This report looks back at INAP98 and collects feedback that is right now going into the plans for INAP99, and invites you to contribute.

The 11th International Conference on Applications of Prolog INAP, under the professional and friendly eyes of local chair Osamu Yoshie closed September 16 after a tight program of three days, 11 sessions and workshops, 41 presented papers, 8 exhibiting companies and organizations, John Fox' invited talk and an unknown number of individual discussions all squeezed into a one-track conference.

End of the last session - some survivors

Conference Chair Shuichi Fukuda last year decided to turn INAP into a full international conference and use the undiluted "Applications of Prolog" title. The drastic increase in submitted papers and attendance showed the correctness of this uncompromising attitude and illustrated the power of Prolog as common denominator and exciting tool to explore ideas.

Contributions covered a rich spectrum of development stages from early research idea level to industrial field use, and ran across a wide range of important application areas in engineering and non-engineering.

Tribute to the program committee, workshop and session organizers: the 11 sessions properly reflected the complexity of our industrial and societal systems and how effectively this complexity can sometimes be tackled with Prolog technology.

Instrumental for the success of INAP'98 were the organizers and their sessions:

• Stephane Bressan (information mediation)
• Takashi Chikayama (parallel programming system KLIC)
• Ulrich Geske (optimization and simulation with constraints)
• Ferenc Katai (constraint programming)
• Michio Kimura (medical systems)
• Hajime Yoshino (legal expert systems)
• Osamu Yoshie (industrial information systems)

Invited Speaker John Fox

During all sessions, sometimes inquisitive questions and comments from the floor often addressed not implementation level but deeper issues, for example the nature of conflict of interests of negotiation partners, or the feasibility of fuzzy reasoning within a formal legal framework. In a way this indicates the achieved level of maturity of the implementation techniques used; the conference participants discussed "the real issues".

Several participants mentioned deficiencies of INAP98 and suggested improvements for future events:

• - a plenary discussion on the last day to integrate the many cut off discussions after paper presentations
• - longer breaks for small group discussions, individual longer demonstrations, and the exhibition
• - exhibitors should have a small time slot during the conference to briefly outline their activities
• - informal "happy hour" session at the end of each day

Plans for INAP'99:

As planned today (Oct 1998) INAP'99 will be held in September/October 1999, hosted by Osamu Yoshie at The Science University of Tokyo in downtown Tokyo.

We anticipate an increasingly broad range of fields covered, including design, management, documentation, problem solving in engineering, business, and society.

The discussions at INAP'98 suggest that many ideas presented for specific applications really converge on a higher level, and that Prolog technology is in a unique position to exploit existing computers, data bases and networks for decisions that create better results and less waste in engineering, business, medicine and jurisdiction.

For INAP'99, the program committee could better convey the use of Prolog for everyday management and problem solving through independent software agents or cooperating software assistants.

Specifically, INAP99 is seeking contributions on:

negotiation:

- problem solving under mutual constraints

mediation:

- use of existing information for a different purpose

broker services:

- dealing with privacy protection and conflicting interests

help desks:

- coping with different levels of expertise and incomplete information

management:

- working with goals and constrained resources

risk:

- screening, assessment and management of uncertainty

rules:

- turning manuals, laws, business practice into executables

consulting:

- expert advice on implications of decisions

knowledge transfer:

- learning, teaching, document authoring and access aids

All of these are widely relevant and tightly interact. For example risk is a key issue for civil engineering, aviation, medical, legal and financial decision making. All of these have problem solving aspects that been successfully modeled and deployed in Prolog across industrial, commercial and societal systems.

Building on the success of past INAPs, INAP99 can present a powerful vision for cost effective problem solving in everyday transactions:

Suggestions for speakers, topics, sessions, workshops are very welcome. INAP will try to accommodate anything that is useful, understandable, legal, and related to Prolog.

Notes:

The 226-page proceedings of INAP98 are available from the organizer for Yen5000.-.

Extra mention goes to The Science University of Tokyo for hosting the event, to Osamu Yoshie (yoshie@ap.kagu.sut.ac.jp)

Local Chair Osamu Yoshie

They ran logistics and equipment

for running the equipment and logistics, and to Toshi Yagihashi (ren.associates@ma3.justnet.ne.jp)

INAP Organizer Toshi Yagihashi

for coffee, gourmet parties and organizing INAP relentlessly for more than 10 years - still counting.

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Photos all by Hajime Yoshino. This report is written by Oskar Bartenstein oskar@ifcomputer.co.jp www.ifcomputer.com/inap, for details see www.ifcomputer.com/inap/inap98/Program/.