AAAI 2008 Spring Symposium Series Call for Participation
The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, in cooperation with Stanford University’s Department of Computer Science, is pleased to present the 2008 Spring Symposium Series, to be held Wednesday through Friday, March 26–28, 2008 at Stanford University. The titles of the eight symposia are as follows:
- AI Meets Business Rules and Process Management
- Architectures for Intelligent Theory-Based Agents
- Creative Intelligent Systems
- Emotion, Personality, and Social Behavior
- Semantic Scientific Knowledge Integration
- Social Information Processing
- Symbiotic Relationships between Semantic Web and Knowledge Engineering
- Using AI to Motivate Greater Participation in Computer Science
AI Meets Business Rules and Process Management
Business Rules and Business Process management are growing research and application areas for semantic technologies. While both areas make use of model driven knowledge representations—often in conjunction with application-oriented modeling tools—the potential of knowledge representations with precise semantics has only recently been recognized.
Generally, the areas of “business rules,” “semantic technologies,” and “business process management” are addressed by different communities at present. Standards are promoted by different organizations like W3C, OMG, and WfMC. Current research and practice, however, begins to identify and explore the benefits for combining methodologies from these different areas.
Business rules, for example, strive to meet the increasing requirements of transparency and compliance, making sure that all stakeholders comply with all rules and regulations at any place and any time. Defining a commonly agreed vocabulary is a prerequisite for rule definitions. Recent standardization efforts try to bring semantics into business rules can benefit from AI’s knowledge representation research that strongly influenced also ontology engineering and the semantic web. Similar observations can be made for other aspects of rule based systems that have already been addressed earlier within AI (for example, rule capture, inferencing, and explanation).
In business process management there is increasing research interest in combining business process modelling and execution with semantic technologies. In particular, the concept of semantic web services promises a new level of agility in process execution where AI can contribute insights and technologies from knowledge representation, reasoning and planning. There have also been approaches to combine business processes and business rules to achieve flexibility and agility in process execution.
The AAAI Symposium Series provides a unique venue in which researchers can present their current state of research, discuss experimental results and theoretical foundations. In this sense—besides invited talks and presentations of accepted papers—the symposium will provide plenty of space for extensive discussions and group interactions between researchers and practitioners from all three communities in order to explore the potentials of AI technologies and to provide the basis for synergetic cooperation.
Organizing Committee
Knut Hinkelmann (Chair), University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland (knut.hinkelmann@fhnw.ch); Andreas Abecker, FZI Research Center for Information Technologies, Karlsruhe (abecker@fzi.de); Harold Boley, University of New Brunswick (harold.boley@nrc.gc.ca); John Hall, Model Systems Ltd.(john.hall@modelsys.com); Martin Hepp, DERI Digital Enterprise Research Institute (martin.hepp@deri.org); Amit Sheth, Wright State University, Ohio (amit.sheth@wright.edu); Barbara Thönssen, University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland (barbara.thoenssen@fhnw.ch).
For More Information
For more information, see the supplementary symposium website.
Architectures for Intelligent Theory-Based Agents
The focus of the Architectures for Intelligent Theory-Based Agents symposium is the definition of architectures for intelligent theory-based agents. These architectures typically comprise languages, knowledge representation methodologies, reasoning algorithms, and control loops.
The motivation of the symposium is the consideration that a number of reasonably rigorous architectures have been designed, but not implemented, that allow one to prove important properties about the agents and their behavior, while other reasonably rigorous architectures have been implemented without attendant proofs about their agents. Unfortunately, there has not yet been much interaction among the groups working on these two classes of architectures. The lack of communication contributes to slowing the development of an otherwise interesting and potentially very important area.
We would like to provide a forum to bring together researchers from these two groups, promote interaction, and stimulate the investigation of the relationships among the different approaches.
During the symposium, there will be discussions on the following topics:
- Descriptions of specific architectures;
- Comparisons of architectures;
- Surveys of the state-of-the-art;
- Descriptions of working systems.
We expect in particular that the works presented will include an overview of languages, knowledge representation methodologies, reasoning algorithms, and control loops used in the architectures considered. We expect to allocate time during the symposium for demonstrations of working systems.
Organizing Committee
Marcello Balduccini, Texas Tech University; Chitta Baral, Arizona State University; Thomas Eiter, Vienna University of Technology; Alfredo Gabaldon, National ICT Australia; Stuart C. Shapiro, University at Buffalo; Francesca Toni, Imperial College London.
For More Information
For more information, see the supplementary symposium website.
