and journal special issues, co-authored more than 100 papers, and presented more than 10 courses and tutorials in Conferences and Summer Schools. He was Conference Chair of JELIA-2004, Program Committee Co-Chair of JELIA-2014, and Co-Chair of several editions of the CLIMA, LADS and DALT workshops. He regularly serves in the Program Committees of major international conferences (IJCAI, AAAI, KR, AAMAS, ECAI, ICLP,…).
• Matteo Baldoni http://www.di.unito.it/~baldoni/ was born in Torino in 1968. He is associate professor at the Department of Computer Science, Università degli Studi di Torino where he is member of the Logic Programming & Automatic Reasoning group. From July 1999 through September 2006 he was a researcher in the same institution.
  From February through October 1998 he has been visiting the Laboratoire d’Informatique de Marseille (LIM) where he worked in the group of Représentation et traiement logique des connaissances under the supervision of Camilla Schwind.
  He has a background in computational logic, modal and nonmonotonic extensions of logic programming, multimodal logics, reasoning by actions and change. His current research interests include issues in communication protocol design and implementation, conformance and interoperabilty for agents and web services, agent programming languages, and personalization by reasoning in the semantic web.

Applications of Logic Programming

• Gerhard Friedrich http://www.uni-klu.ac.at/tewi/inf/ainf/isbi/staff/
  Gerhard Friedrich is a chaired professor at the Universität Klagenfurt, Austria and received his PhD in computer science from the Vienna University of Technology. Since June 2013 he is Dean of the Faculty of Technical Sciences and directs the Intelligent Systems and Business Informatics research group. Previously he managed the Department for Configuration and Diagnosis Systems at Siemens Austria, implementing numerous knowledge-based systems. Gerhard Friedrich also led many research projects and was a research fellow at Siemens Corporate Research and at the Stanford Research Institute. His research interests include recommender systems, knowledge-based systems, knowledge acquisition and maintenance, configuring products and services, diagnosis and repair of processes as well as self-healing Web services. He has published many papers in highly-renowned journals in these areas, such as Artificial Intelligence, AI Magazine, Web Semantics, IEEE Intelligent Systems, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, and the International Journal of Electronic Commerce as well as a book on recommender systems at Cambridge University Press. Gerhard Friedrich served as program committee member for numerous distinguished conferences such as the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence or the WWW. He was an area chair at the 13th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning 2012, and a senior PC member at the ACM Recommender Systems Conferences 2010, 2011, 2012. Gerhard Friedrich is an associate editor of AI Communications and the International Journal of Mass Customization.
  In 2012 he became a fellow of the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence
• Carmine Dodaro https://www.cdodaro.eu/ is a researcher at the Department of Informatics, Bioengineering, Robotics and Systems Engineering (DIBRIS) – University of Genova. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics and Computer Science from University of Calabria in 2015. His research interests include answer set programming, knowledge representation and nonmonotonic reasoning, optimization problems, satisfiability, maximum satisfiability, query answering. He contributes to the development of the ASP solver WASP and of the version 2 of DLV. He is co-chair of the organization committee of JELIA 2019 and he served in the program committees of several international conferences (AAAI, ECAI, IJCAI,…).

Inductive Logic Programming

• Fabrizio Riguzzi http://docente.unife.it/fabrizio.riguzzi
  is Associate Professor of computer science at the University of Ferrara,  Italy where he previously worked as researcher. He obtained his Ph.D. degree in electronic and computer engineering from the University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy, in 1999.
  His research activity focuses on probabilistic logics and in particular inference and learning. He is the author of more than 100 peer-reviewed papers. He is Editor in Chief of Intelligenza Artificiale, Associate Editor of the Journal of Computer Science and Associate Editor of Frontiers in Robotics and AI, specialty section on Computational Intelligence. He is a Member of the Editorial Board of Intelligent Data Analysis. He was program Cochair of AI*IA 2015 and ILP 2012. He is Secretary of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence. He has been Guest Editor for special issues of Machine Learning, Fundamenta Informaticae and Intelligenza Artificiale.
• James Cussens https://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/jc/ is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at the University of York, where he is a member of the Artificial Intelligence research group.
  His work focuses mainly on declarative approaches to machine learning. This includes work on probabilistic inductive logic programming and the application of integer linear programming approaches to Bayesian network learning. He is an Action Editor for Machine Learning journal and serves on the PC of most major AI and machine learning conferences.
  He is co-chair (with Alessandra Russo) of the 26th International Conference on Inductive Logic Programming (ILP’16) which will take place 4th – 6th September 2016, London.

