Pascal Van Hentenryck and Laurent Michel won the best paper award for their paper 'Control Abstractions for Local Search'about part of the Comet System featured in the last issue of conduit! (great timing, isn't it!). The paper describes novel control abstractions to simplify the development, compositionality, and reuse of local search algorithms. It builds on the constraint-based architecture presented last year at OOPLSA 2002. About 184 papers were submitted, 48 of which were accepted.
The conference is CP 2003, which is the Ninth International Conference on the Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming to be held in Kinsale, County Cork, Ireland from September 29 through October 3. The web page is http://www.cs.ucc.ie/cp2003/. (There are some beautiful pictures at that site).
