[UAI] Graduate course on Comet by P. Van Hentenryck     Apologies for cross posting. Please forward to interested people
********************** Call for Participation ************************

      GRASCOMP Graduate School in Computing Science is organizing

                     CONSTRAINT-BASED LOCAL SEARCH
              by Pascal Van Hentenryck (Brown University)
                         20, 21 & 22 June 2007
      UniversitÃ© catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium
**********************************************************************

CONTENT :
Comet is an  object-oriented programming language for constraint-based
local  search  [1].   It  features  advanced   modeling   and  control
abstractions to simplify the design and implementation of neighborhood
search   algorithms,  including  invariants,   differentiable  events,
events, and  nondeterminism. It also  supports high-level abstractions
for parallel  and distributed computing.  Its  applications range from
resource allocation, to facility locations and scheduling.

Comet's  underlying computational  paradigm is  Constraint-Based Local
Search,  the  idea  of  specifying  local  search  algorithms  as  two
components: a high-level model describing the applications in terms of
constraints, constraint combinators, and objective functions; a search
procedure expressed in terms of the model at a high abstraction level.

Constraint-based local search makes  it possible to build local search
algorithms  compositionally,  to  separate  modeling from  search,  to
promote genericity  and reusability  across many applications,  and to
exploit problem structure to achieve high performance.

[1] P. Van Hentenryck, L. Michel. Constraint-Based Local Search.
     MIT Press, 2005.

ORGANISATION :
- This three days course will contain practical and tutoring sessions
   where the participants will use Comet.
- The tutoring and pratical sessions will be held in a computer lab.
   Participants may bring their own laptop, provided they already
   installed Comet (www.comet-online.org).

REGISTRATION :
- This course is open to graduate students and researchers from any
   university.  The number of participants is limited to 40 persons.
- The participation fee is 100 Euros for students and 200 Euros for
   non students.  It is free for the GrasComp graduate students.
- Some rooms are available at the Relais hotel (www.relais.ucl.ac.be)
   in Louvain-la-Neuve (32 Euros, single room).
- Registration is mandatory.  For information and registration,
   contact StÃ©phanie Landrain (sk@info.ucl.ac.be).