Database & Semantic Web

• Alessandra Mileo  http://www.insight-centre.org/users/alessandra-mileo
  
  Dr.      Alessandra Mileo is currently a Senior Research Fellow, Adjunct Lecturer and Unit Leader at the INSIGHT Centre for Data
  Analytics, National University of Ireland Galway.  She holds an MSC and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Milan,
  Italy. Her current research focuses on scalable and interoperable ways of transforming web data streams into actionable knowledge.
  Research areas around this velocity aspect of Big Data involve Stream Reasoning, Web of Things/Internet of Things, query optimization, expressive and scalable stream reasoning languages and frameworks, hybrid methods for qualitative and quantitative reasoning, and access control for Linked Data. She is also active in collaborating with other research groups within the Center, applying research outcome in real world applications that have a very high economical and social potential impact. These include health monitoring, smart cities, sustainable IT and smart enterprise. As a member of the W3C, she is involved in standardization activities. Specifically, she is active in the W3C Community Group on RDF Stream Processing, and the Web of Things Interest Group. Within the European Research Cluster on the Internet of Things, she is contributing to the Activity Chain on Cognitive Technologies for IoT (IERC, AC7).
  She is part of the Insight Galway Steering Committee, and Steering Committee member of the Web Reasoning and Rule Systems
  Association (RRA).
• Francesco Ricca https://www.mat.unical.it/ricca/  is Associate Professor at the Department of Mathematics of the University of Calabria, Italy.
  He received his Laurea Degree in Computer Science Engineering (2002) and a PhD in Computer Science and Mathematics (2006) from the University of Calabria, Italy.
  He is interested in declarative logic-based languages, consistent query answering and data integration, ontologies and in particular on the issues concerning their practical applications: system design and implementation, and development tools.
  Francesco Ricca is co-author of more than 70 refereed articles published in international journals, collections, and conference proceedings.

Implementation

• Martin Gebser http://www.cs.uni-potsdam.de/wv/people/gebser.htmlMartin Gebser is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Potsdam, Germany. His research interests include theoretical and practical aspects of declarative problem solving methods. In particular, Martin contributes to the development of state-of-the-art solving systems in answer set programming and related areas. He gathered practical expertise in knowledge representation and reasoning technology by working on applications in systems biology, system synthesis, configuration, etc.
  Martin co-chaired the ICLP doctoral consortium in 2013 and 2014 as well as the answer set programming competition in 2009, 2014, and 2015.
• Jose F. Morales  http://www.software.imdea.org/people/josef.morales/index.html joined IMDEA Software as a postdoctoral researcher in November 2010, after receiving his Ph.D degree in Computer Science from the Technical University of Madrid (UPM), Spain. Previously, he held a teaching assistant position at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, starting in 2005.
  Jose’s work to date has focused on mechanisms for the efficient execution of logic programs: inference of program properties by abstract interpretation, highly-optimizing translation to low-level code using those properties, and the development of abstractions for the specification and automated construction of abstract machines.
  His current research interests include the design of multiparadigm languages (combining imperative, logic, functional, and object-oriented programming), assertion languages and type systems, abstract interpretation, abstract machines, compiler optimizations, and native code generation. He has been PC member of ICLP 2016, ICLP DC 2015, ICLP 2014, ICLP DC 2014, WLPE 2013, CICLOPS 2013, ICLP DC 2013, ICLP 2012, CICLOPS 2008, CICLOPS 2004, as well as other programming conferences like PLDI 2016 and CC 2016.

