it@cork

More accolades for multi-award winning 4C

In the past two weeks members of 4C have won an R&D Project Award, a Student Medal, and the Ramamoorthy Award, and a new multi-million euro research cluster has been announced in which 4C is participating.

Brief information on these and other highlights from the last year and a half follow.

* Alan Holland wins Irish Software Association Student Medal 2007
On November 9, 2007 Alan Holland won the Irish Software Association Student Medal 2007, given to the post graduate student who has "developed the most innovative and commercially viable software project". Alan, supervised for his Ph.D. by Dr. Barry O'Sullivan, received some of his student support from Enterprise Ireland and some from Science Foundation Ireland. He is now working with Dr. O'Sullivan on an Enterprise Ireland Commercialisation Fund Technology Development Grant, RECAP, Robust & Expressive Combinatorial Auctions for Procurement. Part of this effort involves a project that was shortlisted for the it@cork R&D Project Leaders Award (4C was involved in two of the four shortlisted projects). This project involves the supply of a combinatorial tender system for the leasing, maintenance and repair of a new fleet of vehicles for Cork City Council. 4C hopes to save the council millions of euro in their procurement costs.

* 4C and TreeMetrics Winner in the R&D Project Award category in the it@cork Leaders Awards.
On November 1, 2007, 4C (www.4c.ucc.ie), together with the Irish company TreeMetrics ( www.treemetrics.com) won the it@cork Leaders Award in the R&D Project category. This project is led on the 4C end by a Science Foundation Ireland funded staff member, Dr. James Little, and also has support from an Enterprise Ireland Innovation Partnership, TRIO: Timber Recovery using enhanced Information and Optimisation. TreeMetrics and 4C are working together to develop a new set of forest planning tools based on the combination of several Artificial Intelligence and Optimisation technologies. Treemetrics delivers accurate scanning information of trees in a forest. 4C uses this as the input for a set of decision support tools to predict the shape of the whole tree, how to cut it, where to send the resulting logs, and when in the year this should be done. 4C's technology has increased the value of the information; turning it into key knowledge with which to make better decisions within forest management. Although Ireland is small in forestry terms globally, TreeMetrics software, developed in conjunction with 4C, gives it an opportunity to sell into the major forestry markets around the world.

* ICTAI 2007 Ramamoorthy Award
The ICTAI 2007 Ramamoorthy Award, the best paper award at the Nineteenth IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence has been equally presented to two papers, one of which is "Semiring-Based Constraint Acquisition"
by Xuan-Ha Vu and Barry O'Sullivan. "The annual IEEE International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI) provides a major international forum where the creation and exchange of ideas relating to artificial intelligence are fostered among academia, industry, and government agencies. The conference facilitates the cross-fertilization of these ideas and promotes their transfer into practical tools, for developing intelligent systems and pursuing artificial intelligence applications. The ICTAI encompasses all the technical aspects of specifying, developing, and evaluating the theoretical underpinnings and applied mechanisms of AI tools."

* 4C Participant in new 8M Euro Science Foundation Ireland Strategic Research Cluster "ITOBO"
Science Foundation Ireland has funded a new SFI Strategic Research Cluster, ITOBO: ICT for Sustainable and Optimised Building Operation. The Cluster Director is Prof. Karsten Menzel of the UCC Civil and Environmental Engineering Department. Gene Freuder is Co-Director; Ken Brown and Greg Provan are also among the seven PI's. ITOBO also involves the Tyndall National Institute and the Environmental Research Centre at UCC, and the Cork Institute of Technology and the National University of Ireland, Galway, along with industry partners, Cylon, Vector FM, ARUP, HSG, and Intel. The funding for the Cluster is 6M euro (plus overheads) over 5 years.

* Barry O'Sullivan Elected President of the Association for Constraint Programming
Barry O'Sullivan has been elected to be the next President of the Association for Constraint Programming (ACP). The ACP is in the international association for researchers working in the field of constraint programming.

* 4C Participant in 13.5M Euro PRTLI NEMBES Programme
4C, led by Ken Brown, working with Cormac Sreenan of the Computer Science Department will participate in the 13.5M Euro PRTLI programme, NEMBES: Networked Embedded Systems, a multi-institutional programme led by Dirk Pesch of Cork Institute of Technology.