Creative Intelligent Systems
Although it seems clear that creativity plays an important role in developing intelligent systems, it is less clear how to model, simulate, or evaluate creativity in such systems. In other words, it is often easier to recognize the presence and effect of creativity than to describe or prescribe it. The purpose of this symposium is to explore the synergies between creative cognition and intelligent systems in a cross-disciplinary setting that fosters cooperation both in designing creative systems and in creatively designing systems. This focus on creativity in the context of intelligent systems has the potential for increasing innovation in existing fields of research as well as for defining new fields of study, including the following:
Artificially Creative Systems: Development of new types of intelligent systems that produce or simulate creativity using novel approaches to reasoning, searching, and representing knowledge. These systems may be inspired by human creativity or by the possibilities of artificial systems beyond human capabilities.
Computational Models of Human Creativity: Construct cognitive models of human creativity that can be the basis for computational creativity.
Intelligent Systems for Supporting Creativity: Produce user interfaces, interaction design, decision support, and data modeling techniques that lead to the development of intelligent assistants that support the user in being more creative.
Format
The symposium format will be a mix of oral presentations and open discussions and will include a plenary talk. Twenty-six accepted papers will be presented in two separate poster sessions, with a subset selected for additional oral presentation to serve as a catalyst for the open discussions. Symposium topics will include the following:
- Paradigms for understanding creativity, including heuristic search, analogical reasoning, and re-representation;
- Creativity in different disciplines, including design, art, music, and science;
- Perspectives on creativity, including models of human behavior, intelligent systems, and creativity-support tools;
- The role of creativity in learning, innovation, improvisation, and other pursuits;
- Factors that enhance creativity, including conflict, diversity, knowledge, intuition, reward structures, and technologies
- Social aspects of creativity, including the relationship between individual and social creativity, diffusion of ideas, collaboration and creativity, formation of creative teams, and simulating creativity in social settings.
Organizing Committee
Dan Ventura, Brigham Young University; Mary Lou Maher, National Science Foundation; Simon Colton, Imperial College
Program Committee
Andy Barto (University of Massachusetts), Yang Cai (Carnegie Mellon University), Amilcar Cardoso (University of Coimbria), John Gero (George Mason University), Pablo Gervas (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), Pierre-Yves Oudeyer (Sony CSL Paris), Tony Veale (University College Dublin), Geraint Wiggins (Goldsmiths, University of London), Levent Yilmaz (Auburn University), R. Michael Young (North Carolina State University)
For More Information
For questions or to express interest in attending, contact Dan Ventura (ventura@cs.byu.edu). For more information about the symposium see the supplementary symposium web site supplementary symposium website.
Emotion, Personality, and Social Behavior
Recent years have witnessed increased interest in modeling emotion and personality in cognitive, agent and robot architectures. Increasingly, the focus has been on exploring the role of affective factors in social behavior. These include emotions, moods, personality traits, and attitudes. Researchers and practitioners in areas such as social robotics, game development, affective HCI, and synthetic agents are increasingly recognizing the importance of these affective factors in developing believable, realistic and robust agents, and effective human-machine interfaces.
This symposium seeks to bring together researchers in diverse relevant areas such as affective computing, believable agents, game design, robotics, social computing, and the arts, to examine the roles of emotions, moods, personality traits and attitudes in mediating social behavior among biological and artificial agents. The symposium will provide a forum for interdisciplinary interactions addressing fundamental issues in modeling affect and personality in social behavior.
To facilitate interaction, moderated panels, small working groups, and open discussion will be emphasized, rather than the traditional paper sessions.
- How do we understand the interactions between emotion, personality, and social behavior?
- What can they tell us about cognitive / cognitive-affective architecture?
- How can we make compelling artificial characters?
- How can we make systems that facilitate social interaction among humans or among humans and artificial characters?
- How can considerations of affective factors contribute to more effective human-computer interaction in general?
- How do intrapsychic cognition-emotion interactions manifest at the interpersonal level?
- Methods and techniques for more systematic approaches to design
- What are the best approaches to developing the necessary knowledge-bases?
- What are the best data sources for architecture development and validation?
- How can we validate models and architectures?
- What are the emerging standards in affective artificial characters, robots and systems?
