the sac newsletter
Number 1, November 1996.

Reports on Conferences and Workshops

Report on DISCO'96

From the group of Prof. Jacques Calmet, Karlsruhe

DISCO'96, the Fourth International Symposium on Design and Implementation of Symbolic Computation Systems, was held in cooperation with ACM SIGSAM, SIGART, CompulogNet III, ECCAI, IFIP (TC12), DFG and the Institute of Algorithms and Cognitive Systems at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, on September 18-20, 1996. The conference with 60 participants was chaired by Jacques Calmet (conference chair), Luigia Carlucci Aiello (program chair) and Karsten Homann (local chair).
The DISCO series of conferences was initiated by A. Miola in 1990 to focus mainly on innovative methodological and technological aspects of hardware and software design and implementation for symbolic and algebraic computation, automated reasoning, geometric modeling and computation and automatic programming. As illustrated by the list of papers, the scope of the conference has remained almost unchanged.
However, the successive program committees have modelled what innovative implementation stands for. This trend mirrors the evolution of Computer Science in the recent years: the paradigm of designing and managing complex system is assuming a more relevant role with respect to the paradigm of algorithms. As a consequence the facets of the conference dealing with hardware and algorithm implementation have faded away.
A feature of DISCO is to demonstrate that it is possible to set the design of symbolic system on sound theoretical principles. Another theme that spans the conference proceedings is the trend towards interoperability of software systems. This is rather satisfactory since one of the original goals of this conference was to gather several research communities that used to follow disconnected paths.
The proceedings were edited by Jacques Calmet and Carla Limongelli and have been published as LNCS 1128 by Springer. The included papers are:

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