Connectionists: CfP: Modelling and Reasoning in Context (MRC) @ IJCAI-2017 // Submission deadline: May 16, 2017

[Tarek R. Besold]

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                     Call for Papers: MRC 2017
 The 9th International Workshop on Modelling and Reasoning in Context

                   In conjunction with  IJCAI 2017
                 The International Joint Conference
                     on Artificial Intelligence
                        Melbourne, Australia
                         August 19-25, 2017

                 Submission deadline: May 16, 2017

                 Information: http://mrc.kriwi.de/
    Submissions: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=mrc2017

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Join us in Melbourne
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Context plays an increasingly important role in modern IT applications.
Context
sensitivity and awareness is becoming essential, not only for mobile
systems,
ambient computing and the internet of things, but also for a wide range of
other
areas, such as learning and teaching solutions, collaborative software, web
engineering, mobility logistics and health care work-flow. Advancing the use
and
understanding of context beyond stimuli-response systems suggests a
knowledge
perspective on modelling and reasoning.

For autonomous systems, recognising contextual information is vital if the
system is to exhibit behaviour that is appropriate for the situation at
hand. At
the same time, such systems might change contextual parameters that are
relevant
for human and non-human agents present. Therefore, it is important to be
able to
predict changes in context that are due to the actions of intelligent
systems to
avoid clashing with user needs and expectations.

>From a general AI perspective, one of the challenges is to integrate context
with other types of knowledge as a major additional source for reasoning,
decision-making, and adaptation and to form a coherent and versatile
architecture. There is a common understanding that achieving desired
behaviour
from intelligent systems will depend on the ability to represent and
manipulate
information about a rich range of contextual factors.

These factors may include not only physical characteristics of the task
environment, but, possibly more importantly, many other aspects including
cognitive factors such as the knowledge states (of both the application and
user) or emotions, and social factors such as networks, relations, roles,
and
hierarchies. This representation and reasoning problem presents research
challenges to which methodologies derived from areas such as artificial
intelligence, knowledge management, human-computer interaction, semiotics
and
psychology can contribute solutions.


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Workshop Objectives
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MRC aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from different
communities, both in industry and academia, to study, understand, and
explore
issues surrounding context and to share their problems, techniques and
success
stories across different areas. By considering modelling and reasoning
approaches for contextualised systems from a broad range of areas, the
workshop
will facilitate the sharing of problems, techniques, and solutions. The
workshop
covers different understandings of what context is, different approaches to
modelling context, mechanisms and techniques for (structured) storage of
contextual information, effective ways to retrieve it, and methods for
enabling
integration of context and application knowledge.

MRC invites papers on different aspects of context, on theory as well as on
applications. We particularly invite contributions on topics of autonomy and
context. We also explicitly invite contributions from other fields of study
in
order to further trans- and interdisciplinary approaches.

MRC provides a forum to exchange and discuss issues and ideas in a friendly,
cooperative environment. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

  * Context and autonomy
  * Context and smart data
  * Generic and specific context models
  * Explicit representations of context
  * Context and visualisation
  * Trans- and interdisciplinary issues of context
  * Representation of and reasoning with uncertainty
  * Retrieval of context and context information
  * Socio-technical issues
  * Evaluation of contextualised applications
  * Explanation and context
  * Information ageing
  * Context focusing and context switching
  * Context management
  * Context awareness and context-sensitivity


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Submissions
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Submitted papers must be prepared according to the formatting guidelines,
LaTeX
Styles and Word template for IJCAI 2017, and submitted electronically in PDF
format only through the EasyChair pages for MRC 2017. Authorship does not
need
to be anonymous, but you are free to submit papers with identifying
information
removed.

Submissions must be original, and should not have been formally published or
accepted for publication elsewhere. We also invite longer versions of papers
published in short form elsewhere. Papers have to be submitted on the 16th
of
May, 2017 at the latest.

Long papers are allowed eight (8) pages. An additional page containing the
list
of references is allowed, as long as this ninth page contains only
references.
Short papers, not exceeding three (3) pages, may be submitted for short oral
presentation.

Three members of the program committee will review each submission. A review
form will direct committee members to evaluate submissions for
appropriateness,
technical strength, originality, presentation, and overall evaluation, as
well
as recording the reviewer's confidence in the topic.

Author notification  will be sent out on the 6th of June, 2017.

