THE INTERNATIONAL FEDERATION FOR COMPUTATIONAL LOGIC (IFCoLog) A MANIFESTO Computational Logic has outgrown its humble beginnings and early expectations by far: with close to ten thousand people working in research and development of logic-related methods, with several dozen international conferences and workshops addressing the growing richness and diversity of the field, and with the foundational role and importance these methods now assume in mathematics, computer science, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, linguistics and many engineering fields -- where logic-related techniques are used inter alia to state and settle correctness issues -- the field has diversified in ways that the pure logicians working in the early decades of this century could have hardly anticipated. Dating back to its roots in Greek philosophy as presented in the works of Aristotle, logic has grown in richness and diversity over the centuries to finally find today's methodological approach in the work of Frege. These logical calculi, which capture an important aspect of human thought, were now amenable to investigations with mathematical rigor and the beginning of this century saw the influence of these developments in the foundation of mathematics with the work of Hilbert, Russell and Whitehead, in the foundation of syntax and semantics of language, and in philosophical foundations expressed most explicitly by the logicians in the Vienna Circle. Picking up on these developments and on the early dreams of mechanized reasoning the Dartmouth Conference in 1956 advocated explicitly the hopes for the new possibilities that the advent of electronic computing machinery offered: logical statements could now be executed on a machine with all its far-reaching consequences that ultimately led to logic programming, deduction systems for mathematics and engineering, logical design and verification of computer software and hardware, deductive databases and software synthesis as well as logical techniques for the analysis of mechanical machinery. In this way the growing richness of foundational and purely logical investigations that had led to such developments as: - first order calculi - type theory and higher order logic - non-classical logics - semantics - constructivism and others were enriched by new questions and problems to be asked in particular in computer science and artificial intelligence, leading to: - denotational semantics for programming languages - nonmonotonic reasoning - logical foundations for computing machinery such as CSP, ?-Calculs and others for program verification - logical foundations for cognitive robotics (the frameproblem) - syntax and semantics for natural language processing - logical foundations for data bases - linear logics - logical foundations and the philosophy of mind and many others. This growing diversity is reflected in the numerous conferences and workshops that address particular aspects of the fields mentioned. For example, only twenty years ago, there was just one international conference on automated deduction (later to be called CADE). Today there is not only CADE but also: - RTA (Rewriting Techniques and Applications) - LPAR (Logic Programming and Automated Reasoning) - the TABLEAUX Conference - UNIF (Unification Workshop) - FTP (First Order Theorem Proving), and - LICS (Logic in Computer Science), each of which is held regularly with its own set of proceedings and supported by a mature community. Frequently these conferences are backed up by dozens of national and international workshops, such as JELIA, CALCULEMUS, the Induction Workshops, PROOF.PRESENTATION, USERINTERFACES for ATP; the Nonmonotonic Reasoning Workshops, the Knowledge Representation Conference(s), the Frame Problem meetings and many more. A similar growth of meetings has been seen in the other areas mentioned before, namely logic programming with its main conferences and workshops (more than two dozen regular meetings and events) which are now somehow unified into CL 2000. Similar growth and diversity can be seen in linguistics and natural language processing with its conferences and workshops (again about a dozen conferences and workshops) as well as logic and the philosophy of science with its world conference: Congress for Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science. Logical foundations of computer science and verification has seen a major growth with its traditional conference LICS, but nowadays represented also by CAV (Computer Aided Verification), FM-Europe (Formal Methods) and others, each of which accompanied again by a few dozen national and international workshops and many events that reflect the growing industrial importance of these techniques. This diversity is not necessarily disadvantageous, as every community that has evolved addresses its own important set of problems and issues, and it is clear that one group cannot address them all. However, fragmentation can carry a heavy price intellectually -- as well as politically -- in the wider arena of scientific activity where, unfortunately, logical investigations are still often perceived as limited. For these and other reasons we hereby propose the establishment of an international federation -- IFCoLog -- to be registered as a legal entity and possibly accepted as a member society in the International Union of Sciences (IUS). The members of the International Federation for Computational Logic (IFCoLog) will be the communities attached to the major conferences and logic societies, and they in turn will encompass the individual members working on logic related topics. THE FEDERATION How can these dozens of societies, sociologically grown communities and conference affiliates be re-united without losing their historical identities? One possible solution is inspired by the manner in which the European AI societies are organised into ECCAI (European Co-ordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence): there is one registered society, namely ECCAI, whose members are the European national AI-Societies. With the growing unification of Europe there are currently about 25 members who represent all AI researchers and whose representatives meet every two years at the time of ECAI, the European