CFP: "Relevance" issue of "Artificial Intelligence"

[Russell Greiner]

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       *****         CALL FOR PAPERS  (please post)            ******
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			 Special Issue on  RELEVANCE

        
		       Journal: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE


       Guest Editors: Russell Greiner, Devika Subramanian, Judea Pearl


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, i.e., what information is "relevant".  There has been a recent
flurry of interest in explicitly reasoning about relevance in a number of
different disciplines, including the AI fields of knowledge representation,
probabilistic reasoning, machine learning and neural computation, as well as
communities that range from statistics and operations research to database
and information retrieval to cognitive science.  Members of these diverse
communities met at the 1994 AAAI Fall Symposium on Relevance, to seek a better
understanding of the various senses of the term "relevance", with a focus on
finding techniques for improving the performance of embedded agents by
ignoring or de-emphasizing irrelevant and superfluous information.  Such
techniques will clearly be of increasing importance as knowledge bases, 
and learning systems, become more comprehensive to accommodate real-world
applications. 

To help consolidate leading research on relevance, the "Artificial 
Intelligence" journal is devoting a special issue to this topic.
We are now seeking papers on (but not restricted to) the following
topics: 

[Representing and reasoning with relevance:]
  reasoning about the relevance of distinctions to speed up
  computation, relevance reasoning in  real-world KR tasks 
  including design, diagnosis and common-sense reasoning,
  use of relevant causal information for planning, theories of discrete
  approximations.

[Learning in the presence of irrelevant information:] 
  removing irrelevant attributes and/or irrelevant training
  examples, to make feasible induction from very large datasets;
  methods for learning action policies for embedded agents
  in large state spaces by explicit construction of
  approximations and abstractions.

[Relevance and probabilistic reasoning:] 
  simplifying/approximating Bayesian nets (both topology and values)
  to permit real-time reasoning; axiomatic bases for constructing
  abstractions and approximations of Bayesian nets and other
  probabilistic reasoning models.

[Relevance in neural computational models:] 
  methods for evolving computations that ignore aspects of the
  environment to make certain classes of decisions, automated
  design of topologies of neural models guided by relevance
  reasoning based on task class.

[Applications of relevance reasoning:]
  Applications that require explicit reasoning about relevance
  in the context of IVHS, exploring and understanding large
  information repositories, etc.

We are especially interested in papers that have strong
theoretical analyses complemented by experimental evidence 
from non-trivial applications.

Authors are invited to submit manuscripts conforming to the AIJ
submission requirements by 11 Sept 1995 to

       Russell Greiner            or    Devika Subramanian
       Siemens Corporate Research	Department of Computer Science
       755 College Road East		5141 Upson Hall, Cornell University
       Princeton, NJ 08540-6632		Ithaca, New York 14853
         (609) 734-3627			  (607) 255-9189


Papers will be a subject to a standard peer review.  The first round of
reviews will be completed and decisions mailed by 11 December 1995. The 
authors of accepted and conditionally accepted manuscripts will be required
to send revised versions by  1 March 1996.  The special issue is tentatively
scheduled to appear sometime in 1996.  We also plan to publish this issue as 
a book. 

Finally, to help us select appropriate reviewers in advance, authors 
should email us a title, set of keywords and a short abstract, to arrive 
by 4 September. 
 
To recap the significant dates:

     4/Sep/95: Emailed titles, keywords and abstracts due
    11/Sep/95: Manuscripts dues
    11/Dec/95: First round decisions
     1/Mar/96: revised manuscripts due
       ?? /96: special issue appears (tentative)