* Best Paper Shortlisting at K-CAP 2007
The paper "Maintaining Constraint-based Applications", by Tomas Nordlander, Gene Freuder, and Rick Wallace, was shortlisted for a best paper prize at the Fourth International Conference on Knowledge Capture.

* Barry O'Sullivan Becomes Chair of the Artificial Intelligence Association of Ireland
Barry O'Sullivan has been appointed Chair of the Artificial Intelligence Association of Ireland (AIAI). The AIAI is the
national association for researchers working in the area of artificial intelligence in Ireland. AIAI is one of the members
of ECCAI, the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence.

* Ken Brown Co-Investigator on Enterprise Ireland Proof of Concept Grant
Enterprise Ireland have agreed to fund the following Proof of Concept project STOPP/START: minimising inappropriate prescribing in geriatric patients. The PI is Dr Denis O'Mahony of UCC's Dept of Geriatric Medicine. The co-investigators are Dr Stephen Byrne, Dept of Pharmacy, Dr Ken Brown, 4C/Dept of Computer Science, and Prof. Cormac Sreenan, Dept of Computer Science

* Barry O'Sullivan and Hadrien Cambazard Win Best Paper Prize
Barry O'Sullivan and Hadrien Cambazard won the best paper prize at the 18th Irish Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science. The winning paper was entitled "Automated Constraint Reformulation for Explanation". The prize was sponsored by Google.

* Steve Prestwich has Nectar Track paper at AAAI-07
Steve Prestwich has co-authored a paper, Refutation by Randomised General Resolution, with Inês Lynce (Instituto Superior Técnico INESC-ID Lisboa) that has been accepted for the NECTAR track of the 2007 conference of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. The goal of the Nectar track is "to make the most significant AI results presented at other conferences in the last two years available to a broad AI audience".

* 4C Involved in Two EU COST Actions
4C became involved in two EU COST (European Cooperation in the Field of Scientific and Technical Research) Actions:
Barry O'Sullivan is the Irish representative for COST Action “Algorithmic Decision Theory” ( http://www.cost.esf.org/index.php?%20id=1089). Ioannis Dokas became a member of the Cost Action MAUSE – Towards the Maturation of IT Usability Evaluation ( http://www.cost.esf.org/index.php?id=110&action_number=294)

* Steve Prestwich Joins the Editorial Board of the Journal on Satisfiability, Boolean Modeling and Computation
Steve Prestwich has joined the editorial board of the Journal on Satisfiability, Boolean Modeling and Computation.

* Gene Freuder Elected to Royal Irish Academy
Gene Freuder has been elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy. "The Royal Irish Academy / Acadamh Ríoga na hÉireann is an all-Ireland, independent, academic body that promotes study and excellence in the sciences, humanities and social sciences. It is the principal learned society in Ireland and has approximately 300 members who are elected in recognition of their academic achievements." The Academy was founded in 1785.

* Barry O'Sullivan Vice-Chair of DCC'08
Barry O'Sullivan is Vice-Chair for Ireland of the Third International Conference on Design Computing and Cognition, DCC'08.

* Bord Gais (Irish Gas Board) Project of the Year Award
Keith Bourke, supervised by Steve Prestwich, undertook a project for the MSc in Applied Science (Intelligent Systems for Business and Manufacturing) that was awarded the Bord Gais (Irish Gas Board) Project of the Year Award for this MSc programme.  It was entitled Template Design Using Constraint Based Local Search.  It applied Laurent Michel & Pascal van Hentenryck's constraint-based local search COMET system, to a well-known problem from the colour printing industry: the template design problem, originated by Les Proll and Barbara Smith.

* Tomas Nordlander Co-Organizes K-CAP 2007 Workshop
Tomas Nordlander is organizing, with Jim Blythe of the USC Information Sciences Institute, a Workshop on Knowledge Capture and Constraint Programming, to be held in conjunction with The Fourth International Conference on Knowledge Capture, (KCAP 2007).

* Barry O'Sullivan Co-Chair of AAAI-07 Workshop
Barry O'Sullivan is Co-Chair, with Klas Orsvarn, Tacton Systems AB, Sweden, of the AAAI 2007 Workshop on Configuration, a workshop affiliated with The 22nd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2007).

