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 ...

We heard yesterday that Maurice Herlihy's paper on 'wait-free synchronization'is the 2003 winner of the Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing. The Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing is given to an outstanding paper on the principles of distributed computing, whose significance and impact on the theory and/or practice of distributed computing has been evident for at least a decade.

In this paper Herlihy developed a beautiful and useful theory of fault-tolerant computation in distributed systems where asynchronous processes communicate by accessing shared objects of arbitrary type. He showed that objects of different type can ...