Organizing Committee
Ian Horswill, Northwestern University (ian@northwestern.edu); Eva Hudlicka, Psychometrix Associates (Hudlicka@ieee.org); Christine Lisetti, Florida International University (lisetti@cis.fiu.edu); Juan Velasquez, MIT (jvelas@csail.mit.edu)
Program Committee
Antonio Camurri (University of Genoa, Italy), Fiorella de Rosis (University of Bari, Italy), Gerry Matthews (University of Cincinnati, US), Andrew Ortony (Northwestern University, US), Ana Paiva (IST-Technical University of Lisbon and INESC-ID, Portugal), Rui Prada (IST-Technical University of Lisbon and INESC-ID, Portugal), Helmut Prendinger (National Institute of Informatics, Japan).
For More Information
For more information, see the supplementary symposium website.
Semantic Scientific Knowledge Integration
Interest in and requirements for the next generation of information technology for science are expanding. e-Science has become a growing subject of discussion covering topics such as grid computing for science and knowledge-enhanced scientific data retrieval. Within individual science areas, we are experiencing the emergence of virtual observatories such as those in astronomy, heliophysics, geophysics and solar-terrestrial physics, where virtual distributed collections of scientific data are made available in a transparent manner. The goal of such efforts is to provide a scientific research environment that provides software tools and interfaces to interoperating data archives. While initial goals for these efforts may include relatively simple uses of AI techniques, the medium and long range goals for these efforts require full scale semantic integration of scientific data, thus they present interesting motivations for and tests of artificial intelligence techniques.
Concurrent with the growing demand for next generation information technology for science is a growth in semantic technologies. While knowledge representation languages and environments continue to evolve, some have reached a stable state in terms of reaching recommendation status from standards bodies. This recommendation status has attracted the interest of startup companies as well as established companies and a number off academic and commercial tools and environments are now available for use.
In this workshop, we are interested in bringing together the semantic technologies community with the scientific information technology community in an effort to build the general semantic science information community. The workshop has multiple goals including obtaining requirements for AI researchers from the scientific community, informing the computational science community of AI research efforts that are ready for use now or with additional research, and providing a forum for current collaborative efforts to present their work.
Topics will include AI-based foundations and applications in scientific integration applications such as the following:
- Knowledge representation foundations for e-science
- Ontologies and ontology environments aimed at science integration applications
- Knowledge provenance / meta data /annotation for e-science
- AI-based scientific workflow
- AI-supported virtual observatories
- AI-supported community and collaboration for scientific application
- Knowledge-based extraction of scientific data and data models
- AI-based scientific interoperability
- Scientific semantic web services
- AI-supported scientific grid computing
- Query languages for science
- AI-based mapping and merging of scientific schemas
Chairs
Deborah L. McGuinness (dlm@ksl.stanford.edu) and Peter Fox (pfox@ucar.edu)
For More Information
For more information, see the supplementary symposium website.
Social Information Processing
The label “social media” has been attached to a quickly growing number of web sites, such as blogs, wikis, Flickr, and Del.icio.us, whose content is primarily user-driven. In the process of using social media sites, users are generating content and adding metadata in the form of (1) tags: content annotations using freely-chosen keywords; (2) ratings: passive or active evaluation of content; and (3) social networks: where users designate others as friends so as to track their activities. The connections between content, users and metadata create layers of rich interlinked data that is revolutionizing information processing by facilitating new methods of interacting with information. We call this "social information processing." Social information processing allows users to collaborate implicitly (or explicitly) by leveraging the opinions and knowledge of others to solve problems such as information management, discovery, and personalization. In addition to improving individual user experience, social information processing may lead to new solutions to collective problems, such as ensuring fairness, managing common resources, etc. Another exciting possibility is that wholly new kinds of knowledge will emerge from the distributed activities of many users.
The Social Information Processing symposium will bring together researchers from academia and industry who are interested in using Web technologies to facilitate collective knowledge sharing and collaborative problem solving. Below is a list of some of the topics to be explored.
- Information personalization and recommendation using social data
- Social networks, relations and trust
- Tagging and emergent semantics
- Communities, community management and user participation
- Collective intelligence, "wisdom of crowds" and beyond
- Methods for extracting knowledge from social data, including network analysis and probabilistic modeling techniques
The symposium agenda will consist of invited talks and presentations from select participants. The symposium will be structured to encourage active participation and discussion. We invite participants to help us define an emerging new field of social information processing. What are the issues and challenges associated with using social data? What questions can we ask and what methods can we use to answer them?
Organizing Committee
Kristina Lerman (USC Information Sciences Institute); David Gutelius (SRI International); Srujana Merugu (Yahoo Inc.); and Bernardo Huberman (HP Labs).
For More Information
For more information, see the supplementary symposium website.
