I am happy to let you know that my paper titled Abstract Cores in Implicit Hitting set MaxSat solving has been awarded a best paper award at the 2020 SAT conference. The paper reports on work that was started during my visit to Toronto in 2019. We propose a technique that seeks to address the inherent drawback in the so called implicit hitting set approach to MaxSAT solving, one of the most successful approaches to solving MaxSAT instances corresponding to real world applications. Abstract cores seek to reduce the number of cores that the algorithm needs to extract before terminating without increasing the complexity of the core extraction steps too much. The instantiation of this idea in the MaxHS solver was one of the best performing approaches in the 2020 MaxSAT Evaluation.

I would like to thank the conference organizers for the recognition and for putting together an event that, considering the current circumstances, was probably the best possible way of organizing SAT 2020. I would also like to thank my co-authors, especially Prof. Fahiem Bacchus for his efforts in the implementation and getting the experimental results.