Work started before the project officially began, with LORIA (at their expense) hosting a meeting of LORIA/MPI/RWTH and the Coordinator. This enabled the dissemination and community building phases to hit the ground running, with the poster at ISSAC, paper at CICM, and session at CASC all accepted before the project officially started.
The first three months were largely spent in dissemination, culminating in the first workshop, very much a community-building exercise, in Timisoara in September 2016. This was also the first Project Board meeting. To save time and expense, we agreed to hold electronic, rather than physical, project boards if there was no major event to tie them to. Hence electronic Project Board meetings were held in December 2016 and March 2017. A physical one was scheduled to coincide with the second workshop in July 2017.
O1 Build a joint SC2 community Progress has undoubtedly been made here: we have held two successful workshops, with 26 and 35 attendees respectively. The special session at CASC 2016 is an example of visibility at other events, and we have had a steady flow of people wising to become associates.
O1.1 Create communication platforms. The mailing lists, both of members and, more widely, that of associates, have communicated informal news and information. The workshop proceedings have helped communicate semi-formal results, and the proposed Special Issue of the Journal of Symbolic Computation, suggested by the Editor-in-Chief after he attended our workshops, will help with more finished results.
O1.2 Initiate cooperations. There are two clear examples of inter-field coop-ration here, and one of novel applications.
* The two Italian partners (FBK and Genoa) did not know each other until the project started. The two are now co-operating, and the Genoa leader has also found new cooperations within her own department, with people who had been communicating with FBK.
* RWTH and RISC-Linz initiated a cooperation, with a talk at ICAI 2017.
* The MPI/Bath/Coventry collaboration was formed out of the requirement of Bath/MPI to plan the summer school, but led to papers at ISSAC and CASC in the applications of the techniques of all three SC2 partners to a problem in Biology.
O1.3 Strengthen research and technology transfer to industry. This is happening: we had industrial talks at the workshops, and particularly at the summer school to inspire young researchers with the challenges. In particular see Oxford's part in the Exploitation part of Deliverable D6.5. It has also greatly strengthened Bath's collaboration with Altran.
O1.4 Support scientific offspring. The Summer School had 50 attendees - double the plan. The young scientists at the partners benefit from increased cooperation and dialogue, and Maplesoft are supporting a research student to start in Bath in 2017.
O2 Create a research roadmap. The launch of SC2 has led to an increase in research in the SC2 area. The specific research prototyping exercises planned in WP 1-3 have not really begun (as planned, they are largely over summer 2017). However, we have been asked to participate in the ARCADE conference, aimed at setting the research roadmap for the Automated Deduction area. This has helped crystallise the discussions within the SC2 consortium and the early stages of the roadmapping exercise.
O3 Initiate SC2 standards This is a complex process.
O3.1 Propose input language standards. OpenMath and SMTLIB are the two standards from the two communities, but they are rather different in focus. A comparison paper has been written, and seen by the OpenMath and SC2 communities.
O3.2 Create an SC2 benchmark library. Being collected.
O4 Increase the visibility of SC2 This is happening: see the invitation to ARCADE (O2) and the many activities in the Dissemination part of Deliverable D6.5.
