Minutes of the RTA-99 Business Meeting Trento, July 2, 1999 Chair: Nachum Dershowitz Secretary: Bernhard Gramlich -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Agenda 1. Report by local arrangements chair (Andrea Asperti) 2. Report by PC co-chairs (Paliath Narendran, Michael Rusinowitch) 3. Election (by secret ballot) of two new OC members 4. RTA'2000 status report (Richard Kennaway, Leo Bachmair) 5. Vote on RTA'2001 PC chair 6. Proposals for RTA'2001 7. Cooperation with IFIP 8. Cooperation with CADE 9. Increased exposure 10. Proposals/discussions from the floor -------------------------------------------------------------------------- The business meeting starts at 5:30pm with 43 persons attending. 1. A.Asperti reports about the budget of RTA'99: Accounts are not yet closed but the final result is likely to exhibit a good balance between income and expenses. He further presents some statistics on RTA'99 participants, including the figures for the two FLoC'99 workshops W8 "Groebner Bases and Rewriting Techniques" and W9 "Explicit Substitutions: Theory and Applications to Programs and Proofs" affiliated to RTA'99. After the report there is some discussion about the way the two workshops have been funded and supported by RTA'99. K.Madlener criticizes that the two workshops have not been equally supported (in particular, the registration fee for W9 was automatically included in the one for RTA'99, unlike the case for W8). A.Asperti tries to explain some of the reasons for this decision, which in turn leads to some further discussion. Finally, it seems that there is at least a consensus that for future workshops affiliated to RTA this kind of problems should be avoided. 2. P.Narendran and M.Rusinowitch report on the work of the RTA'99 programme committee and on submission / acceptance statistics. The latter ones are as follows: #authors by country accepted/submitted Australia 0/1 China 0/2 France 17/30 Germany 8/17 Great-Britain 0/4 India 1/1 Israel 1/1 Italy 1/1 Japan 4/10 Netherlands 1/1 Poland 1/1 Portugal 2/2 Spain 8/14 Sweden 0/2 USA 12/17 In total, the PC selected 23 papers out of 46 regular submissions, and 4 system descriptions out of 7 submitted. In addition, the programme features two invited talks by B.Courcelle (on hierarchical graph decompositions defined by grammars and logical formulas) and by F.Otto (on the connections between rewriting and formal language theory) as well as an invited tutorial by F.van Raamsdonk (on higher-order rewriting). M.Rusinowitch points out that 10 out of 14 PC members have never been in an RTA PC before, and that the electronic web-based PC meeting worked quite satisfactorily. The PC co-chairs announce that a special journal issue of selected papers from RTA'99 is being planned. Suggestions for appropriate journals include TCS (Theoretical Computer Science) and I&C (Information and Computation). 3. The RTA organzing committee (OC) currently consists of H.Comon (Cachan), P.Narendran (Albany), N.Dershowitz, chair (Tel Aviv), T.Nipkow (Munich), H.Ganzinger (Saarbr"ucken), Y.Toyama (Tatsunokuchi). According to the RTA bylaws two new members replacing H.Ganzinger and P.Narendran have to be elected. N.Dershowitz presents the proposal of the OC for the two new OC members, Michael Rusinowitch (Nancy) as current PC co-chair, and Jose Meseguer (Menlo Park). Election (by secret ballot) of the two new OC members yields the following result: 18 votes for both, 9 for Michael only, 1 for Claude (Kirchner), 1 against both, and 1 blank. Hence, Michael and Jose are both elected. 4. R. Kennaway, as local organizer, briefly presents some details about RTA'2000 (PC-chair: Leo Bachmair) to be held at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. The proposed date is July 10-12, 2000. A call for papers as well as a call for workshops is announced to be available shortly (and is distributed later on during FLoC'99). M.Hermann remarks that the proposed date overlaps with ICALP'2000 (in Geneva, Switzerland, July 9-15, 2000). 5. N.Dershowitz presents the proposal of the OC for the RTA'2001 PC chair: Aart Middeldorp (Tsukuba). This proposal is unanimously accepted by the general assembly. 6. The proposal of Nachum to host RTA'2001 in Tiberias (Israel), jointly with IWT'2001 (5th Int. Workshop on Termination), with the backup option somewhere in the Netherlands, is unanimously accepted by the general assembly. 7. C.Kirchner briefly reports on the cooperation with IFIP and the meeting of the recently established IFIP WG 1.6 on term rewriting, held on July 1, 1999 in Trento. He agrees to inform the rewriting community about this IFIP cooperation and working group via a corresponding e-mail to the rewriting mailing list, as well as to include a link to the working group on the rewriting homepage on the web (see: http://www.loria.fr/~vigneron/RewritingHP/). 8. The organizing committee suggests to have a cooperation with CADE occasionally. Further suggestions from the floor include: contacting also conferences on lambda calculus and functional programming like TLCA, ICFP (P.Lescanne), and on declarative programming like PPDP (H.Kirchner), joining another conference every second year (H.Ganzinger). These proposals are shortly discussed, but no definitive decision is made. 9. Possibilities for an increased exposure of rewriting (and RTA) are discussed, corresponding to a concern of the current OC. Issues addressed include: continued renewal in RTA PCs would be a positive and encouraging signal (P.Lescanne); coordination of RTA'2000 with TABLEAUX'2000 and FTP'2000 (all to be held in UK) might be a good idea (M.P.Bonacina); interesting and promising areas for applications of rewriting like semantics and implementation of concurrency / programming languages, and rewriting logic should deserve more attention (J.Meseguer); having more invited speakers on practical applications of rewriting would be good (C.Kirchner). 10. No further point is raised and the meeting ends at 6:30pm. --------------------------------------------------------------------------