The proceedings of the workshop will be published electronically and made
freely
available. Depending on the nature of submissions, the proceedings will be
published through a suitable channel such as the CEUR Workshop Proceedings.
Authors of accepted papers might be invited to submit extended versions for
inclusion in a special journal issue on contextualised systems, if justified
by
the quantity and quality of submissions.

The authors will be responsible for producing camera-ready copies of papers
in
PDF format, conforming to the formatting guidelines, for inclusion in the
published proceedings. At least one author of each accepted paper is
required to
attend the workshop to present the contribution.


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Important Dates
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Papers due:   May 16
Notification: June 6
Camera-ready: June 20
MRC Workshop: August 19.-21. (one day, exact date tbd)


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Websites
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More information about MRC and the paper submission process as well as paper
templates can be found on the workshop website at:
http://mrc.kriwi.de/

Submission System:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=mrc2017

The IJCAI 2017 main conference website has more information about the
location
and registration process:
http://ijcai-17.org/


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Organisation
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Chairs

Jörg Cassens
Institute for Mathematics and Applied Informatics
University of Hildesheim, Germany

Rebekah Wegener
Institute for English and American Studies
RWTH Aachen University, Germany
Audaxi - Discover a better way to learn.
Sydney, Australia

Anders Kofod-Petersen
Alexandra Institute
Copenhagen, Denmark
Department of Computer and Information Sciences
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Trondheim, Norway

Contact all chairs at: mrc2017 at kriwi.de


Program Committee (subject to amendments)

Juan Carlos Augusto         Middlesex University, UK
Tarek Richard Besold        University of Bremen, Germany
Henning Christiansen        Roskilde University, Denmark
Adrian Clear                Northumbria University, Newcastle University, UK
Bozidara Cvetkovic          Jozef Stefan Institute, Slovenia
Martin Christof Kindsmüller University of Applied Sciences Brandenburg,
Germany
Christian Kohlschein        RWTH Aachen University, Germany
David Leake                 Indiana University, USA
Ana Gabriela Maguitman      Universidad Nacional del Sur, Argentina
Tobias Meisen               RWTH Aachen University, Germany
Stella Neumann              RWTH Aachen University, Germany
Maite Taboada               Simon Fraser University Vancouver, Canada


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Background to MRC
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MRC is an interdisciplinary workshop with a focus on applications within
computer science. Because of this focus the workshop primarily attracts
participants from within the computer science community and specifically
within
artificial intelligence. However, MRC has always had a strong
interdisciplinary
appeal and does draw from fields such as linguistics, semiotics, philosophy,
mathematics, cognitive science, social sciences and psychology as well as
various sub-fields within computer science.

MRC has traditionally been held at either the bi-annual International and
Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context (CONTEXT) or
AI-related conferences such as ECAI, IJCAI and AAAI. These workshops have
been
successful in raising awareness about the importance of context as a major
issue
for future intelligent systems, especially for the use of mobile devices and
current research on ubiquitous computing. At the same time, advances in
methodologies for modelling and retrieving context have been made and MRC
continues to provide a venue for the discussion and furthering of research
into
issues surrounding context.

MRC 2017 will be held at the the International Joint Conference on
Artificial
Intelligence (IJCAI 2017) in Melbourne, Australia. The main conference
website
has more information about the location and the registration process as well
as
other workshops. Participants for MRC will have to register for IJCAI. In
particular, at least one author of any paper accepted for presentation at
MRC
will have to register for the workshop at IJCAI.


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Agenda
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The workshop will last one full day and will have three main types of
interaction.

The first type will consist of short presentations of the accepted papers.
The
goal of these sessions is to introduce the work of all the participants.

The second type will consist of two panel discussion sessions, each
dedicated to
one specific issue. The suggested issues are "Recognising Context in
Autonomous
Systems" and "Changing Context with Autonomous Systems", but are subject to
change dependent on the interests of the attendees and the nature of
submissions. The goal of these panels is to discuss the various approaches
to
each of these basic issues and to identify the critical problems in need of
attention and the most promising research directions.

The workshop will be concluded with the last type, an open, but guided
discussion summarising the most important lessons learned.

Industry representatives are invited to display context related
demonstrations
during the workshop.

A detailed agenda will be published on our website before the workshop.


--
Digital Media Lab
Center for Computing and Communication Technologies (TZI)
University of Bremen

Email: Tarek.Besold at uni-bremen.de
Web: http://www.cat-ai.org