Officers' Agendas for 2008

• Agenda of the Secretary/Treasurer
  • Maintain an e-NewsLetter, containing relevant information for CP-ers in North-America. This includes PhD defenses in the broad area of CP, information on the CP-related job market, conference announcements/CFPs, etcetera.
  • Maintain repositories on the CPNA website, in particular
    • resources for education: examples of courses, slides, papers, texbooks, ...
    • resources for success stories of CP: applications, companies, ...
    • resources as described in the e-NewsLetter: conferences, job market, ...
  In addition, Willem would like to initialize the following (hopefully recurring) events:
  • A summer school for students and prospective practitioners. My idea is to have a 4 or 5 day summer school to be held in May/June, taught by, say, 2 lecturers, covering some topic on CP. Ideally it should involve applications and an on-hands part (computer implementation). Main motivation: expose CP to more people, and try to convince them to use it.
  • A small and informal CP workshop (say 3 days), with unpublished proceedings, where North-American researchers and students can present new (and less new but interesting) work. Main motivations: i) easy way to stay up-to-date with latest developments in North-American CP, 2) get to know new people (for example PhD students), 3) create atmosphere that allows easier collaboration between groups.
  Willem realizes that these last two activities do not necessarily fall in the scope of the Secretary/Treasurer office, and they may overlap with the other agendas. However he would be happy to organize them (or help organizing them).

• Agenda of the Platform Chair
  • Co-organize CPAIOR 2009 with Willem van Hoeve, with a venue in North America. John has already investigated several locations, and in the end he and Willem have more or less decided to hold it at CMU--but this could change. Your opinion is welcome. It will be in late May 2009, avoiding the Memorial Day weekend.
  • John would like to work with Gilles on the Banff workshop in Dec 2009. He thinks this is a great opportunity to promote CP in North America.

• Agenda of the Career Chair
  Given the resources already available through the Association for Constraint Programming (e.g., CP Online: slash.math.unipd.it/cp/), it does not appear an useful to reproduce the job listings and other resources. Instead, Chris' goal for 2008 is to develop recommendations for an appropriate undergraduate curriculum. This will take two forms:
  • A webpage to organize the teaching resources for an undergraduate course in CP that are available (e.g., material and links to material from existing undergraduate courses in CP and from the Summer Schools on Constraint Programming).
  • The development of a broader undergraduate curriculum in CP. Such a curriculum will necessarily include a course on CP, but it will also include foundational material in mathematics, computer science, optimization, artificial intelligence, etc.
  Toward this second goal, Chris has become a member of the INFORMS Computing Society Education Committee whose mandate is to develop "appropriate curricula for undergraduate students wishing to pursue graduate or industry work at the OR/CS interface."

• Agenda of the Liaison
  The main task Andrew wishes to address as industry liason is effective communication between industry and academia with respect to the following:
  • Make industry more aware of CP technology. In particular, maintain a web site with case studies of successful applications of CP. Identify where (and why) one would use CP as opposed to other technologies for specific application areas. One idea is to initiate an annual prize similar to the Edelman award in INFORMS for the most innovative and compelling use of CP technology in a real application setting. (Andrew is not sure there are enough real CP applications in a given year to make this very competitive right now, but it might be worth starting anyway).
  • Make academia more aware of the needs of industry. Create a database of real problems from industry and make researchers aware of these problems. One possibility is to nominate one interesting industry problem each year addressing some specific industry issues, and organise a competition and workshop around solving the problem. This worked very well a few years ago at the CP conference.