Constraint reasoning techniques, developed in the context of AI research, have successfully solved many real problems. Although it is a mature field, there are many important active lines of research such as open CSPs, distributed CSPs, quantified CSPs and soft constraint problems. Another well-known AI topic is Planning. It has recently gained new strenth in the research community due to its reformulation in terms of graphs, search and constraint satisfaction. In this project we want to make progress in the open lines of research of both fields. We also want to exploit the close relation between constraint processing and planning. Our objectives are:
Constraint reasoning. Our goal is to contribute to the efficient resolution of the new paradigms (open, distributed and quantified CSPs) as well as continue our work on soft constraints, where we have already made relevant contributions, extending the results to closely related models such as clausal formulas or bayesian networks. Since the problem is in general untractable, we also want to identify tractable classes (soluble in polynomial time).

Planning

Our goal is to refine the methods based on heuristic search for planning. We also want to study and develop the combination of search and inference. We want to exploit the existence of symmetries to decrease the solving effort, which is a well-known topic in the constraint community.

We present this project as a continuation of REPLI (TIC2002-04470-C03) motivated by the good results and experience that was achieved. We have now a larger and more experienced team of researchers. The benefits of the project will be the accomplishment of the previous goals as well as the integration of different research groups with complementary expertise.

The project, planned as a continuation of project LOGFAC (TIC2001-1577-C03-01), has three basic objectives. The first one is to continue the logic and algebraic study of t-norm based many-valued logics in the frame of both residuated and substructural logics. The second one is the formalization, within the framework of the above logics, of several deductive soft computing mechanisms, based on fuzzy logic, to deal with fuzziness and imprecision. The last one is to continue theoretical and experimental research on algorithms for the satisfiability problem in many-valued logics and their application to computational problems, in particular to constraint satisfaction problems with hard and soft constraints problems.

ONCNOSIS aims to discover novel molecular tools, therapeutic compounds and developing new technological approaches for disease diagnosis, prognosis and treatment in four selected cancers.

The mission of ARES is to advance the state of the art and the practice of information security and privacy through:

• Edge-cutting, world-class research on information security and privacy, making the latter compatible with the former
• The reinforcement of Spanish participation in the European 7th Framework Programme, specifically in the thematic programmes "Security and space" and "Information and communications technologies"
• The contribution of ARES to higher education in their activity domain by co-operating with the UNESCO Chair in Data Privacy held by the ARES co-ordinator and the doctoral programmes and Bologna master degrees in which the six groups of the team are involved
• The constitution of ARES as a national and international reference team in the domain of information security and privacy;
• The fosterage of technology transfer in information security and privacy towards industry and productive sectors, by means of contracts, agreements, patents and training.

A mid-term ambition of ARES is to become an inter-university research center excelling in information security and privacy. This change of legal status will not be operated immediately, but it is hoped that it can be accomplished within the next five years.
The activity areas of ARES include but are not limited to the following: secure electronic commerce, information privacy, critical infrastructures, intellectual property protection and digital rights management, cryptology, smart cards, personal identification and biometrics, access control and authentication, network security, security certification and trust generation, dependability, security and privacy in ubiquitous (pervasive) computing. The leitmotiv of the proposed research programme is ?National and corporate security vs individual privacy in information and communications technologies?.

The main objective of E-AEGIS is to demonstrate that transaction security in the information society is compatible with consumer privacy. Specifically, this will be demonstrated for the following three scenarios: mobile services (subproject E-AEGIS/M-PRIVACY), digital content management (subproject E-AEGIS/STEGOPRIVACY), and privacy-preserving data mining (subproject EAEGIS/DBPRIVACY).

Subproject E-AEGIS/DBPRIVACY will focus on the creation of synthetic (i.e. simulated) datasets which preserve a certain model present in an original dataset for a number of subdomains (subsets of variables and records). This will enable companies to co-operate in joint market analyses without exchanging their customers' real data, but only synthetic data. To ensure that the synthetic data really do preserve privacy, re-identification methods will be used to measure disclosure risk. New reidentification methods will be designed to take non-independent data into account. The ultimate goal is to use synthetic data also *within a company*: the corporate data warehouse will be fed with synthetic data simulating the real data collected by the operational subsystems; the operational data will be deleted at short time intervals, with the ensuing privacy gain.

The inclusion of soft constraints in the constraint-based reasoning model has connected this model with combinatorial optimization. This allows one to have a common view of both areas, exchanging methods between them. This project tries to use, integrate and extend ideas that have been shown successful for constraint reasoning in a double dimension:

• Soft constraints. Contribution to the issues caused by the inclusion of soft constraints in the constraint model, extending existing results for hard constraints. In particular, we will focus on soft constraint propagation and local consistency, resolution algorithms and their complexity, and the efficient formulation of real problems.
• Applications. To apply constraint techniques to two different fields: planning and uncertainty management. On planning, the idea of planning as heuristic search wll be extended to produce a temporal planner of high performance, combining a branch-and-bound scheme with prunning techniques based con constraint propagation. On uncertainty management, constraint-solving algorithms based on decomposition will be applied to bayesian networks and to the possibilistic model. Finally, other problems will be studied, in particular the optimization of circuit design. Project benefits include not only the above mentioned contributions and the resolution of the applications, but also the integration of research groups with complementary backgrounds.