2022 Election Results
The 2023 ACP Executive Committee (EC) comprises the following people:
- David Bergman - President
- Tias Guns - Secretary
- Nadjib Lazaar - Treasurer (new, ex-officio)
- Helene Verhaeghe - Conference Coordinator (new)
- Zeynep Kiziltan - Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Delegate
- Ines Lynce (new)
- Gilles Pesant (new)
- Chris Beck - Past President
The following ACP EC members left the ACP EC at the end of 2022 after having served their respective terms:
- Sophie Demassey
- Emmanuel Hebrand
- Michele Lombardi
On behalf of the CP community, the EC thanks the outgoing members for their contributions and dedication during their service on the EC.
Election Statements
Ines Lynce
I have been a member of the CP community for a long time. I first attended a CP conference as a PhD student in 2001. In that year, I also participated in the first CP doctoral program. I still remember the first steps of the ACP.
I am now a professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Engineering School of the University of Lisbon. I am also a researcher at INESC-ID. Since 2020 I have served on the Editorial Board of the Artificial Intelligence Journal. I publish at and am a recurrent member of the program committees of the IJCAI, AAAI, ECAI, CP, and SAT conferences. I have been the co-organizer of the 2018 SAT-SMT-AR summer school. In addition, I was the co-chair of the 21st International Conference on Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing (SAT’19).
My main research contributions include developing search algorithms and applying those algorithms to solve practical problems. I tend to make use of SAT tools to solve these problems. But in the end, I resort to the most appropriate technology and end up using not only SAT but also CP, OR, SMT or ASP.
I have now the opportunity to serve on the ACP Executive Committee. If elected, my research work, having its roots in SAT, will provide me with a privileged vision and a diverse perspective on the future of the ACP. I want to put into practice three simple ideas:
Making CP more inclusive and diverse. The CP community goes far beyond academics having CP as the primary research field. CP is pervasive in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science. We should welcome all those who contribute to the development of CP. On the other hand, the ACP should foster initiatives involving ACP members in other sister communities.
Improving the internal communication within the community. We should be aware of and be proud of the success stories of the ACP members - publications, projects, dissertations, prizes, events. This communication will help us find more opportunities to collaborate with other ACP members.
Reaching out to more practitioners, researchers, students, and the general public. Most of us are involved in such activities in our local communities, ranging from teaching to outreach initiatives. ACP currently provides financial support to some of these activities. I advocate that ACP should further support these activities by making available comprehensive materials produced by the ACP members.
Web page: https://sat.inesc-id.pt/~ines/
Gilles Pesant
I am a professor of Computer and Software Engineering at Polytechnique Montréal, Canada. Constraint Programming has been my main research area for the past 30 years. I attended the very first CP conference in Cassis, France. I am a past Editor-in-Chief of the Constraints journal and a founding member of the CPAIOR Steering Committee. I was part of the organizing committee for the CP’04, CP’12, CP’15, CPAIOR’03, CPAIOR’05, and CPAIOR’09 conferences. I serve regularly on the program committee of the CP, CPAIOR, AAAI, and IJCAI conferences.
I believe ours is an exciting, intellectually-stimulating, industry-relevant, and impactful research area. Yet our community does not really show signs of the growth it deserves. The number of CP-related submissions to dedicated conferences (CP, CPAIOR) as well as to more general ones (e.g. IJCAI, AAAI) appears to decline. We are not alone in this situation: other AI-related communities are currently struggling in the shadow of Machine Learning.
If you choose to elect me, I will work with you to make our community grow. I don’t pretend to know exactly how yet but, looking at past statements from candidates who stood for election and at recent efforts by the ACP EC, I see lots of great ideas. I would first identify in what direction(s) we wish to grow and then target a few strategic actions at a time, putting to work our considerable human talent and financial resources. For example, given the popularity of online courses, should we produce and promote high-quality short courses (modules) on CP that can be integrated in graduate and even undergraduate curricula, especially in parts of the world or segments of the population where our community is underrepresented? Could we send some of the prominent members of our community on a mission to promote our field by visiting big tech companies, top universities, and even government agencies, or by proposing tutorials to related conferences? Could we put together a CP task force to join efforts in tackling major social and environmental issues?
Hélène Verhaeghe
I am currently a post-doctorate researcher at Polytechnique Montreal (Canada), under the supervision of Prof. Gilles Pesant and Prof. Claude-Guy Quimper.
I am an active member of the CP community since attending my first JFPC conference in 2016 (French CP conference). I have already attended many conferences from the community (all CP conferences since CP2017, CPAIOR multiple times and every JFPC since 2016). I have already helped with the organization of multiple conferences. I was the photograph at CP2017 and CP2018, publicity chair and in charge of the online organization at CP2020 and doctoral program chair at CP2022. On the research side, I am also an active contributor to the CP community. My research topic includes working on CP constraints and solver (the extensional constraint, sampling of solutions), using CP methods to solve ML-related problems (decision trees, improving neural net learning using CP), and some applications of CP (RCPSP problem). I have frequently submitted papers to the CP and CPAIOR conferences as well as some workshops and the Constraint journal. I have also already served on many program committees (CP, CPAIOR, AAAI and IJCAI), and did some reviews for the constraint journal (twice) and others.
If I were to be elected, I would focus on strategies for strengthened the community and open it to more people. First, I find it important to broaden the visibility of the CP community. For example, by improving and diffusing the available resources (success stories, Wikipedia pages,...) or creating new ones (listing of solvers, list of online tutorials,...). Having such complete resources would amazing tools to promote CP and attract new users. It would also help professors to easily include mentions of CP into their courses or even create full courses on the topic.
Secondly, the opening of the community to other fields is also important to me. The CP one could benefit from such synergies. By opening up to the OR, ML, planning,... communities, CP researchers could learn from methods developed there. CP can also provide some help to the other communities. However, as often, CP is not well known. Providing means for the creation of workshops or tutorials aiming at the presentation of CP solutions during conferences of these domains would be a good opportunity to build scientific bridges.
Last but not least, I would advocate broadening the diversity within the CP community. For now, the community is mostly situated in Europe, North America and Australia. Attracting a broader public could only benefit to the community. Means to do that includes the diffusion of resources related to CP, as well as considering once in a while places where the community is less represented for the conferences.