======================================================================= Call for Papers: MRC 2018 The 10th International Workshop on Modelling and Reasoning in Context In conjunction with FAIM 2018 Federated Artificial Intelligence Meeting IJCAI-ECAI 2018 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and European Conference on Artificial Intelligence ICML 2018 International Conference on Machine Learning AAMAS 2018 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems Stockholm, Sweden July 9-19, 2018 Early bird deadline: Friday May 04, 2018 Regular deadline: Friday May 18, 2018 Information: http://mrc.kriwi.de/ Submissions: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=mrc2018 ======================================================================= Join us in Stockholm ======================================================================= 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. In multi-agent systems, contextual information might not be shared between the different actors explicitly or upfront. Therefore, it is vital for intelligent agents to identify the different context configurations and adapt their own behaviour accordingly. From a machine learning perspective, contextual information might have to be learned from data before a contextualised system is being implemented. In many cases, contextual configurations might change over time, and cannot fully be modelled in the design phase of a system, necessitating machine learning methods to be employed during runtime. With a renewed interest in explainable systems, context is also increasingly important to identify user needs and system capabilities in providing explanations of system behaviour at runtime. 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. 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. Although hosted at the most prestigious AI conference, we explicitly invite contributions from other fields of study in order to further trans- and interdisciplinary approaches. ======================================================================= 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 automatically learn about context from data and 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 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 big data * Context and smart data * Machine learning of contextual parameters * Generic and specific context models * Retrieval of context and context information * Explicit representations of context * Representation of and reasoning with uncertainty * Context and visualisation * Trans- and interdisciplinary issues of context * Socio-technical issues * Context in ethical AI * Evaluation of contextualised applications * Explanation and context * Information ageing * Context focusing and context switching * Context management * Context awareness and context sensitivity ======================================================================= Submissions ======================================================================= 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. MRC being a joint workshop for IJCAI-ECAI, ICML and AAMAS, we explicitly welcome papers which have been rejected at the main conferences but which would still be suitable for a workshop. Original papers should be prepared according to the IJCAI-ECAI formatting guidelines, and using the LaTeX Styles or Word template for IJCAI-ECAI 2018. Long papers are allowed eight (8) pages. Short papers, not exceeding four (4) pages, may be submitted for short presentation. For both paper types, two additional pages containing only references and acknowledgments are allowed. Papers formatted according to the author guidelines and styles for ICML 2018 or AAMAS 2018 may be submitted to MRC without reformatting to the IJCAI-ECAI style. Papers must be submitted electronically in PDF format only through the EasyChair pages for MRC 2018. Authorship does not need to be anonymous, but you are free to submit papers with identifying information removed. 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. 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 ======================================================================= Early bird papers due: Friday May 04, 2018 Regular papers due: Friday May 18, 2018 Early bird notification: Friday May 25, 2018 Regular notification: Friday June 15, 2018 Camera-ready: Friday June 29, 2018 MRC Workshop: half day July 13-15, exact date tbd ======================================================================= 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=mrc2018 The IJCAI 2018 main conference website has more information about the location and registration process: http://ijcai-18.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: mrc2018@kriwi.de Program Committee * Juan Augusto Middlesex University, United Kingdom * Tarek Richard Besold City, University of London, UK * Henning Christiansen Roskilde University, Denmark * Adrian Clear Northumbria 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. This is also reflected in the list of program committee members past and present. MRC has traditionally been held on major AI-conferences such as ECAI, IJCAI and AAAI or conferences focusing on context from different perspectives such as the International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context (CONTEXT). 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 autononomous 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 2018 will be held at the Federated AI Meeting (FAIM) in Stockholm, Sweden. It will be part of the joined workshop track for IJCAI-ECAI, ICML and AAMAS. The main conference website for IJCAI-ECAI has more information about the location and the registration process as well as other workshops. ======================================================================== Agenda ======================================================================== Besides contributed papers, this workshop will offer organised and open spaces for targeted discussions. A balanced mix of peer reviewed paper presentations, organised panel discussion sessions, industry input, and open discussion time should make the workshop a dynamic and attractive venue. The workshop will last one half 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 one panel discussion session, dedicated to one specific issue. The suggested issue is "Learning to recognise and change context in autonomous systems", but is subject to change dependent on the interests of the attendees and the nature of submissions. The goal of the panels is to discuss the various approaches to 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.