Welcome to MRC 2017

MRC 2017 was held as a workshop at IJCAI 2017, the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Melbourne, Australia. It was a full day workshop. For more information, please check the MRC 2017 schedule and paper download page.

MRC 2018 took place as a workshop at the Federated AI Meeting (FAIM) in Stockholm, Sweden, July 9-19 2018. Please check the workshop website for details.

Overview

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 this perspective, the integration of knowledge about different contexts into various reasoning paradigms poses challenges for the reasoning process and the underlying knowledge model. At the same time, the capabilities of autonomous systems pose new challenges for context models, context storage and retrieval, and contextualised reasoning. Therefore, there are numerous research questions at the borderline between contextualised computing and autonomous systems.

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.

Despite the value of diverse approaches to context, integrating findings from the humanities into the design of context-aware systems and building psychologically plausible knowledge models remains problematic. Furthermore, it is difficult to deal with uncertainty on different levels, from interpretation of uncertain sensor input data through to identification of contexts with fuzzy borders. Moreover, the ability of the system to use explanations, both as a part of its reasoning and as a means of communication with the user, requires further consideration.

This workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners exploring modelling and reasoning issues and approaches for contextualised systems, to share their problems, techniques and success stories across different research and application areas.

Background to MRC

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.

Advertising material for MRC
Previous MRC Workshops

MRC 2016 took place at The 22nd European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2016) in The Hague, The Netherlands. It was jointly held with two other Workshops, the 2nd AI-IoT (Artificial Intelligence and Internet of Things) and 1st MMDA (Multimodal Data Analytics). The proceedings for all three workshops and the overall schedule can be found on our combined workshop website.

For more information on MRC 2016, please check the following resources:

Earlier Instalments

Last modified: Sunday, 2020-08-30 10:02 UTC.