======================================================================= Draft Call for Papers MRC 2010 Sixth International Workshop on Modelling and Reasoning in Context In conjunction with the 19th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-2010), Lisbon, Portugal Submission deadline: Friday 7 May 2010 http://events.idi.ntnu.no/mrc2010/ ======================================================================= Welcome to MRC 2010 ======================================================================= Ambient intelligent applications do not necessarily have the luxury afforded traditional software applications of "knowing" by design in which situations they are to function. Because of the ever-changing nature of the world with which these systems interact, they have to dynamically adapt their behaviour in run time. To do this, they must be able to interpret the environment in which they are situated and adapt their behaviour accordingly. Context sensitive processing plays a key role in many modern IT applications, with context-awareness and context-based reasoning essential not only for mobile and ubiquitous computing, but also for a wide range of other areas such as collaborative software, web engineering, personal knowledge management, information sharing, health care workflow and patient control, adaptive games, and e-Learning solutions. From an intelligent systems perspective, one of the challenges is to integrate context with other types of knowledge as an additional major source for reasoning, decision-making, and adaptation 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 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 social sciences 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. ======================================================================= Workshop Objectives ======================================================================= The Modeling and Reasoning in Context workshop series provides a forum to exchange and discuss issues and ideas in a friendly, cooperative environment. MRC aims to bring together researchers and scientists from different communities, both in industry and academia, to study, understand, and explore issues surrounding context. By exploring modeling and reasoning approaches for context-sensitive systems from a broad range of areas, the workshop will facilitate the sharing of problems, techniques, and solutions. We will cover theoretical approaches to 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. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to: * Generic and specific context models * Explicit representations of context * Representation of and reasoning with uncertainty * Retrieval of context and context information * Context-based retrieval and reasoning * Socio-technical issues * Approaches to the integration of findings from the social sciences * Context awareness and context-sensitivity * Context awareness in applications * Evaluation of context-aware applications * Explanation and context * Mobile context * Issues of time, dynamics and information ageing * Context focusing and context switching * Context management ======================================================================== Agenda ======================================================================== The workshop will last two full days and will be organised into three main parts. The first part will consist of short presentations of the accepted papers, grouped into sessions. Each session will be followed by a discussion period. The goal of these sessions is to introduce the work of all the participants. The second part will consist of three panel discussion sessions, each dedicated to one specific issue. The suggested issues are "perception", "context awareness", and "context sensitivity", 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 an open discussion summarising the most important lessons learned. ======================================================================= Submissions ======================================================================= The following formatting instructions are preliminary as we wait for approval of the format by the ECAI workshop chair. Workshop submissions are electronic, in PDF format only, using the EasyChair submission system. Paper submission is now open. The EasyChair MRC 2010 Web page is http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=mrc2010 Paper length should not exceed 12 pages in the Springer LNCS format. Guidelines and templates are available on the web at http://www.springer.de/comp/ncs/authors.html. Papers will be published in accompanying proceedings. Provided that the quantity and quality of submissions justifies a book or special journal issue on context aware systems, authors of accepted papers will be invited to submit extended versions for such a publication. All workshop participants must register both for this workshop and the main conference. At least one author of each accepted paper must attend the workshop. ======================================================================= Background to MRC ======================================================================= MRC was first held at the AI conference KI in 2004. Subsequent workshops were held at IJCAI, AAAI, CONTEXT (2007), and most recently at HCP (2008). 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. ======================================================================= Websites ======================================================================= More information about MRC and the paper submission system can be found on the workshop website at: http://events.idi.ntnu.no/mrc2010/ Join the mailing list for MRC by visiting: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/mrc-discuss/ The ECAI 2010 main conference website has more information about the location and the registration process as well as other workshops: http://ecai2010.appia.pt/ ======================================================================= Important Dates ======================================================================= Submission of papers: Friday, 7 May 2010 Reviews due: Friday, May 28, 2010 Notification: Monday, 7 June 2010 Camera-ready copies: Friday, 18 June 2010 CRC updates (LaTeX only, see note): Friday, 25 June 2010 MRC Workshop: Monday/Tuesday, 16-17 August 2010 Correctly formatted camera ready versions of manuscripts typeset using LaTeX can be updated up to one week after the camera ready version has been submitted if (and only if) they pass EasyChair's check and compile without errors when uploaded. You will have to submit a working version by the normal camera ready deadline, this helps you to check whether your LaTeX code compiles without errors. It does also give us a version to work with. Note that this applies to LaTeX users only since, out of experience, Word documents need much more fine tuning on our side, so we need the additional time. No exceptions will be made. ======================================================================= Organisation ======================================================================= Chairs Joerg Cassens Institute for Multimedia and Interactive Systems University of Luebeck, Germany Anders Kofod-Petersen SINTEF Information and Communication Technology Trondheim, Norway Marielba Silva de Zacarias Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering University of Algarve, Portugal Rebekah K. Wegener Centre for Language in Social Life Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia Program Committee To be announced.