In 1996 the paper “In Pursuit of the Holy Grail” (also here) proposed that Constraint Programming was well-positioned to pursue the Holy Grail of computer science: the user simply states the problem and the computer solves it. It was followed about a decade later by “Holy Grail Redux“, and then about a decade after that by “Progress Towards the Holy Grail“. This series of workshops aims to encourage and disseminate progress towards that goal, in particular regarding work on automating:

• Problem Acquisition: learning, debugging, maintaining, etc.
• Model Reformulation: transformation for efficient solution, redundant models, etc.
• Solver Construction: adaptive parameter tuning, automated selection from portfolios, etc.
• User Explanation: reasons for failure, implications for choices, etc.

Of special interest is the intersection of the Holy Grail goal with the increasing attention being paid to machine learning, explainable AI, Human-Aware AI, Human-AI Collaboration, and intelligent software assistants.

The websites for the individual workshops are accessible from the drop-down menu.