AAAI-11: Tutorial Forum

Tutorial Forum of the Twenty-Fifth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence

Call for Papers

• December 3, 2010: Tutorial Proposals due to tutorial chairs
• January 14, 2011: Tutorial Acceptances mailed
• January 28, 2011: Tutorial descriptions, autobiographical statements, and speaker photos due
• July 1, 2011: Completed course materials must be posted on speaker’s website
• August 7–8, 2011: AAAI-11 Tutorial Forum

The AAAI-11 Program Committee invites proposals for the Tutorial Forum of the Twenty-Fifth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-11). The Tutorial Forum will be held August 7–8, 2011 in San Francisco. Anyone interested in presenting a tutorial at AAAI-11 should submit a proposal to the 2011 Tutorial Forum Cochairs via EasyChair.

What Is the Tutorial Forum?

The Tutorial Forum provides an opportunity for junior and senior researchers to spend two days each year freely exploring exciting advances in disciplines outside their normal focus. We believe this type of forum is essential for the cross fertilization, cohesiveness, and vitality of the AI field. We all have a lot to learn from each other; the Tutorial Forum promotes the continuing education of each member of the AAAI. To encourage full participation by technical conference registrants, no separate fee will be charged for admittance to the Tutorial Forum in 2011.

Topics

AAAI is interested in proposals for advanced tutorials at the leading edge of AI. We are particularly interested in tutorials that offer two types of knowledge. The first type provides in-depth background tools to help educate researchers and students for the purpose of conducting AI research; examples of this type of tutorials from AAAI-10 include “Sampling Techniques for Probabilistic and Deterministic Graphical Models,” “Voting Theory,” and “Reinforcement Learning Algorithms for MDPs.” A second type of tutorial provides a broad overview for an AI area that potentially crosses boundaries with an interesting application area; examples of this type of tutorial from AAAI-10 include “Exploiting Statistical and Relational Information on the Web and in Social Media: Applications, Techniques, and New Frontiers,” “Towards Intelligent Web Search: Inferring Searcher Intent,” and “Machine Learning Meets Knowledge Representation in the Semantic Web.”

Our goal is to present a diverse program that includes core areas of AI, new techniques from allied disciplines that can inform research within AI, and conversely emerging applications of AI techniques to new areas. Previous years’ tutorial programs provide an indication of the scope and variety of possible topics. The list is not exclusive; indeed, we are expressly interested in topics that we would not have imagined to mention. Finally, note that we very much welcome proposals for educational approaches that go beyond the traditional format of four-hour tutorials, exploiting the flexibility that the open format program offers.

Submission Requirements

We need two kinds of information in the proposals: information that will be used for selecting proposals and information that will appear in the tutorial description brochure. The proposal should provide sufficient information to evaluate the quality of the technical content being taught, the quality of the educational material being used, and the speakers’ skill at presenting this material.

Each proposal should include at least the following:

• Goal of the tutorial: Who is the target audience? What will the audience walk away with? What makes the topic innovative?
• History: List of previous venues and approximate audience sizes, if the same or a similar tutorial has been given elsewhere; otherwise an estimate of the audience size.
• Content: Detailed outline and list of additional materials, augmented with samples, such as past tutorial slides and survey articles, whenever possible. Be as complete as possible.
• Tutorial description: A short paragraph summarizing the tutorial outline, and the intended duration of the symposium (default is four hours).
• Prerequisite knowledge: What knowledge is assumed of the target audience.
• Please also submit the following information about the team of presenters: name, mailing address, phone number, email address; background in the tutorial area, including a list of publications and/or presentations; any available examples of work in the area (ideally, a published tutorial-level article or presentation materials on the subject); evidence of teaching experience (courses taught or references); and evidence of scholarship in AI or computer science.

Submission Deadline

Proposals must be received by December 3, 2010. Decisions about the tutorial program will be made by January 14, 2011. Speakers should be prepared to submit their tutorial descriptions and bios by January 28, 2011, and to post completed course materials on their websites by July 1, 2011.

Submissions must be in pdf format and made via EasyChair at www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=aaai2011tutorialforum.

AAAI-11 Tutorial Program Cochairs

• Thomas Lukasiewicz
  Oxford University Computing Laboratory
  Wolfson Building, Parks Road
  Oxford OX1 3QD, UK
  0044-1865-522566
  0044-1865-273839 (fax)
  Thomas.Lukasiewicz@comlab.ox.ac.uk
  
  
• Patrick Pantel
  Microsoft Research
  One Microsoft Way
  Redmond, WA 98052
  ppantel@microsoft.com

AAAI-11 Tutorial Program Committee

Eyal Amir (University of Illinois, USA)
Nate Chambers (Stanford University, USA)
Colin Cherry (National Research Council, Canada)
Peter Clark (Vulcan Inc., USA)
Tommaso Di Noia (Technical University of Bari, Italy)
Wolfgang Faber (University of Calabria, Italy)
Nicola Fanizzi (University of Bari, Italy)
Ariel Fuxman (Microsoft Research, USA)
Pascal Hitzler (Wright State University, USA)
Eyke Hüllermeier (University of Marburg, Germany)
Gabriele Kern-Isberner (University of Dortmund, Germany)
Jérôme Lang (University of Paul Sabatier, France)
Weiru Liu (Queen's University Belfast, UK)
Carsten Lutz (University of Bremen, Germany)
Sofus Macskassy (Fetch Technologies, USA)
Rada Mihalcea (University of North Texas, USA)
Ralf Möller (TU Hamburg, Germany)
Hoifung Poon (University of Washington, USA)
Umberto Straccia (ISTI-CNR Pisa, Italy)
Heiner Stuckenschmidt (University of Mannheim, Germany)
Partha Talukdar (Microsoft Research, USA)

Information