Conference of Artificial Intelligence. So the idea for IFCoLog is as follows: An International Federation for Computational Logic (IFCoLog) will be created and legally registered, whose members are the current (and future) communities related to computational logic. Currently, this would include the groups and their respective representatives who are listed below for the Board of IFCoLog. Some of these are actually organised into legal societies, others are just centred around a conference or not legally organised at all, but still form a scientific community of considerable size and importance. To make this workable, it will be required to form an organisational structure that does not infringe on the interests of the individual communities but nevertheless ensures maximum cohesion. The following organization is therefore proposed: THE BOARD The Board should be composed of one representative from each member society or community. This may be a delegate elected by the society or simply the current chairperson. Initial members would be the dozen or so groups listed below. Subsequently newcomers will be able to apply formally and be admitted on the basis of a majority vote of the Board. The idea is that this should be an open process with as little factionalism as possible: the main motivation is not to alienate, but to unite. THE EXECUTIVE COUNCIL This is the actual executive that would run the business of the Federation, and it should be comprised of: - The President - Five Vice-presidents - A Chief Executive Officer - The Treasurer - The PR Officer (for journals, WWW, press releases, etc), and possibly - A full-time co-ordinator and a halftime secretary. 1. The President. This should be an outstanding scientist with appropriate presidential personality who can unite and bring together the many factions. He or she is not necessarily active in the day-to-day running of the Federation. The President will be elected by the Board and the Executive Council. 2. The Vice-Presidents. There should be five vice-presidents elected by the Board and the Executive Council for a limited period of time (say 3 years). Ideally the five VPs should represent the major scientific subareas, such as symbolic logic, logic programming, automated deduction, logic in computer science and artificial intelligence, formal methods and verification, logic and language as well as logic and philosophy. Three of the vice presidents should come from the three major geographical regions of the world: North America, Europe, and the Pacific Rim. This reflects the current shape of the global village, which is likely to remain dominant for the first part of the next century at least. The fourth Vice-President should come from the Network of Excellence in Computational Logic (Compulog Net) which would provide some initial funds and resources and the fifth vice president should represent any of the other subfields. THE JOINT CONFERENCE Every four years, the member communities agree to hold one major conference -- IJCoLog: The International Joint Conference of the Federation for Computational Logic -- that consists of the back-to-back conferences of the individual members, similar to FLoCS which is held every two years, while the individual conferences like CADE, LICS; CL 2000 etc. will be held yearly or biannually. This united conference, with probably more than a thousand expected participants, will be a major show of strength, unification and cross-fertilisation, and will ensure the overall visibility of the Federation. OTHER TASKS Inasmuch as the Federation aims to counterbalance the growing division in the field and to represent it once again in its entirety, it is deemed to work in order to: - influence funding policy - increase international visibility - set up concrete educational curricula - set up special chairs - encourage high-quality teaching materials (books, videos, etc) - maintain an active information policy similar to COMPULOG-Net - create an infrastructure for web sites and links - maintain a register of individual and corporate e-mail addresses - establish an informal journal, (such as AI Magazine, "Computational Logic" or others) - found a formal scientific journal (possibly electronic). - foster an association with the databases of DBLP, COMPULOG etc. THE EXECUTIVE COUNCIL For the period 1999-2002, the proposed officers are: President: Dana Scott Vicepresident: (US/Logic) John Barwise Vicepresident (US/LICS) Moshe Vardi Vicepresident (Pacific Rim/CL) John Lloyd Vicepresident (Europe/CoLi/LLI) Johan v. Bentham Vicepresident: COMPULOG-Net Joerg Siekmann Chief Executive Officier: Graham Wrightson Treasurer: N.N. Coordinator COMPULOG: David Pearce Public Relations Officer: N.N. Secretary (halftime): N.N. THE BOARD - Automated Deduction (CADE, TABLEAUX, FTP, LPAR etc.): Ulrich Furbach - Term Rewriting and Verification (RTA, UNIF, etc.): Claude Kirchner - Logic in Computer Science (LICS, etc.): Moshe Vardi - Verification (CAV, etc.): Edmund Clarke - Formal Methods (FM Europe, and US, etc.): Jeanette Wing - Association of Automated Reasoning (AAR and JAR): Deepak Kapur - Association of Symbolic Logic (ASL): John Barwise - Association for Logic Programming (ALP): Krzysztof Apt - CL 2000 (LP, Logic in D.B., LP workshops etc.): John Lloyd - Logic and Language (Coli, LCI, etc.): Johan v. Bentham - Congress for Logic, Methodology and Philosphy of Science: Jens Erik Fenstad - European Computer Science and Logic Society: Egon Boerger - Nonmonotonicc Reasoning (NMR, RMS, etc.): Eric Sandevall - HOL (Conferences and Society): Tobias Nipkow - Knowledge Representation, Logic in AI (KR, JELIA, etc.): Tony Cohn - Symbolic Computation (JSC): Bruno Buchberger - Special Intersest Group on Foundations of AI (SIGFAI)of the Japanese Society for AI: Koichi Furukawa Further Applications of logic related conferences and societies are under way, but no consensus yet. For further information see http://www.compulog.org/net/IFCoLog.html Special requests and queries should be sent to Graham Wrightson graham@cs.newcastle.edu.au or to David Pearce for COMPULOG.NET: pearce@dfki.de There is also an email distributor IFCoLog-all@dfki.de which will automatically send your email to all officers of the board and of the executive council.