First Call for Papers

SymCon'09

The Ninth International Workshop on Symmetry and Constraint Satisfaction Problems

To be held at the Fifteenth International Conference
on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2009)

Lisbon, Portugal
September 20, 2009

Workshop Description

SymCon'09 is the 9th 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 CP registration fee in addition to the workshop fee.

Paper Submission

To submit a paper to the workshop, please e-mail a PS or PDF file in
IJCAI style to symcon09@gmail.com.

Papers must be formatted using IJCAI requirements 
(http://ijcai-09.org/fcfp.html), and can be of any
length not exceeding 8 pages. All submissions must be received by July
31, 2009. 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 2009.

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.


Important Dates

Submission deadline: 31 July 2009 (extended)
Notification of acceptance: 14 August 2009
Camera ready deadline: 22 August 2009
Workshop: Sunday, 20th September 2009

Symcon Workshop Series: http://www.it.uu.se/research/group/astra/SymCon/

Program Committee Chairs
- Belaid Benhamou, Universite of Provence (Aix-Marseille I)
- Alex Fukunaga, Tokyo Institute of Technology
- Meinolf Sellmann, Brown University

Programme Committee 
- Fadi A. Aloul, American University of Sharjah, U.A.E.
- Berthe Y. Choueiry, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Lincoln, USA
- Pierre Flener, Uppsala University, Sweden
- Alan Frisch University of York, UK
- Brahim Hnich, Izmir University of Economics Sakarya Caddesi, Izmir, Turkey
- Zeynep Kiziltan, University of Bologna, Italy
- Ines Lynce, Instituto Superior Tecnico INESC-ID Lisboa, Portugal
- Francois Margot Carnegie Mellon University, USA
- Pedro Meseguer, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain.
- Justin Pearson, Uppsala University, Sweden
- Karen Petrie, Oxford University, UK
- Steve Prestwich, University College Cork, Ireland
- Lakhdar Sais, Universite d'Artois, France.
- Pierre Siegel, Universite of Provence, Aix-Marseille I, France.
- Pascal van Hentenryck, Brown University, U.S.A.
- Toby Walsh, University of New South Wales, Australia
- Jian Zhang, Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China