Call for Papers
First Call for Papers
SymCon'08
The Eighth International Workshop
on Symmetry and Constraint Satisfaction Problems
To be held at the Fourteenth International Conference
on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2008)
Sydney, Australia
September 15th 2008
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@cril.fr.
Papers must be formatted using IJCAI requirements and can be of any length not exceeding
8 pages. All submissions must be received by July 6,
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
** Extended Deadline **
Submission deadline: Sunday, 6 July 2008
Notification of acceptance: Friday, 25 July 2008
Camera ready deadline: Friday, 8 August 2008
Workshop: Sunday, 15th September 2008