Int. Federation Computational Logic

Int. Federation Computational Logic

[Graham Wrightson]

THE INTERNATIONAL FEDERATION FOR COMPUTATIONAL LOGIC (IFCoLog)

A MANIFESTO

Computational Logic has outgrown its humble beginnings and early
expectations by far: with close to ten thousand people working in
research and development of logic-related methods, with several dozen
international conferences and workshops addressing the growing
richness and diversity of the field, and with the foundational role
and importance these methods now assume in mathematics, computer
science, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, linguistics and
many engineering fields -- where logic-related techniques are used
inter alia to state and settle correctness issues -- the field has
diversified in ways that the pure logicians working in the early 
decades of this century could have hardly anticipated.

Dating back to its roots in Greek philosophy as presented in the works
of Aristotle, logic has grown in richness and diversity over the
centuries to finally find today's methodological approach in the
work of Frege.  These logical calculi, which capture an important aspect of
human thought, were now amenable to investigations with mathematical
rigor and the beginning of this century saw the influence of these
developments in the foundation of mathematics with the work of
Hilbert, Russell and Whitehead, in the foundation of syntax and
semantics of language, and in philosophical foundations expressed most
explicitly by the logicians in the Vienna Circle.

Picking up on these developments and on the early dreams of mechanized
reasoning the Dartmouth Conference in 1956 advocated explicitly the
hopes for the new possibilities that the advent of electronic
computing machinery offered: logical statements could now be executed
on a machine with all its far-reaching consequences that ultimately
led to logic programming, deduction systems for mathematics and
engineering, logical design and verification of computer software and
hardware, deductive databases and software synthesis as well as
logical techniques for the analysis of mechanical machinery.  In this
way the growing richness of foundational and purely logical
investigations that had led to such developments as:

  - first order calculi
  - type theory and higher order logic
  - non-classical logics
  - semantics
  - constructivism and others
  
were enriched by new questions and problems to be asked in particular in
computer science and artificial intelligence, leading to:

  - denotational semantics for programming languages
  - nonmonotonic reasoning
  - logical foundations for computing machinery such as CSP, ?-Calculs
       and others for program verification
  - logical foundations for cognitive robotics (the frameproblem)
  - syntax and semantics for natural language processing
  - logical foundations for data bases
  - linear logics
  - logical foundations and the philosophy of mind and many others.

This growing diversity is reflected in the numerous conferences and
workshops that address particular aspects of the fields mentioned.  

For example, only twenty years ago, there was just one international
conference on automated deduction (later to be called CADE).  Today
there is not only CADE but also: 

  - RTA (Rewriting Techniques and Applications)
  - LPAR (Logic Programming and Automated Reasoning)
  - the TABLEAUX Conference
  - UNIF (Unification Workshop)
  - FTP (First Order Theorem Proving), and
  - LICS (Logic in Computer Science), 

each of which is held regularly with its own set of proceedings and
supported by a mature community.  Frequently these conferences are
backed up by dozens of national and international workshops, such as
JELIA, CALCULEMUS, the Induction Workshops, PROOF.PRESENTATION,
USERINTERFACES for ATP; the Nonmonotonic Reasoning Workshops, the
Knowledge Representation Conference(s), the Frame Problem meetings and
many more.  

A similar growth of meetings has been seen in the other areas
mentioned before, namely logic programming with its main conferences
and workshops (more than two dozen regular meetings and events) which
are now somehow unified into CL 2000.  Similar growth and
diversity can be seen in linguistics and natural language processing
with its conferences and workshops (again about a dozen conferences
and workshops) as well as logic and the philosophy of science with its
world conference: Congress for Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of
Science.  Logical foundations of computer science and verification has
seen a major growth with its traditional conference LICS, but nowadays
represented also by CAV (Computer Aided Verification), FM-Europe
(Formal Methods) and others, each of which accompanied again by a few
dozen national and international workshops and many events that
reflect the growing industrial importance of these techniques.

This diversity is not necessarily disadvantageous, as every community
that has evolved addresses its own important set of problems and
issues, and it is clear that one group cannot address them all.
However, fragmentation can carry a heavy price intellectually -- as
well as politically -- in the wider arena of scientific activity
where, unfortunately, logical investigations are still often perceived
as limited.

For these and other reasons we hereby propose the establishment of an
international federation -- IFCoLog -- to be registered as a legal
entity and possibly accepted as a member society in the International
Union of Sciences (IUS).  The members of the International Federation
for Computational Logic (IFCoLog) will be the communities attached to
the major conferences and logic societies, and they in turn will
encompass the individual members working on logic related topics.

THE FEDERATION

How can these dozens of societies, sociologically grown communities
and conference affiliates be re-united without losing their historical
identities? One possible solution is inspired by the manner in which
the European AI societies are organised into ECCAI (European
Co-ordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence): there is one
registered society, namely ECCAI, whose members are the European
national AI-Societies.  With the growing unification of Europe there
are currently about 25 members who represent all AI researchers and
whose representatives meet every two years at the time of ECAI, the
European Conference of Artificial Intelligence.

