News

• The program is available.
• Registration is open now.
• The submission deadline has been extended to June 13.

Conference Overview

The 15th International Symposium on Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming will take place in September 2013 in Madrid, Spain.

PPDP 2013 is a forum that brings together researchers from the declaratrive programming communities, including those working in the logic, constraint and functional programming paradigms, but also embracing languages, database languages, and knowledge representation languages. The goal is to stimulate research in the use of logical formalisms and methods for specifying, performing, and analyzing computations, including mechanisms for mobility, modularity, concurrency, object-orientation, security, verification and static analysis. Papers related to the use of declarative paradigms and tools in industry and education are especially solicited. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to

• Functional programming
• Logic programming
• Answer-set programming
• Functional-logic programming
• Declarative visual languages
• Constraint Handling Rules
• Parallel implementation and concurrency
• Monads, type classes and dependent type systems
• Declarative domain-specific languages
• Termination, resource analysis and the verification of declarative programs
• Transformation and partial evaluation of declarative languages
• Language extensions for security and tabulation
• Probabilistic modeling in a declarative language and modeling reactivity
• Memory management and the implementation of declarative systems
• Practical experiences and industrial application

This year the conference will be co-located with the 23st International Symposium on Logic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation (LOPSTR 2013).

The conference will be held in Madrid, Spain. Previous symposia were held at Leuven (Belgium), Odense (Denmark), Hagenberg (Austria), Coimbra (Portugal), Valencia (Spain), Wroclaw (Poland), Venice (Italy), Lisboa (Portugal), Verona (Italy), Uppsala (Sweden), Pittsburgh (USA), Florence (Italy), Montreal (Canada), and Paris (France). You might have a look at the contents of past PPDP symposia.

Proceedings

The proceedings will be published in the ACM International Conference Proceedings Series.

Important Dates

Submission Guidelines

Papers must describe original work, be written and presented in English, and must not substantially overlap with papers that have been published or that are simultaneously submitted to a journal, conference, or workshop with refereed proceedings. Work that already appeared in unpublished or informally published workshop proceedings may be submitted (please contact the PC chair in case of questions).

Authors should submit an electronic copy of the full paper in PDF. Papers should be submitted to the submission website for PPDP 2013.

Papers should consist of the equivalent of 12 pages under the ACM formatting guidelines. These guidelines are available online, along with formatting templates or style files.

Submitted papers will be judged on the basis of significance, relevance, correctness, originality, and clarity. They should include a clear identification of what has been accomplished and why it is significant.

Authors who wish to provide additional material to the reviewers beyond the 12-page limit can do so in clearly marked appendices: reviewers are not required to read such appendices.

PPDP13 Special Issue in Science of Computer Programming

After the symposium, a selection of the best papers will be invited to extend their submissions in the light of the feedback solicited at the symposium. The papers are expected to include at least 30% extra material over and above the PPDP version. Then, after another round of reviewing, these revised papers will be published in a special issue of SCP with a target publication date by Elsevier of 2014.

Invited Speakers

Ilya Sergey: Monadic Abstract Interpreters

In this talk, we will present recent studies on systematic construction and implementation of control-flow analyses for higher-order languages by means of abstract interpretation.

We will start by exploring state-of-the-art techniques for turning a small-step abstract machine into an abstract interpreter that delivers the flows-to information by approximating collecting semantics of a program. The key idea of the approach is eliminating circular dependencies in a semantic state-space and then bounding it by providing an abstraction over its leaf elements. We will also briefly describe advanced techniques, allowing one to improve precision and complexity boundaries of the analysis: widening, abstract garbage collection and counting.

In the second part of the talk, we will show a systematic method for transforming a concrete semantics into a monadically-parameterized abstract machine, such that changing the monad changes the behaviour of the machine. By choosing an appropriate monad, one can recover a spectrum of machines: from the original concrete semantics to a monovariant, flow- and context-insensitive static analysis with a singly-threaded heap and weak updates. The monadic parameterization also suggests an abstraction over the ubiquitous monotone fixed-point computation found in static analysis. This abstraction makes it straightforward to instrument an analysis with high-level strategies for improving precision and performance.

Peter Stuckey: Search is dead - long live proof

Constraint programming is a highly successful technology for tackling complex combinatorial optimization problems. Any form of combinatorial optimization involves some form of search, and CP is very well adapted to make use of programmed search and strong inference to solve some problems that are out of reach of competing technologies. But much of the search that happens during a CP execution is effectively repeated. This arises from the combinatorial nature of the problems we are tackling. Learning about past unsuccessful searches and remembering this in the form of lemmas (or nogoods) in an effective way can exponentially reduce the size of the search space. In this sense search can be seen as a mechanism to prove lemmas, and optimization search is simply a proof that no better solution can be found, with the side effect that good solutions are found on the way. In this talk I will explain lazy clause generation, which is a hybrid constraint solving technique that steals all the best learning ideas from Boolean satisfiability solvers, but retains all the advantages of constraint programming. Lazy clause generation provides the state of the art solutions to a wide range of problems, and consistently outperforms other solving approaches in the MiniZinc challenge. Lazy clause generation allows concise lemmas to be recorded about the optimization search, and this together with methods like rapid restart mean we are no longer searching for a good solution, but instead iteratively building a proof that no better solution can be found. So search is dead, long live proof.

Program Committee

Contacts

Program Chair (contact him for additional information about papers and submissions):

Tom Schrijvers
Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science
Ghent University
9000 Gent, Belgium
Email: Tom.Schrijvers@UGent.be

Symposium Chair:

Ricardo Peña
Facultad de Informática
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
28040 Madrid, Spain

Call for Papers

You can view or download the Call for Papers as

• plain text

Anti-harassment Policy

PPDP is committed to holding a conference that reflects the diversity of its community and provides a harassment-free conference experience for everyone, regardless of ethnicity, religion, disability, physical appearance or gender. It is important to remember that a community where people feel uncomfortable or threatened is not a productive one.

Harassment of PPDP participants will not be tolerated in any form. Harassment includes offensive verbal comments related to ethnicity, religion, disability, physical appearance, gender, or sexual orientation in public spaces, deliberate intimidation, stalking, following, harassing photography or recording, sustained disruption of talks or other events, inappropriate physical contact, and unwelcome attention. Participants asked to stop any harassing behaviour are expected to comply immediately.

If a participant or speaker engages in harassing behaviour, the conference organisers may take any action they deem appropriate, ranging from a simple warning the offender to immediate expulsion from the conference.

If you are being harassed, notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please contact the programme chair.

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