======================================================================= 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 21, 2017 Submission deadline: June 05, 2017 Late and Breaking: June 19, 2017 Information: http://mrc.kriwi.de/ Submissions: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=mrc2017 ======================================================================= Join us in Melbourne ======================================================================= 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. ======================================================================= Workshop Objectives ======================================================================= 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 ======================================================================= Submissions ======================================================================= 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. ======================================================================= Important Dates ======================================================================= Papers due: June 05 Notification: June 18 Late & Breaking: June 19 Camera-ready: tbd MRC Workshop: August 21 ======================================================================= Websites ======================================================================= 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/ ======================================================================= Organisation ======================================================================= 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@kriwi.de Program Committee 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 Božidara Cvetković Jožef 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 ======================================================================= 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. ======================================================================== Agenda ======================================================================== 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.