CLIMA-X, SEA'09 and LPNMR'09

The Computational Logic in MultiAgents (CLIMA) Workshop celebrated its tenth anniversary this year. It co-located for the first time with MATES. Personally I think this was a good choice; it made the workshop feel less like one of many workshops of a very big conference or the little fish in a big pond. The MATES conference (the German conference on Multi-agent systems) and associated workshops was very well organised. Everything ran extremely smoothly; if it did not nobody noticed it. I have organised events before myself and I can only appreciate the amount of effort that must have gone in it. Given that MATES is a German conference, I was surprised to see that the authors were from all over the world. I really liked the join invited talks. While time constraints prevents participants to go to every talk, the invited talks give you a feel of what is going on in each community. The coffee and lunch breaks were sufficiently long that you could talk with colleagues without havingto skip sessions. For me, the social program is important contributor to the success of a meeting. It gives participants the opportunity to have discussions in a more informal and relaxed setting. The MATES/CLIMA reception and conference dinner where well thought-off. There was ample time, food and drinks to keep discussions, networking and socialising going. Back to the scientific part, I enjoyed the CLIMA workshop. There was a good mix of topics and interesting presentations. But I do have to say that the content is moving away from the computational aspect of logic, which is a shame really. The scientific highlights for me, and this is purely a personal research bias, were the invited talks of Tran Cao Son’s invited talk on “Logic Programming and Multiagent Planning“ and Bernt Farwer on “Modelling and Verification of Resource-Bounded Multi-Agent Systems” and the presentations on “Model Checking Normative Agent Organisations (Louise Dennis, Nick Tinnemeier and John-Jules Meyer)“ and „A Difference Logic Approach to Solve Matching Problems in Multi-Agent Settings (Helena Keinänen and Misa Keinänen“. All these presentations had strong links to research I am currently involved in and gave me new insights for my work. After a relaxing weekend, I was ready to start the second week of conferencing. The theme was no longer multiagent systems but logic programming in general and answer set programming (ASP) more specifically. The SEA’09 workshop on Monday was organised byTorsten Schaub from the University of Potsdam and myself. The workshop was established to bring together research interested in the software engineering and programming side of ASP. While originally a highly theoretical field, more researchers are getting interested in applications or the applied areas of ASP. LPNMR’09 (Logic Programming and Non-Monotonic Reasoning) had ASP applications as it special theme this year. This was emphasised with two panel discussion on “Applications of ASP” and “Future application of ASP”, and a poster session on successful applications of ASP. >From an organiser’s point of view, SEA’09 went very well. Participants told me after the event that they enjoyed the workshop. The LPNMR conference was very intense. It packed to the rafters with interesting papers and presentations, which meant that coffee and lunch breaks were reduced to an absolute minimum. The conference was organised with German precision. With an early start of 8.30 in the morning it stretched the night-owl among us. Personally, I would have preferred the conference to have been spread over four days rather than three. It would have made the breaks more relaxed and would have allowed from more discussion with colleagues without having to skip sessions. The social programme was excellent. On the first day we were taking on a tour of the beautiful park of Sanssouci, the once royal gardens and residences of the German rulers, which was followed by the reception. The conference dinner, in a traditional German brewery, was preceded by a boat tour on the lovely lakes around Potsdam. With the sunny weather, it was an absolute treat. The highlight of SEA for me was the panel on ASP programming methodologies. For ASP to become a known technique outside academia we need tools and processes to make programming in this paradigm more accessible; a methodology for writing programs is one ofthem. The panel was a good starting point to collate different views and styles. I was very pleased when it was announced that this year’s special theme for LPNMR was applications of ASP and NMR and I did not get disappointed. I always find it fascinating to see good theoretical research put in practice. The conference had a very goodselection of papers and the paper that for me jumped out was “The First Version of a new ASP Solver: ASPeRiX” by Claire Lef‘evre and Pascal Nicolas. Current answer set solvers have the problem that the program has to be grounded (made variable-free) before the actual solving can start. ASPeRix is the first solver that is capable of grounding on demand. Although in a very early stage of development, the system shows promise. On Thursday evening, my colleagues and I flew back to the UK, tired but filled with new ideas.