MRC 2018: Tenth International Workshop Modelling and Reasoning in Context Federated AI Meeting (FAIM 2018) Stockholm, Sweden, July 13-15, 2018

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.

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.

List of Topics

• 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

Submission Guidelines

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.

Committees

Organising Committee

• 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 
  City, University of London, UK
• Henning Christiansen 
  Roskilde University, Denmark
• Adrian Clear 
  Northumbria University, Newcastle University, UK
• Božidara Cvetković 
  Jožef Stefan Institute, Slovenia
• Martin Christof Kindsmüller 
  Brandenburg University of Applied Sciences, Germany
• Christian Kohlschein 
  RWTH Aachen University, Germany
• David Leake 
  Indiana University Bloomington, 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

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to the workshop chairs at mrc2018@kriwi.de