* Emmanuel Hebrard and Tarik Hadzic Receive Embark Initiative Post-doctoral Fellowships
Emmanuel Hebrard and Tarik Hadzic have received Embark Initiative Post-doctoral Fellowships to work with Barry O'Sullivan at 4C.

* Barry O'Sullivan Joins Editorial Board of the journal Advances in Artificial Intelligence
Barry O'Sullivan has become an Associate Editor of the journal Advances in Artificial Intelligence

* Steve Prestwich Joins Editorial Board of the Journal of Digital Information Management
Steve Prestwich has joined the Editorial Board of the Journal of Digital Information Management

* Barry O'Sullivan and Steve Prestwich Join Editorial Board of Constraint Programming Letters
Barry O'Sullivan and Steve Prestwich have joined the  Editorial Board of Constraint Programming Letters. Barry has also become the Area Chair for Design and Configuration.

* Barry O'Sullivan Co-Edits Book on Trends in Constraint Programming
Barry O'Sullivan is the co-editor, along with Frédéric Benhamou, University of Nantes, France
and Narendra Jussien,  Ecole des Mines, Nantes, France, of Trends in Constraint Programming

* 4C Collaborates with TreeMetrics on Enterprise Ireland Innovation Partnership
4C is collaborating with TreeMetrics on an Enterprise Ireland Innovation Partnership. This work is directed by James Little, Steve Prestwich, and Tomas Nordlander. TreeMetrics is an award-winning Irish software company servicing the forest industry.

* 4C Collaborates with British Telecom on Embark Enterprise Partnership
Barry O'Sullivan and Nic Wilson are collaborating with Nader Azarmi and David Lesaint of British Telecom on a project jointly funded by British Telecom and the Embark Initiative under the Embark Initiative's Enterprise Partnership Scheme.

* 4C Receives received two Enterprise Ireland Commercialisation Fund Technology Development grants
4C has received two Enterprise Ireland Commercialisation Fund Technology Development grants. Barry O'Sullivan and Alan Holland are directing work on RECAP - Robust & Expressive Combinatorial Auctions for Procurement, and Gene Freuder, James Little, and Jacob Feldman are directing work on CP-Inside - Embedding Constraint-based Decision Tools in Successful Commercial Software.

* SFI Principal Investigator Awards
Barry O'Sullivan and Gene Freuder received joint SFI Principal Investigator Awards for Applying Artificial Intelligence to Make Constraint Programming Easier to Use for Decision Making.

* Nic Wilson Paper among ECAI 2006 Best
Nic Wilson's paper, An Efficient Upper Approximation for Conditional Preference, was judged to be among the 10 best papers at the 2006 European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, as selected by the ECAI-06 chairs.

* 4C Authors Receive Rob Milne Memorial Award at AI-2006
Alfio Vidotto, Ken Brown, and 4C alumnus Chris Beck won the Rob Milne Memorial Award for the best refereed application paper at AI-2006, the Twenty-sixth SGAI International Conference on Innovative Techniques and Applications of Artificial Intelligence. The memorial trophy, which was instituted in 2005 in memory of the contribution that Rob Milne made to AI, was presented to them during the conference, along with a cheque for £500.

* Ross Nicholson, Derek Bridge, and Nic Wilson Win Best Paper Award
Ross Nicholson, Derek Bridge, and Nic Wilson won the best paper award at the 2006 European Conference on Case-Based Reasoning.

* Alan Holland and Roberto Rossi Shortlisted for Irish Software Association Student Medal for Commercially Viable Software 2006
Alan Holland and Roberto Rossi, both of the Cork Constraint Computation Centre, were two of the four short-listed candidates for the Irish Software Association Student Medal for Commercially Viable Software 2006.

* Industrial Paper Prize at INCOM2006
James Little and summer intern Paidi Creed, along with Suresh Goyal, Steve Berry, and Doug Cokely of Lucent Technologies, were awarded an Industrial Paper prize at INCOM2006, the 12th IFAC Symposium on Information Control Problems in Manufacturing.

* Rick Wallace Receives EU Transfer of Knowledge Funding
Rick Wallace has received an EU Transfer of Knowledge grant for Constraint Reasoning Extended to Enhance Decision Support (CREEDS). CREEDS will provide approximately 600K euro to bring complementary expertise into 4C.