David Pearce

Industrial Relations

This year's week of Practical Applications Conferences was again held in London in April, attracting nearly 300 delegates and 9 exhibitors in all. A new conference on data-mining (PADD) joined the established Prolog, Constraints and Agent events (PAP, PACT, PAAM). The network has as usual been active in sponsoring and promoting these events, and network nodes have been represented in the different programme committees. In addition, this year a special Compulog Net tutorial on Internet and WWW Programming was given by Manuel Hermenegildo. This formed part of a range of network supported activities to promote computational logic as an internet and WWW programming tool. Earlier, in December 1996, the network sponsored a special workshop on internet programming organised by Imperial College and attracting over 70 participants. A special feature at next year's PAP 98 conference will be a session devoted to new tools and products for the internet that are being brought out by vendors of logic programming systems.

The Practical Applications conferences are designed primarily for an industrial audience and consequently tend to attract only a handful of the network's academic nodes. All too often this means that even academic nodes who are active in developing and applying (C)LP technologies are scarcely aware of the vast range of high-quality industrial applications of (C)LP around the world. To help fill the gap and raise awareness, Compulog Net has now sent all its nodes copies of the proceedings of this year's PAP and PACT conferences. We hope these will be put on display, browsed and studied by colleagues and students. Nodes can order additional copies and other back issues of proceedings at highly discounted rates.

One of the more ambitious programmes within Compulog Net II was the series of one-day industrial seminars (ASTAP) devoted to key application areas of computational logic, such as finance, manufacturing, telecommunications and transportation, held in various major European cities. Although the network no longer plans a fixed series of such seminars at regular intervals, it actively encourages contacts with potential cooperation partners who have the skills, experience and enthusiasm to organise an industrial seminar on a focused topic. One such event recently took place in Bled, Slovenia, which could provide a model for future industrial seminars co-organised by the network. This seminar was run in cooperation with the Centre for Knowledge Transfer in Information Technologies of the Josef Stefan Institute (IJS), Ljubljana. The Centre can draw on IJS's very strong expertise in machine learning and computational logic and, importantly, has already well-established contacts in the medical and pharmaceutical industries (one of Slovenia's most important industries), besides varied experience in organising industrial events. The seminar focused on biomedical applications of computational logic and machine learning and was well-attended by medical doctors and computer specialists in the field (see report in the Machine Learning section of this issue). Biomedicine is also the theme of the network's first Special Industrial Interest Group that is being set-up under the coordination of Peter Hammond (Eastman Institute, London). Anyone interested in any aspect of the application of computational logic in the biomedical field should contact Peter Hammond at: hammond@eastman.ucl.ac.uk. If the initiative demonstrates sufficient support, one of the Group's first activities is expected to be the planning and organisation of a workshop to take place in 1998.