NEWSLETTER No. 78, October 2007

From the AAR President
Results of the CADE Trustee Elections 2007
Call for Papers, Workshops, and Posters

From the AAR President, Larry Wos... My congratulations to the new officers of CADE's board of trustees. The competition was intense this year, and I hope that many of the candidates' ideas for promoting automated reasoning will be carried out in the next few years. Of course, conferences are an excellent arena for presenting ideas. IJCAR 2008 (and all the associated conferences) includes a call for presentations on working automated deduction systems. The key word is "working" -- and I'd love to hear from those of you who have working systems that are answering open questions in mathematics or logic. I also note a repeated theme in this newsletter: program testing and verification. TAP 2008 has issued a call for papers on testing and verification techniques, and a new book reviewed by Martin Leucker also covers program verification. If you have material to contribute to these topics, please let me know.

An election was held from September 11 through October 2 to fill four positions on the board of trustees of CADE Inc. Christoph Benzmüller, Maria Paola Bonacina, Amy Felty, Robert Nieuwenhuis, Brigitte Pientka, Volker Sorge, Geoff Sutcliffe, and Andrei Voronkov were nominated for these positions. (See AAR Newsletter No. 77, September 2007.)

Ballots were sent by electronic mail to all members of AAR on September 11, for a total of 736 ballots. Of these, 121 were returned with a vote, representing a participation level of 16.4% (as compared to 16.0% in 2006, 18.1% in 2005, and 19.8% in 2004 and 2003). One vote was invalid (double listing of one candidate), meaning there are 120 valid votes. Therefore, in each iteration of the STV algorithm¹, a candidate is elected iff he or she gets strictly more than 60 1st preference votes. Otherwise, the votes of the candidate with the least 1st preference votes are redistributed.

The following table reports the initial distribution of preferences among the candidates:

No candidate reaches more than 60 1st preference votes. By redistributing the votes of V. Sorge, one gets the following table:

No candidate reaches more than 60 1st preference votes. By redistributing the votes of B. Pientka, one gets the following table:

No candidate reaches more than 60 1st preference votes. By redistributing the votes of R. Nieuwenhuis one gets the following table:

No candidate reaches more than 60 1st preference votes. By redistributing the votes of A. Felty one gets the following table:

No candidate reaches more than 60 1st preference votes. By redistributing the votes of A.Voronkov one gets the following table:

No candidate reaches more than 60 1st preference votes. C. Benzmüller and G. Sutcliffe have the same number of 1st preference votes, but G. Sutcliffe is higher in the ranking because of receiving more 2nd preference votes. By redistributing the votes of C. Benzmüller one gets the following table:

No candidate reaches more than 60 1st preference votes. By redistributing the votes of G. Sutcliffe one gets the following table:

Now M.P. Bonacina reaches more than 60 1st preference votes, and is elected to the board of trustees. The redistribution of her votes produces the following table:

No candidate reaches more than 60 1st preference votes. By redistributing the votes of V. Sorge one gets the following table:

No candidate reaches more than 60 1st preference votes. By redistributing the votes of R. Nieuwenhuis one gets the following table:

No candidate reaches more than 60 1st preference votes. By redistributing the votes of B. Pientka one gets the following table:

No candidate reaches more than 60 1st preference votes. By redistributing the votes of A.Voronkov one gets the following table:

No candidate reaches more than 60 1st preference votes. By redistributing the votes of A. Felty one gets the following table:

No candidate reaches more than 60 1st preference votes. By redistributing the votes of C. Benzmüller one gets the following table:

Now G. Sutcliffe reaches more than 60 1st preference votes, and is elected to the board of trustees. The redistribution of his votes produces the following table:

No candidate reaches more than 60 1st preference votes. By redistributing the votes of V. Sorge one gets the following table:

No candidate reaches more than 60 1st preference votes. By redistributing the votes of R. Nieuwenhuis one gets the following table:

No candidate reaches more than 60 1st preference votes. By redistributing the votes of B. Pientka one gets the following table:

No candidate reaches more than 60 1st preference votes. By redistributing the votes of C. Benzmüller one gets the following table:

No candidate reaches more than 60 1st preference votes. By redistributing the votes of A. Felty one gets the following table:

Now A.Voronkov reaches more than 60 1st preference votes, and is elected to the board of trustees. The redistribution of his votes produces the following table:

No candidate reaches more than 60 1st preference votes. By redistributing the votes of V. Sorge one gets the following table:

No candidate reaches more than 60 1st preference votes. By redistributing the votes of B. Pientka one gets the following table:

No candidate reaches more than 60 1st preference votes. By redistributing the votes of R. Nieuwenhuis one gets the following table:

No candidate reaches more than 60 1st preference votes. By redistributing the votes of C. Benzmüller one gets the following table:

Now A. Felty reaches more than 60 1st preference votes, and is elected to the board of trustees.

