MRC 2017: Ninth International Workshop Modelling and Reasoning in Context Melbourne, Australia, August 19-25, 2017

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.

List of Topics

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

Submission Guidelines

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 5th of June, 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.

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.

Committees

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

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

Agenda