Connectionists: CFP: AAAI-2018 Workshop on Planning and Inference

[Alexander Ihler]

CALL FOR PAPERS
AAAI-2018 Workshop on Planning and Inference
2/3 February 2018, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~roni/PI2018/index.html

Important Dates:
- Submission deadline: October 13, 2017
                       Electronic papers due by 11:59 PM UTC-10
(midnight Hawaii)
- Notification: November 9, 2017
- Workshop date: 2/3 February, 2018

### Description:

The workshop is focused on the problems of Stochastic Planning and
Probabilistic Inference and the intimate connections between them.
Both Planning and inference are core tasks in AI and the connections
between them have been long recognized. However, much of the work in
these subareas is disjoint. The last decade has seen many exciting
developments with explicit constructions and reductions between
planning and inference that aim for efficient algorithms for large
scale problems and applications. The work in this area is is
distributed across many conferences, sub-communities, and sub-topics
and varies from discrete to continuous problems, single vs.
multi-agent problems, general vs. spatial problems, propositional vs.
relational problems, model based planning vs. reinforcement learning,
and exact/optimal vs. approximate vs. heuristic solutions.
Applications similarly vary for example from scheduling to
sustainability and to robot control.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers from all
these areas and facilitate synergy and exchange of ideas: to discuss
core ideas, techniques and algorithms that take advantage of the
connection between planning and inference, identify opportunities and
challenges for future work, and explore applications and how they can
inform the development of such work.

The workshop will include invited talks by experts on planning and
inference, contributed talks and a poster session, leaving room for
discussion and interaction among participants.

### Invited Speakers:

-  Rina Dechter, UC Irvine, USA.
-  Marc Toussaint,  University of Stuttgart, Germany.
-  Pascal Van Hentenryck, University of Michigan, USA.

### Contributions:

We invite 4 types of submissions (typeset in the AAAI style):
- Papers describing current unpublished work (up to 8 pages including
references).
- Review of mature work (from multiple papers) by the authors (up to 8
pages including references).
- Papers recently published at other venues (1 page abstract with a
link to the full paper).
- Position papers (2 pages including references).

All papers should clearly explain how the work relates planning and inference.
We welcome relevant submissions of papers being reviewed for AAAI 2018
or at other venues.

### Submission procedure:

Papers are to be submitted via easychair through
    https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=planinf2018

### Organizers

- Roni Khardon, Tufts University, USA
- Akshat Kumar, Singapore Management University, Singapore
- Alex Ihler, UC Irvine, USA

Contact Information:

Queries about the workshop should be directed to: planinf2018 at easychair.org