First Call for
Papers
SymCon'07
The Seventh International Workshop
on Symmetry and Constraint Satisfaction Problems
(http://www.cmi.univ-mrs.fr/~benhamou/symcon07/)
To be held at the Thirteenth International Conference
on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2007)
Providence, RI, USA
September 23rd 2007
SymCon'07 is the 7th in a series of workshops affiliated with the CP conference, and focuses on the investigation of symmetry and symmetry breaking techniques for Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs). Symmetries occur frequently in CSPs. When undetected, they cause thrashing during traditional backtracking search by redundantly exploring symmetric parts of the search space. The topic was discussed as far back as 1874 by Glaisher, and new techniques to detect and/or break symmetry have been proposed in recent years. However, many outstanding problems remain. For instance, the detection and exploitation of local, dynamic, and weak forms of symmetry remains a challenge.
The workshop is a forum for researchers to present advances in symmetry breaking techniques and to discuss the above or other open problems. Additionally, the workshop welcomes the presentation of applications and case studies that exhibit some form of symmetry. The workshop is relevant to the computational group theory (CGT) community because CGT is often the theory underlying many symmetry breaking techniques. Importantly, the organizers welcome submissions from researchers working in other areas of Artificial Intelligence who feel that their work would be of interest to the CP community. Such areas include planning, model checking, QBF formulas, finite model search, and theorem proving in FOL.
Workshop topics include, but are
not limited to:
- Symmetry definition: semantic symmetry, syntactic symmetry, constraint
symmetry, solution symmetry
- Automatic symmetry detection: static approaches and dynamic approaches
- Global symmetry detection and elimination
- Dynamic symmetry detection and elimination
- Combining symmetry breaking techniques
- Exploiting weak forms of symmetries like "dominance" and "almost-symmetries"
- Case studies of problems that exhibit interesting symmetries
- Application of computational group theory techniques to symmetry
breaking
- Heuristics that use information about symmetry to guide search
- Elimination and avoidance of symmetry by re-modelling
- Dynamic avoidance of symmetric states during search
- Complexity analysis of symmetry breaking techniques
- Application of CSPs to symmetry and related algebraic problems
- Comparing symmetry breaking techniques in constraint programming
with
techniques for dealing with symmetry in other search
domains
- Symmetry in CNF formulas and OBF formulas
- Symmetry in finite model search in first order logic
- Novel exploitation of symmetry in varied search domains of interest
to the CP community
The workshop is open to all members of the CP community. At least one author of each submission accepted for presentation must attend the workshop and present the contribution. All workshop attendees must pay the workshop fee.
To submit a paper to the workshop, please e-mail a PS or PDF file in IJCAI03 style to symcon07@cmi.univ-mrs.fr.
Papers must be formatted using IJCAI requirements and can be of any length not exceeding 8 pages. All submissions must be received by June 22nd, 2007. The Program Committee Chairs will acknowledge all submissions. If a submitted paper is not acknowledged in 2 working days, the authors are kindly requested to contact one of the chairs.
All submissions will be reviewed. Those that present a significant contribution to the workshop topics will be accepted for publication in the workshop proceedings. The proceedings will be available electronically at the workshop web-page and in hardcopy at CP 2007.
If necessary, for time reasons, only a subset of the papers will be presented. A selection will then be made by the Program Committee Chairs.
Post-publication of the proceedings is currently under negotiation.
Submission deadline:
Friday, 22nd June 2007
Friday, 29th June 2007 (Closed)
Notification of acceptance: Tuesday, 17th July 2007
Camera ready deadline: Friday, 3rd August 2007
Workshop: Sunday, 23rd September 2007
Belaïd Benhamou
Université de Provence (Aix-Marseille I)
LSIS-CMI, 39 F. Joliot-Curie
13453 Marseille Cedex13 France.
Email:
Belaid.Benhamou@cmi.univ-mrs.fr
Berthe Y. Choueiry
256 Avery Hall
Constraint Systems Laboratory
CSE--University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Lincoln, NE, 68588-0115, USA
Email: choueiry@cse.unl.edu
Brahim Hnich
Faculty of Computer Sciences
Izmir University of Economics
Sakarya Caddesi No:156, 35330 balcova
Izmir, Turkey
Mail: brahim.hnich@ieu.edu.tr
- Fadi A. Aloul, American University
of Sharjah, U.A.E.
- Gilles Audemard, Université d'Artois, France.
- Rolf Backofen, Albert-Ludwigs-University, Germany
- Pierre Flener, Sabanci University, Turkey and Uppsala University, Sweden
- Zeynep Kiziltan, University of Bologna, Italy
- Derek Long, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK
- Igor Markov, University of Michigan, U.S.A.
- Pedro Meseguer, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain.
- Michela Milano, University of Bologna, Italy
- Justin Pearson, Uppsala University, Sweden
- Karen Petrie, Oxford University, UK
- Steve Prestwich, University College Cork, Ireland
- Jean-François Puget, ILOG, France
- Lakhdar Sais, Université d'Artois, France.
- Pierre Seigel, University of Provence, Aix-Marseille I, France
- Meinolf Sellmann, Brown University, U.S.A.
- Barbara Smith, Cork Constraint Computation Centre, Irland.
- Pascal van Hentenryck, Brown University, U.S.A.
- Toby Walsh, University of New South Wales, Australia