Nominations for two CADE trustee positions were being sought, in preparation for the elections to be held after IJCAR 2024.
The following candidates were nominated and their statements, in alphabetical order, are below:
CADE and IJCAR, along with SAT, are my favorite conferences due to their stimulation of exciting and important research. Since 2012, I have had the pleasure of participating in most CADE and IJCAR conferences and serving on several of their program committees, including co-chairing IJCAR'24. Additionally, I was honored to serve as a trustee from 2017 to 2022.
My research focuses on two significant challenges in automated deduction: validating the correctness of complex techniques developed by the community and leveraging the power of large computer clusters. Although my work primarily targets SAT and QBF solving, these challenges are also crucial for first-order logic and beyond. I am particularly interested in promoting the application of successful techniques from propositional logic to richer logics.
The community has developed powerful tools such as CaDiCaL, Vampire, and Z3, which have also found success in industry. I support encouraging paper submissions that demonstrate the impact of these tools on solving relevant problems, as such papers can have a broad impact. Furthermore, I advocate for the requirement that experimental evaluations be reproducible by reviewers and the wider community.
I strongly believe that all future publications in automated reasoning, including CADE/IJCAR proceedings and JAR articles, should be Open Access. This approach enhances accessibility and can expand the community. Although there are concerns about the financial impact on authors and participants, I believe we can address these through sponsorships and agreements with funding agencies. I favor using LIPIcs for conference proceedings over LNCS, due to ongoing issues with Springer, including typesetting. A recent community survey showed overwhelming support for LIPIcs, and as a trustee, I will push to implement this change.
The current structure of alternating yearly between CADE and IJCAR and joining FLOC every four years strikes the right balance between focusing on our community and maintaining visibility with related communities. I support coordinating the locations of CADE/IJCAR/FLOC conferences to improve geographic distribution. Despite most CADE attendees being from Europe, I am committed to encouraging participation from North American researchers. Thus, it is important to continue organizing CADE/IJCAR regularly in the US or Canada.
I am honoured and excited to be nominated once again to serve on the CADE's Board of Trustees. I have actively participated in both CADE and IJCAR for many years. I contributed both research and tool papers to either conference, served as a PC member several times, and helped with the organisation of the first edition of CADE in South America. I also have experience as a PC member, chair, SC member and organiser for other conferences in our field.
My research is focused on both the theoretical foundations and practical aspects related to the implementation of proof methods for non-classical logics and their combinations. CADE and IJCAR are (and should remain) welcoming venues for research encompassing a broad range of logics and techniques. I feel at home here and I am deeply committed to this community. As an enthusiastic implementer, I advocate for the increase of submission numbers of system and tool papers, and for introducing demo sessions for tools at the conference. This is not only important in my field, but more generally, as it encourages and celebrates the hard work of producing these tools.
I very strongly believe that a better geographical distribution of conference sites for CADE would be beneficial to our community. It will help to stimulate research and disseminate knowledge about automated reasoning and also attract talented individuals from regions that are not well represented in our field at present. We need to be sensitive to the fact that in those areas funding is often not available, and both researchers and students may have difficulties with meeting travel expenses and registration fees. I therefore support continuing the Bledsoe Award, to support students, and exploring options for reduced registration fees.
Costs are important. I support maintaining open access to the CADE proceedings to ensure the broad dissemination of our research. Open access is not for free, though, and we need to be mindful of what serves our community best and carefully evaluate cost-effective options. The consultation made by the current Board of Trustees already gives us a direction. However, it is also crucial to consider the impact of any changes to our sister conferences, TABLEAUX and FroCoS, which we join every two years to form IJCAR. I support therefore that we continue with discussions with their steering committees, as decided in our recent meeting in Nancy, before making any decision.
Thank you for considering my nomination. I am looking forward to the opportunity to continue contributing to our community.
I am honored to be nominated for the CADE Board of Trustees. CADE-22 (Montreal, 2009) was my very first serious conference and, with one exception, I took part at CADE and IJCAR ever since. I have served on the program committee of these conferences for the last six years. Since 2023, I am also a member of the steering committee of CADE's sibling FroCoS.
My current primary research interest is automated theorem proving and how it can be boosted through the techniques of machine learning. In the past, I also worked on temporal reasoning, SAT/QBF, and model finding. I am one of the main developers of the award-winning automatic theorem prover Vampire.
I am generally happy with the scope of CADE, catering for a wide range of topics, for both theoretical papers and those with focus on implementation. I like the regular merging with neighboring conferences on even years, which ensures we keep close contact with related fields. I also more than agree with the continuous support of young researchers, be it in the form of the Woody Bledsoe Student Travel Award, the Bill McCune PhD award, or in organizing the SAT/SMT/AR summer school.
The transition to the open access publication model was a step in the right direction. However, I believe that lower publication fees and less copy editing from the side of the publisher would improve our situation further. I understand that some funding agencies or career promotion committees may regard LNCS as prestigious, while they have not heard of LIPIcs yet, but that is a separate battle that we should fight elsewhere. For instance, by making sure CADE maintains or even improves on its current CORE ranking.