KR & Non-monotonic Reasoning

• Marcello Balduccini http://drexel.edu/cci/contact/Faculty/Balduccini-Marcello/  is an Assistant Research Professor of Compute Science at Drexel University (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA).
  His research interests include knowledge representation and reasoning, constraint satisfaction, commonsense, reasoning and problem solving, cybersecurity, and cyber-physical systems. He is affiliated with the AJ Drexel Institute for Energy and the Environment and with the Drexel University Cybersecurity Institute. Prior to joining Drexel, Marcello served as principal research scientist at Kodak Research Labs, leading the research on automated reasoning for industrial printing workflow.
  Dr. Balduccini has published more than 70 refereed technical publications, including three book chapters, and has edited two volumes.
• Dr. Fangkai Yang is a senior research scientist in Maana Inc, Bellevue, WA. He obtained his Ph.D degree on computer science from UT-Austin in 2014 under the supervision with Prof. Vladimir Lifschitz and close collaboration with Prof. Peter Stone, working on studying theoretical foundations of representing, reasoning and planning with actions in logic formalisms and applications on task planning and learning for mobile intelligent robots. From 2014-2017 he was a research engineer of Schlumberger, Houston where he was involved in research and development on task planning and execution for the next generation of autonomous drilling rig and several other projects using answer set programming on industrial products for planning, scheduling and optimization. From 2017 to present he works for Maana Inc, focusing on integrating symbolic planning and reinforcement learning to build AI-powered decision making support platform. His research work is publicized in major AI conferences and journals such as IJCAI, KR, ICLP, ICAPS, LPNMR, TPLP, IJRR, etc.

Analysis & Verification

• Fabio Fioravanti https://www.sci.unich.it/~fioravan/ is an Associate Professor at the University of Chieti-Pescara, Italy. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Sapienza University of Rome in 2002. His current research interests are mainly focused on the use of Constrained Horn Clauses in semantics-based program analysis, verification and testing of programs and business processes. He is one of the authors of the VeriMAP system for CHC transformation and verification.In 2014, together with other colleagues, he started the Workshop on Horn Clauses for Verification and Synthesis (HCVS). He was program co-chair of LOPSTR 2017 and HCVS 2014 and he served as PC member or reviewer for various conferences, journals and doctoral dissertation awards. He was Guest Editor for special issues of Fundamenta Informaticae and is member of the editorial boards of Intelligenza Artificiale and the Journal of Computer Science. He is member of the steering committees of LOPSTR and HCVS, and Secretary of the Italian Association for Logic Programming (GULP).
• Samir Genaim http://samir.loopkiller.com received a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 2003. After completing his Ph.D. he was awarded a Marie-Curie fellowship for a 2-years post-doc appointment at the Universita’ degli studi di Verona with Roberto Giacobazzi. In 2005 he was awarded a ‘Juan de la Cierva’ fellowship, by the Spanish ministry of science, for a 3-years post-doc appointment with the CLIP research group at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. Since December 2008 he is a lecturer at the Departamento de Sistemas Informáticos y Computación at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He is currently a member of the COSTA research group. His research expertise is in the area of formal approaches to program analysis, which includes developing program analysis tools and their underlying theory in order to statically infer run-time properties of programs. He has a particular interest in theoretical and practical aspects of termination and cost analysis. He has published more than 80 peer-reviewed papers.

Student specialist

• Gian Luca Pozzato http://www.di.unito.it/~pozzato/  was born in Moncalieri (Turin) in 1978. He took his ”Laurea” degree ”summa cum laude” in Computer Science in April 2003, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science in February 2007.
  Since November 2015 he is an associate professor at the Department of Computer Science in the Università degli studi di Torino, where he is co-responsible of the “Knowledge representation, Automated Reasoning, Logic and ontologies” (KARL) and Head of Master in ‘’Progettazione e Management del Multimedia per la Comunicazione’’.
  His main research interests in Logical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence include non-monotonic reasoning, conditional logics, preferential logics, description logics, proof theory and theorem proving.