Minutes of the Kick-off Meeting for SweConsNet,
the Network for Sweden-based
researchers and practitioners
of Constraint programming

Friday 24th of May 2002, Uppsala

Originally Stated Purpose

We believe that Sweden has a critical mass of research and development in constraint programming, but lacks an infrastructure allowing the involved people to learn about the existing projects and products, to meet each other, and to cross-fertilise through partnerships.

Objectives:

• a homepage (hosted at Uppsala University) with:
  • links to person, project, and product listings at member nodes
  • a calendar of upcoming courses, seminars, thesis defences, etc
  • job openings
• a yearly workshop

Minutes

Goals:

• Organise technical meetings
• Help find collaborators in academia and industry
• Provide and promote education in constraints across Sweden (listing of available courses)
• Increase publicity of constraints both in academia and industry
• Help find funding for constraint research in Sweden (monitoring funding sources and helping to put consortia together)
• Provide access to solved problems and software done in Sweden
• Potentially provide connections to EU-wide or worldwide networks

Focus: For now, SweConsNet focuses its attention on constraints (as opposed to merge with combinatorial optimisation networks, etc) and on Sweden (as opposed to North Europe).

The most urgent tasks are:

• setting up a webpage [first draft in late summer 2002 by Pierre and Justin]
• setting up a mailing-list [done, by Justin]

Next meeting: The next meeting will be at SICS/Kista in fall/winter 2002, with both the possibility for new nodes to present themselves and the opportunity for more technical presentations. Per Kreuger from SICS (piak@sics.se) is responsible for organising this meeting.

Organisation: The responsibility for at least the top-level webpages should rotate among the nodes of SweConsNet. At this moment, Pierre Flener and Justin Pearson are in charge.

(Prepared by Christian Schulte, Pierre Flener, and Justin Pearson)

Attendees

• Nicolas Beldiceanu and Mats Carlsson (SICS, Uppsala)
• Per Kreuger (SICS, Kista)
• Pierre Flener and Justin Pearson (ASTRA group, Uppsala University)
• Tomas Lidén (Carmen Consulting, Stockholm)
• Arne Andersson (Uppsala University and Trade Extensions)
• Wlodek Drabent, Jan Maluszynski, and Pawel Pietrzak (Linköping University)
  
• Erik Kilborn and Mattias Grönkvist (Chalmers and Carmen Systems, Göteborg)
• Christian Schulte, Thomas Sjöland, and Sven Lämmermann (KTH, Stockholm)
• Andreas Ermedahl and Jakob Engblom (Uppsala University and IAR Systems)
• Tomas Axling (Tacton)
• Jonas Fager (Optimal Solutions, Linköping)
• Kostis Sagonas, Magnus Ågren, Simon Wrang (Uppsala University)
• Markus Bohlin and Waldemar Kocjan (SICS Västeras)