The UT Dallas Computer Science Department’s head, Dr. Gopal Gupta, has been elected president of the Association for Logic Programming.

The international association was founded in 1986 to contribute to the development of logic programming, which is a programming paradigm and the basis of Prolog, a computer language that’s widely used in research and education.

“Logic programming is an important component of modern computer science,” Gupta said. “Logic programs are considerably shorter and easier to maintain than programs written in other languages, and the association works to relate logic programming to other subfields of computer science and to promote its use in academia and industry worldwide.”

Logic programming was the creation of computer scientist Robert Kowalski in the early 1970s. It emerged from computer scientist Alan Robinson’s creation of the Resolution Principle in 1965, ultimately taking strong hold in the academic community and becoming the basis of important scientific projects such as the Japanese Fifth-Generation Computing Initiative.

The association now has several hundred members worldwide and publishes a scholarly journal called Theory and Practice of Logic Programming. Its 26th international conference will take place this July in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Gupta has conducted research in the field of logic programming since the late 1980s. He has published numerous scholarly articles in the field and has developed several logic programming-based software systems. From 2003 to 2007 he also served on the association’s executive committee.

As president, Gupta said, he plans to pursue three primary courses of action: promoting the advantages of computing with logic programming to industry, organizing summer educational programs for younger researchers to help ensure the field remains vibrant, and reaching out to other research communities working in areas related to logic programming so that cross-fertilization of ideas can continue.