2024 Quarterly Report 4 and 2025 Quarterly Report 1
Miquel Bofill Arasa
In this quarterly report 1, we provide updates on the ACP Executive Committee, the ACP Summer School 2025, and the calls for awards and bids for CP 2027 and ACP Summer School 2026!
ACP.1: Executive Committee UpdateThe ACP held elections last year to replace four outgoing members of the Executive Committee (EC).
We as a community greatly thank outgoing members David Bergman (president), Tias Guns (secretary), Zeynep Kiziltan (DEI delegate), and Chris Beck (past president).
The new elected members of the Executive Committee are Roland Yap, Nadjib Lazaar (who was already serving as the treasurer of the ACP as a non-voting member), Miquel Bofill, and Roie Zivan. They will serve a term of 4 years starting 2025.
Within the new team, the newly appointed roles of the ACP EC are:
President - Gilles Pesant
Secretary - Miquel Bofill
Treasurer - Nadjib Lazaar
Conference Coordinator - Hélène Verhaeghe
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Delegate - Inês Lynce
Communications: Roie Zivan
We look forward to continue serving the community, and welcome your input.
ACP.2: Summer School 2025The ACP Summer School 2025 will be in Benin, Africa. It is organized by CP community members Ratheil Houndji and John Aoga.
The dates are set at 25-29 August 2025.
Registration is open! The Deadline is 23 June 2025.
More information is available on https://school.a4cp.org/summer2025/
ACP.3: Call for AwardsEvery year, the Association for Constraint Programming recognizes individual community members who are making outstanding contributions to the field.
This year we have three different awards, for researchers of different seniority:
- The ‘Doctoral Research’ award: for researchers that obtained their PhD in the last 2 calendar years (i.e., official completion in 2023-01-01 to 2024-12-31)
- The ‘Early Career Research’ award: for rising stars that obtained their PhD 2-8 years ago (i.e., 2017-01-01 to 2022-12-31)
- The ‘Research Excellence’ award: for well-established and highly influential researchers
For each award, a nominator has to submit an official nomination for a colleague, and arrange for referees to submit separate reference letters, as described on the nomination forms below. The information required for the nomination and the rules for submission are specific to each award and it is the nominator's responsibility to submit the proper information and have referees submit reference letters.
We welcome nominations from you! Please take a moment to think of someone who would deserve such a wonderful recognition.
- Doctoral Research award nominations: https://forms.gle/kk8Lo9kwAnqkb6sY7
- Early Career Research award nominations: https://forms.gle/RdLfSTgt9ZU1NzzP7
- Research Excellence award nominations: https://forms.gle/fXnfosFYYYQKNevS6
The deadline is 30 May 2025.
The ACP Executive Committee (EC) holds the annual International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP). Since the ACP plans CP conferences two years in advance, we now solicit bids for CP 2027. If you are interested in organising a future CP conference, then you need to make a proposal to the Conference Coordinator of the EC (helene.v...@uclouvain.be) by the 15th of June 2025.
The proposal must be made by those volunteering to be Conference Chairs (CC) of the conference and volunteering to be responsible for the budget and local arrangements in the proposed city. Proposals must follow the guidelines at http://www.a4cp.org/events/conference-organisation-policy and should address in brief all the following items:
Location
Possible dates
Local organisers and brief description of previous experience organising similar events
Conference facilities and hotels (with URLs if available)
Availability of student accommodation
Possible social events
Preliminary budget and financial considerations (e.g. local sponsorship, cost of the conference facilities)
Travel information
Support of local and national organisations
Collocated events that might be held alongside the conference
Any other information that might be of relevance
The CCs of a CP conference are scientifically acknowledged people in the constraint programming community. A single person can be CC, but the workload is usually best distributed over several people. The EC will select one from the proposals submitted. The EC will independently select a Programme Chair (PC) for the conference to be responsible for the technical program.
ACP.5: Bids for Summer School 2026The Association for Constraint Programming invites proposals for organizing the ACP Summer School on Constraint Programming in 2026. Since its establishment, the summer school has been a major success with feedback from student attendees being very positive.
The proposed topic of the school can be on general CP or on a specific research subject. A complete list of ACP summer schools can be found here: http://www.a4cp.org/events/summer-schools.
Members of the CP community who are interested in organizing the 2026 Summer School should send a proposal to helene.v...@uclouvain.be by the 15th of June 2025, covering the following aspects:
topic of the school
location (and possible co-locations)
dates
organizers
tentative list of speakers
provisional budget
Co-location with related summer schools, such as those organised by SAT or ICAPS, will be viewed favorably. We will also take into account location, giving slight preference to locations where ACP believes there is an opportunity to expand the CP community.
ACP.6: SponsoringThe ACP sponsors a number of activities that promote the use of CP and dissemination of CP research. For example, we sponsor part of the ACP summer school.
In the past quarter we agreed to sponsor two activities:
ICS 2025: The 18th INFORMS Computing Society Conference, March 14-16, 2025, Toronto, Canada, where three tutorials on CP and successful domains were given by Pierre Schauss, Chris Beck and Willem van Hoeve.
CPAIOR 2025: The 22nd International Conference on the Integration of Constraint Programming, Artificial Intelligence, and Operations Research, November 10-13, 2025, Melbourne, Australia.
2024 Quarterly Report 4
In this quarterly report 4, we provide updates on AAAI Bridge and the coming two CP conferences.
AAAI25 BridgeEugene Freuder and Barry O'Sullivan are organizing the AAAI-25 Constraint Programming and Machine Learning Bridge, part of the AAAI-25 Bridge Program.
The focus will be on bringing together the traditional AI fields of constraint-based reasoning and machine learning, but participants from related fields of reasoning, optimization and learning, e.g. SAT, operations research, data mining, will be welcome.
It is hoped that this one-day Bridge event will help establish an ongoing community, leading to workshops, special issues, etc.
The bridge has multiple tracks. More information: https://aaai.org/conference/aaai/aaai-25/aaai-25-bridge-list/#bp07
ACP.1: CP 2025The International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP) is the premier annual conference on all aspects of computing with constraints, including theory, algorithms, models, solvers, and a diverse range of applications in machine learning/artificial intelligence, planning, and scheduling, to name a few. This is the 31st version of the CP series organized by the Association for Constraint Programming.
The CP 2025 program will include presentations of high quality scientific papers on constraints technology. It will be located in Glasgow, Scotland, at the University of Glasgow.
This year, CP will be co-located with the 28th International Conference on Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing (SAT 2025), the 18th International Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS 2025), and the 23rd International Workshop on Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT 2025). Additionally, the SAT/SMT/AR Summer School will be held in St Andrews during the week before the conference.
Program chair: María García de la Banda (Monash University)
Conference chairs: Ciaran McCreesh and Blair Archibald (University of Glasgow)
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Dates: August 10-15, 2025
We already share some more information on CP 2026 as well, which will be part of FLoC 2026.
Conference chair: Inês Lynce (University of Lisbon)
Location: Lisbon, Portugal
Dates: July 20-23, 2026
Kind regards,
Miquel Bofill, Secretary of the ACP