Altogether, the four candidates which are elected to the board of trustees in this election are M. P. Bonacina, G. Sutcliffe, A. Voronkov, and A. Felty.

After this election, the following people (listed alphabetically) are serving on the board of trustees of CADE Inc.:

Wolfgang Ahrendt (Secretary, appointed 5/2007)
Alessandro Armando (IJCAR 2008 Program Co-chair)
Franz Baader (President, CADE-19 Program Chair, elected 10/2003, reelected 10/2006)
Peter Baumgartner (elected 10/2003, reelected 10/2006)
Maria Paola Bonacina (Secretary 9/1999 to 5/2004, elected 10/2004, reelected 10/2007)
Amy Felty (Secretary 5/2004 to 5/2007, elected 10/2007)
Reiner Hähnle (Vice President, elected 10/2005)
Neil Murray (Treasurer)
Geoff Sutcliffe (elected 10/2004, reelected 10/2007)
Aaron Stump (elected 10/2006)
Cesare Tinelli (elected 10/2005)
Andrei Voronkov (CADE-18 Program Chair, elected 10/2002, Vice President 2003, elected 10/2007)

On behalf of the AAR and CADE Inc., I thank David Basin and Rajeev Goré for their service as trustees during the past three years, all candidates for running in the election, all the members who voted; and offer congratulations to Maria Paola Bonacina, Amy Felty, Geoff Sutcliffe, and Andrei Voronkov on being elected.

Submissions should describe previously unpublished work (completed or in progress), including descriptions of research, tools, and applications. Papers must be formatted following the Springer LNCS guidelines and be at most 15 pages long. Submission of papers is via EasyChair. The proceedings are planned to be published within Springer's LNCS series. They will be available at the conference.

For further information, see the Web site.

IJCAR 2008

The 4th International Joint Conference on Automated Reasoning will take place in Sydney, Australia, August 10-15, 2008.

IJCAR 2008 is a merger of several leading events:

Submission is electronic, through EasyChair. Authors are strongly encouraged to use LaTeX and the Springer "llncs" format, which can be obtained from the Springer website. The page limit is 15 pages for full papers and 5 pages for system descriptions.

The paper registration deadline is February 22, 2008; the paper submission deadline is March 2, 2008.

Workshops and Tutorials

Workshop and tutorial proposals on IJCAR-related topics are solicited. Proposals that promise to bring new topics into IJCAR, of either practical or theoretical importance, or provide a forum for more detailed discussion on central topics of continuing importance are highly welcome. Proposals that close the gap between automated reasoning and related areas, e.g., formal methods or software engineering, are especially encouraged.

Proposals must contain information sufficient for the programme committee to judge the importance, quality and community interest in the proposed topic. Each workshop or tutorial must have one or more designated organizers, and may have a programme committee as well.

Proposals must be limited to three pages and provide at least the following information:

Important dates: Deadline for proposal submissions: December 17, 2007; deadline for camera-ready copy of workshop notes: July 14, 2008 For further information, see the Web site.

IJCAR, the International Joint Conference on Automated Reasoning, has a new constitutional frame. And thanks to Geoff Sutcliffe, IJCAR also has a Web presence, at www.ijcar.org. Located there are the new IJCAR Rules and the IJCAR Steering Committee.

Following the success of the 2007 Workshop on Visual Languages and Logic VLL 2007, we are soliciting, for a special issue of JOLLI, papers in which the primary focus is research at the intersection of logic and visual languages. In particular, we invite VLL 2007 authors to submit updated and expanded versions of their papers. Topics of interest include the following:

Those who intend to submit a paper should email a title, abstract, and keywords to VLL@cs.dal.ca by November 30, 2007. This information will be used to assign referees in advance of the paper deadline. Papers may be up to 30 pages, must conform to the JOLLI style (see following URL), and be emailed as a PDF to VLL@cs.dal.ca by January 31, 2008. Note that although PDF is not the required format for the final copies of accepted papers, it is the most convenient for reviewing.