So the idea for IFCoLog is as follows: An International Federation for
Computational Logic (IFCoLog) will be created and legally registered,
whose members are the current (and future) communities related to
computational logic.  Currently, this would include the groups and
their respective representatives who are listed below for the Board of
IFCoLog.  Some of these are actually organised into legal societies,
others are just centred around a conference or not legally organised
at all, but still form a scientific community of considerable size and
importance.  To make this workable, it will be required to form an
organisational structure that does not infringe on the interests of
the individual communities but nevertheless ensures maximum cohesion.
The following organization is therefore proposed:

THE BOARD

The Board should be composed of one representative from each member
society or community.  This may be a delegate elected by the society
or simply the current chairperson.  Initial members would be the dozen
or so groups listed below.  Subsequently newcomers will be able to
apply formally and be admitted on the basis of a majority vote of the
Board.  The idea is that this should be an open process with as little
factionalism as possible: the main motivation is not to alienate, but
to unite.

THE EXECUTIVE COUNCIL

This is the actual executive that would run the business of the
Federation, and it should be comprised of:

  - The President
  - Five Vice-presidents
  - A Chief Executive Officer
  - The Treasurer
  - The PR Officer (for journals, WWW, press releases, etc),
and possibly
  - A full-time co-ordinator and a halftime secretary.

1. The President.  This should be an outstanding scientist with
appropriate presidential personality who can unite and bring together
the many factions.  He or she is not necessarily active in the
day-to-day running of the Federation.  The President will be elected
by the Board and the Executive Council.

2. The Vice-Presidents.  There should be five vice-presidents elected
by the Board and the Executive Council for a limited period of time
(say 3 years).  Ideally the five VPs should represent the major
scientific subareas, such as symbolic logic, logic programming,
automated deduction, logic in computer science and artificial
intelligence, formal methods and verification, logic and language as
well as logic and philosophy.  Three of the vice presidents should
come from the three major geographical regions of the world: North
America, Europe, and the Pacific Rim.  This reflects the current shape
of the global village, which is likely to remain dominant for the
first part of the next century at least.  The fourth Vice-President
should come from the Network of Excellence in Computational Logic
(Compulog Net) which would provide some initial funds and resources
and the fifth vice president should represent any of the other
subfields.

THE JOINT CONFERENCE

Every four years, the member communities agree to hold one major
conference -- IJCoLog: The International Joint Conference of the
Federation for Computational Logic -- that consists of the
back-to-back conferences of the individual members, similar to FLoCS
which is held every two years, while the individual conferences like
CADE, LICS; CL 2000 etc.  will be held yearly or biannually.  This
united conference, with probably more than a thousand expected
participants, will be a major show of strength, unification and
cross-fertilisation, and will ensure the overall visibility of the
Federation.

OTHER TASKS

Inasmuch as the Federation aims to counterbalance the growing division
in the field and to represent it once again in its entirety, it is
deemed to work in order to:
  - influence funding policy
  - increase international visibility
  - set up concrete educational curricula
  - set up special chairs
  - encourage high-quality teaching materials (books, videos, etc)
  - maintain an active information policy similar to COMPULOG-Net 
  - create an infrastructure for web sites and links
  - maintain a register of individual and corporate e-mail addresses
  - establish an informal journal, (such as AI Magazine,
       "Computational Logic" or others)
  - found a formal scientific journal (possibly electronic).
  - foster an association with the databases of DBLP, COMPULOG etc.

THE EXECUTIVE COUNCIL

For the period 1999-2002, the proposed officers are:

  President:  Dana Scott
  Vicepresident: (US/Logic)  John Barwise
  Vicepresident (US/LICS) Moshe Vardi
  Vicepresident (Pacific Rim/CL) John Lloyd
  Vicepresident (Europe/CoLi/LLI)  Johan v. Bentham
  Vicepresident: COMPULOG-Net Joerg Siekmann
  Chief Executive Officier: Graham Wrightson
  Treasurer: N.N.
  Coordinator COMPULOG: David Pearce
  Public Relations Officer: N.N.
  Secretary (halftime): N.N.

THE BOARD

  - Automated Deduction (CADE, TABLEAUX, FTP, LPAR etc.): Ulrich Furbach
  - Term Rewriting and Verification (RTA, UNIF, etc.): Claude Kirchner
  - Logic in Computer Science (LICS, etc.): Moshe Vardi
  - Verification (CAV, etc.): Edmund Clarke
  - Formal Methods (FM Europe, and US, etc.): Jeanette Wing
  - Association of Automated Reasoning (AAR and JAR): Deepak Kapur
  - Association of Symbolic Logic (ASL): John Barwise
  - Association for Logic Programming (ALP): Krzysztof Apt
  - CL 2000 (LP, Logic in D.B., LP workshops etc.): John Lloyd
  - Logic and Language (Coli, LCI, etc.): Johan v.  Bentham
  - Congress for Logic, Methodology and Philosphy of
       Science: Jens Erik Fenstad
  - European Computer Science and Logic Society: Egon Boerger
  - Nonmonotonicc Reasoning (NMR, RMS, etc.): Eric Sandevall
  - HOL (Conferences and Society): Tobias Nipkow
  - Knowledge Representation, Logic in AI (KR, JELIA, etc.): Tony Cohn
  - Symbolic Computation (JSC): Bruno Buchberger
  - Special Intersest Group on Foundations of AI (SIGFAI)of the Japanese
	         Society for AI: Koichi Furukawa

Further Applications of logic related conferences and societies are under
way, but no consensus yet.

For further information see 

         http://www.compulog.org/net/IFCoLog.html 

Special requests and queries should be sent to Graham Wrightson               

         graham@cs.newcastle.edu.au

or to David Pearce for COMPULOG.NET:

         pearce@dfki.de

There is also an email distributor 

         IFCoLog-all@dfki.de 

which will  automatically send your email to all officers of the board and
of the executive council.