Symbiotic Relationships between Semantic Web and Knowledge Engineering
The challenges that have confronted the developers of intelligent systems for the past three decades are compounded as the AI community now attempts to build systems that can be distributed on the Internet in nearly endless ways. There is a strong symbiotic relationship between intelligent systems and the semantic web.
This symposium will bring together researchers and application developers from the area of semantic web (SW) and knowledge engineering (KE). Its goal is to promote the exchange of knowledge and ideas, and to highlight possible future developments and challenges. The intention is to promote multidisciplinary research that will eventually be beneficial for both the SW and KE fields. The KE community brings three decades of extensive Knowledge Acquisition and Intelligent Systems development to the table; the SW community has much to learn from this. At that same time, the SW community has articulated a very bold research agenda and is beginning to develop some eye-catching applications as well as some important new technologies. Clearly, the SW community can offer techniques and ideas that are of considerable benefit to the KE community.
The following topics will be covered by the symposium:
- Collaborative ontology development
- Searching for relevant ontological materials
- Creating knowledge base systems from components
- Issues on the architecture of SWKE systems
- Choosing the appropriate representational formalism for your application
- WIKIs and the semantic web
One of the major insights of the knowledge engineering community is that knowledge based systems can be produced from components—namely from knowledge bases or instantiated ontologies on the one hand together with inference engines or problem solvers. These components are likely to be held at a variety of different sites on the web, so there are significant challenges associated with developing search techniques to find these components. Once found, these components will need to be refined to suit the current requirements, and it is likely that mappings will need to be made between the variables of the problems solver(s) and those of the knowledge bases. Once created, a further challenge is to produce web services from these systems thus making them available to the whole web community.
This symposium will feature invited keynote talks, contributed presentations, demonstrations, and extensive general discussions. We plan to include an industrial panel.
Contact
Derek Sleeman (Computing Science Department, Aberdeen) d.sleeman@abdn.ac.uk;
Organizing
Harith Alani (Southampton, UK), Jim Blythe (ISI, US), David Corsar (Aberdeen, UK), Mark Musen (Stanford, USA), Natasha Noy (Stanford, USA), Guus Schreiber (Amsterdam, NL), Derek Sleeman (Aberdeen, UK),York Sure (Karlsruhe, Germany), Edward Thomas (Aberdeen, UK)
For More Information
For more information, see the supplementary symposium website.
Using AI to Motivate Greater Participation in Computer Science
Seeking to stem the decline in undergraduate computer science enrollments over the past several years, educators have developed several exciting curricular changes to introduce AI to introductory audiences in computer science. This symposium showcases ways that topics in AI have been used to motivate greater student participation in computer science by highlighting fun, engaging, and intellectually challenging developments in CS curriculum involving AI. We examine AI-related programs and curriculum that can capture student interest early in their undergraduate years and/or be suitable for deployment at an even earlier stage in the education pipeline (such as high schools).
The Using AI to Motivate Greater Participation in Computer Sciencesymposium aims to bring together educators, researchers, and curriculum designers to discuss successful tactics and strategies in using AI-based educational resources to help increase the perceived intellectual excitement of CS and promote greater participation in the field.
Samples of topics that papers at the symposium will address include (but are not limited to) the following:
- AI-themed courses and assignments in introductory curriculum
- The use of robotics and other tangible media in CS curriculum
- Generating interest through game playing and machine learning
- Encouraging underrepresented students to enter computer science through AI
- The infusion of AI into other portions of the CS curriculum
- Using AI to interest students in computing during high school
In addition to paper presentations, the symposium will also feature three invited talks on AI and education. Vincent Conitzer (Duke University) will speak on computational economics; Phil Levis (Stanford University) will tak about teaching with sensor nodes; and Illah Nourbakhsh (Carnegie-Mellon University) will speak about TeRK: Telepresence Robot Kit.
The symposium will also include several discussion periods allowing participants to more informally discuss their experiences and particular institutional needs. Additionally, we will offer hands-on sessions where participants can directly engage with some of the educational projects and resources that have been developed by selected symposium contributors.
Organizing Committee
Mehran Sahami (chair), Stanford University; Marie desJardins, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Zachary Dodds, Harvey Mudd College; Jeffrey Forbes, Duke University; Timothy T. Huang, Middlebury College; Caitlin Kelleher, Carnegie Mellon University; Tom Lauwers, Carnegie Mellon University; Todd W. Neller, Gettysburg College; Illah R. Nourbakhsh, Carnegie Mellon University.
For More Information
For more information, see the supplementary symposium website.