[TYPES/announce] Second CFP of SymCon'08

[benhamou]

We apologize for multiple copies of this Call.

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                         Call for Papers

                  SymCon'08

           The Seventh International Workshop
       on Symmetry in Constraint Satisfaction Problems
                 (http://www.aloul.net/symcon)
      To be held at the Fourteenth International Conference
    on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2008)

                  Sidney, Australia
              September 15th 2008

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WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION
--------------------

SymCon'08 is the 8th 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


ATTENDANCE
----------

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.


PAPER SUBMISSION
----------------

To submit a paper to the workshop, please e-mail a PS or PDF file in
IJCAI03 style to symcon2008 at cril.fr.
Style files can be obtained at http://www.aloul.net/symcon

Papers must be formated in IJCAI requirements and can be of any length
but should not exceed 8 pages. All submissions must be received by
June 29th, 2008. 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.


SELECTION PROCESS
-----------------

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 2008.
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.


IMPORTANT DATES
---------------

Submission deadline:        Sunday, 29th June 2008
Notification of acceptance: Thursday, 17th July 2008
Camera ready deadline:      Sunday, 3rd August 2008
Workshop:                   Monday, 15th September 2008


PROGRAM COMMITTEE CHAIRS
------------------------

- Fadi Aloul 
  American University of Sharjah, UAE
  Email: faloul at aus.edu

- Belaid Benhamou
  University of Provence (Aix-Marseille I)
  LSIS-CMI, 39 F. Joliot-Curie
  13453 Marseille Cedex13 France.
  Email: Belaid.Benhamou at cmi.univ-mrs.fr
   
- Lakhdar Sais
  University of Artois
  Rue Jean Souvraz SP-18
  F-62307 Lens Cedex 3, France
  E-mail : sais at cril.fr





 
PROGRAM COMMITTEE (Provisional List)
-----------------
- Anbulagan, NICTA Ltd, Australia
- Gilles Audemard, Université d'Artois, France.
- Rolf Backofen, Albert-Ludwigs-University, Germany
- Brendan D. McKay, Australian National University, Australia
- Berthe Y. Choueiry, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Lincoln, USA
- Pierre Flener, Sabanci University, Turkey and Uppsala University, Sweden
- Brahim Hnich, Izmir University of Economics Sakarya Caddesi, Izmir, 
Turkey
- Ines Lynce, Instituto Superior Tecnico INESC-ID Lisboa, Portugal
- 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
- Karen Petrie, Oxford University, UK
- Steve Prestwich, University College Cork, Ireland
- 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
- Jian Zhang, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China