CFP: "Relevance" Symposium

[Russell Greiner]

==============================================================================
			   AAAI 1994 Fall Symposium

				  RELEVANCE

			      4-6 November 1994
		 The Monteleone Hotel, New Orleans, Louisiana


== Call for Participation ==

With too little information, reasoning and learning systems cannot work
effectively.  Surprisingly, too much information can also cause the
performance of these systems to degrade, in terms of both accuracy and
efficiency.  It is therefore important to determine what information must be
preserved, or more generally, to determine how best to cope with superfluous
information.  The goal of this workshop is a better understanding of this
topic, relevance, with a focus on techniques for improving a system's
performance (along some dimension) by ignoring or de-emphasizing irrelevant
and superfluous information.  These techniques will clearly be of increasing
importance as knowledge bases, and learning systems, become more comprehensive
to accommodate real-world applications.

There are many forms of irrelevancy.  In many contexts (including both
deduction and induction), the initial theory may include more information than
the task requires.  Here, the system may perform more effectively if certain
irrelevant *facts* (or nodes in a neural net or Bayesian network) are
ignored or deleted.  In the context of learning, certain *attributes* of
each individual sample may be irrelevant in that they will play essentially no
role in the eventual classification or clustering.  Also, the learner may
choose to view certain *samples* to be irrelevant, knowing that they
contain essentially no new information.  Yet another flavor of irrelevance
arises during the course of a general computation: A computing process can
ignore certain *intermediate results*, once it has established that they
will not contribute to the eventual answer; consider alpha-beta pruning or
conspiracy numbers in game-playing and other contexts, or control heuristics
in derivation.


== Submission Information ==

Potential attendees should submit a one-page summary of their relevant
research, together with a set of their relevant papers (pun unavoidable).
People wishing to present material should also submit a 2000 word abstract.
We invite papers that deal with any aspect of this topic, including
characterizations of irrelevancies, ways of coping with superfluous
information, ways of detecting irrelevancies and focusing on relevant
information, and so forth; and are particularly interested in studies that
suggest ways to improve the efficiency or accuracy of reasoning systems
(including question-answerers, planners, diagnosticians, and so forth) or to
improve the accuracy, sample complexity, or computational or space requirement
of learning processes.  We encourage empirical studies and cognitive theories,
as well as theoretical results.

We prefer plain-text, stand-alone LaTeX or Postscript submissions sent by
electronic mail to   greiner at learning.scr.siemens.com.  Otherwise, please
mail three copies to
	Russell Greiner
	"Relevance Symposium"
	Siemens Corporate Research, Inc
	755 College Road East
	Princeton, NJ 08540-6632
In either case, the submission must arrive by 15 Apr 1994.


== Important Dates ==
 - Submissions due                       15 April 1994
 - Notification of acceptance		 17 May 1994
 - Working notes mailed out		 20 Sept 1994
 - Fall Symposium Series		 4-6 Nov 1994

== Organizing Committee ==
  Russ Greiner  (co-chair, Siemens Corporate Research,
			   greiner at learning.scr.siemens.com)
  Yann Le Cun  (AT&T Bell Laboratories)
  Nick Littlestone (NEC Research Institute)
  David McAllester (MIT)
  Judea Pearl  (UCLA)
  Bart Selman  (AT&T Bell Laboratories)
  Devika Subramanian (co-chair, Cornell, devika at cs.cornell.edu)


== Attendance ==

The symposium will be limited to between forty and sixty participants.
In addition to invited participants, a limited number of other interested
parties will be able to register on a first-come, first-served basis.
Registration will be available by mid-July 1994.  To obtain registration
information, contact AAAI at   fss at aaai.org;   (415) 328-3123; or
445 Burgess Drive, Menlo Park, CA 94025.

== Sponsored by ==
  American Association for Artificial Intelligence
  as part of the AAAI 1994 Fall Symposium Series.