Welcome to MRC 2023 @ECAI

Thank you for your interest in the Fourteenth International Workshop on Modelling and Representing Context at ECAI 2023, the 26th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence. ECAI is the premier European scientific gathering of AI researchers and practitioners in Europe and world wide. The event is currently being held in Kraków, Poland, from September 30 to October 05, 2023. The workshop took place on the first day of the conference, Saturday, 30th of September.

As a fundamental topic in Artificial Intelligence, context plays a critical role in enabling AI systems to effectively integrate and utilize information, reason and communicate, and adapt to different scenarios and domains. With contextual AI, we can enhance the transparency, explainability, and interpretability of AI systems, process diverse data types, and achieve a better understanding of context and meaning, enabling more natural and rich interactions between humans and AI systems.

As an interdisciplinary topic, contextual AI has clear relations to linguistics and semiotics, cognitive science and psychology, mathematics and philosophy, as well as sociology and anthropology. The MRC workshop series is highly interactive and offers a platform for researchers and practitioners from different disciplines to exchange ideas and discuss the latest advancements in contextual AI.

As context research is inherently transdisciplinary, we encourage a range of publication formats that may not be commonly seen in the AI community, including narrative reviews, ethnographic stories, and artistic creations, reflecting the diverse perspectives and approaches needed to fully understand the complexities of context. So, whether you're a researcher or artist, we invite you to share your unique insights and perspectives with the wider community through this workshop.

The Workshop

A list of topics for the workshop includes, but is not limited to:

  • Human-Centered AI: Context plays a critical role in enabling AI systems to interact with humans and other agents in a natural and appropriate manner.
  • Explainable AI: Contextualizing explanations is essential to understanding how and why AI systems work, evaluating their effectiveness and efficiency, and helping users achieve their goals.
  • Ethical and Responsible AI: Context is critical for addressing ethical considerations in AI, including issues of privacy, bias, and fairness.
  • Machine Learning and Knowledge Representation: Contextual information must often be inferred from data, thus requiring machine learning approaches for dynamic adaptation of context models and methods for reasoning with uncertainty.
  • Human-Computer Interaction: The incorporation of context is critical to enhance user experience in AI systems. How can we design AI systems that effectively leverage contextual information to improve the overall user experience?
  • Ambient Intelligent Systems: AmI systems are characterized by embedded, context-aware, context-sensitive, personalized, adaptive, anticipatory, and socially intelligent technologies.
  • Natural Language Processing: Context is vital for natural language processing, improving accuracy and effectiveness in understanding and generating natural language.
Submissions

MRC welcomes different kinds of papers, short position papers, research proposals, case studies, results from qualitative or quantitative experiments, theoretical contributions, surveys; early contributions from young researchers and student submissions as much as blue sky papers from senior members of the community.

We welcome various forms of publication, including those that are not commonly seen in the AI community, such as narrative reviews, ethnographic stories, and artistic creations. These submissions will be subjected to the same rigorous peer-review process as other forms of publication.

We plan to publish the papers in accompanying online proceedings. Authors of (a subset of the) accepted papers may 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.

Please check our submission instructions for details on submitting to MRC 2023. You find the relevant dates in the sidebar (or if you are reading it on a small screen or using a screen reader, below this text).

Attending

The ECAI conference website has more information about the location and the registration process as well as other workshops. Participants of MRC will have to register via the ECAI registration system. In particular, at least one author of any paper accepted for presentation must register for the MRC workshop at ECAI for the paper to be included in the proceedings.

Context is inherently an interdisciplinary topic that, besides AI and HCI, has clear relations to linguistics and semiotics, cognitive science and psychology, mathematics and philosophy as well as other areas such as sociology and anthropology. This is reflected by the workshop series as well, with MRC being an interdisciplinary and highly interactive workshop.

For updated information on upcoming events or general discussion, please join our (low volume) mailing list.

Diversity and Inclusion

The shift to fully virtual conferences and workshops at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic made it more accessible for people to attend our events. We received positive feedback from marginalised and disadvantaged groups, who were able to participate despite geographical, economic, and physical barriers. Moving forward, we aim to continue providing opportunities for virtual and hybrid participation to ensure inclusivity for all attendees, even if it means facing new challenges.

While we are actively pursuing options for different forms of participation, this can only be done within the framework set by the organisers of the main conference and by the infrastructure available on location.

Given the transdisciplinary nature of context research, we strive for diversity and inclusivity in our program committee and encourage submissions from a diverse range of researchers and practitioners, regardless of gender or other backgrounds.

The MRC organisers actively support having appropriate codes of conduct at all scientific events, with the ACM "Policy Against Harassment at ACM Activities" serving as a baseline. We are committed to creating a respectful, inclusive, and safe environment for all participants.

Previous MRC Workshops

MRC 2022 took place on July 24, 2022, as a workshop at IJCAI-ECAI 2022, the combined 31st International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence and 25th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The event was held in Vienna, Austria.

Please check out the list of accepted papers and workshop agenda.

MRC 2021 was held on August 19 & 20, 2021, as a workshop at IJCAI 2021, the 30th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The event was held in Montréal-themed virtual reality, 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The papers are published online by CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org, ISSN 1613-0073) as Volume 2995.

MRC 2020 was in August 2020 part of ECAI 2020, the 24th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Originally planned to be held in Santiago de Compostela, in the northwest corner of Spain, the conference and all its associated events became fully digital due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The papers are published online by CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org, ISSN 1613-0073) as Volume 2787.

MRC 2018 took place at FAIM, the Federated AI meeting in Stockholm. Within FAIM, several leading conferences in Artificial Intelligence were held together in July 2018, including IJCAI-ECAI (The combined International Joined Conference on Artificial Intelligence and European Conference on Artificial Intelligence), AAMAS (Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems), ICCBR (International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning), ICML (International Conference on Machine Learning), and SoCS (Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Search). The papers are published online by CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org, ISSN 1613-0073) as Volume 2134.

MRC 2017 was held 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 2016 was part of 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.

Last modified: Saturday, 2023-09-30 17:44 UTC.