MRC 2020: Eleventh International Workshop Modelling and Reasoning in Context Held as a virtual workshop at the virtual ECAI 2020 Santiago de Compostela, Spain, August 29-September 5, 2020

ECAI 2020 is going digital, taking place August 29 to September 5.

While the registration procedure for ECAI is still to be published, it is already clear that there will be no registration fees for workshop participation. Since organizing and attending the workshop is now both significantly cheaper and easier, we have decided to keep paper submission open until further notice, for all types of papers. There will be a deadline announced in due time to allow for both the review process and the preparation of the proceedings, but going all digital, we expect that we can accept further submissions for quite a while. Updates follow when we know more about the final registration process for ECAI.

Context has been and remains a central topic in Artificial Intelligence in general. In terms of recent concerns within AI, context is crucial for understanding causation, for personalization and ethical AI and for the development of contextual AI. As well as these broader concerns, research on context is vital for developments within specific areas of AI:

Machine Learning and Knowledge Representation: In most cases, context can not be modelled a-priori but contextual information has to be inferred from data. In addition, contextual features might change over time, necessitating machine learning approaches for dynamic adaptation of context models and methods for reasoning with uncertainty.

Human-Centred AI: In Human-Computer Interaction, context is crucial for human-centred approaches to systems development. Because of the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary nature of MRC, the workshop series is ideally suited to build bridges between these two closely related sub-fields of computer science and to facilitate the exchange of knowledge and methods for human-centred approaches.

Ethical and Responsible AI: Context is core to ethical and responsible approaches to AI, as reasoning about contextual parameters is inherent in human interpretation of ethical questions. Furthermore, explicit models of context can help mitigate the effects of algorithmic and data bias. The strong connection between context and ethical and responsible AI makes MRC 2020 an ideal venue for discussing research in these areas.

Responsible Personalization: Context is central to enabling a more collaborative partnership between humans and machines. But personalization brings risks to privacy and current methods embed and hide algorithmic bias and data biases. Making context explicit helps mitigating those effects.

Explainable AI: 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.

Autonomous Agents and Robotics: The concept of context is itself contextual and always pertains to the acting agent. Additionally, context is an important issue in autonomous systems, in particular if they are to be integrated in socio-technical environments with human actors.

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. Given the recent interest in AI beyond the field, MRC can act as a bridge between these different communities and serve as a means for integrating models and findings from these different areas.

Agenda

If you attend virtually and have an accepted paper, we would like to ask you to prepare a video with your presentation upfront, which will be made available to all workshop participants. We will invite all of you to join an online community where we can discuss the individual presentations in different discussion threads asynchronously. We will also reserve time slots at the workshop for synchronous discussions.  community.

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. We explicitly welcome papers which have been rejected at the main ECAI conference but which would still be suitable for a workshop.

Regular papers (long or short) for MRC are due March 18, 2020 (notification of acceptance will be sent out in time for the early bird registration deadline for the main conferences). Late and breaking papers for MRC are due April 29, 2020 (notification for these papers will arrive after the end of early bird registration).

Original papers should be prepared according to the ECAI formatting guidelines, and using the LaTeX Styles or Word template for ECAI 2020.

Long papers are allowed eight (8) pages. Short papers, not exceeding four (4) pages, may be submitted for short or poster presentation. Late and breaking papers which highlight current developments or characterise open challenges are allowed four (4) pages. For all paper types, pages containing only references and acknowledgments are not counted towards that limit.

Papers must be submitted electronically in PDF format only through the EasyChair pages for MRC 2020. Authorship does not need to be anonymous, but we encourage you 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 attend the workshop to present the contribution. Please be advised that every workshop participant has to register for MRC through the main ECAI conference (workshop-only registrations are available).

List of Topics

MRC aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from different communities, both industry and academia, to study, understand, and explore issues surrounding context and to share problems, techniques and solutions across a broad range of areas.

The workshop covers different understandings of what context is, a variety of approaches to automatically learn about context from data, and different approaches to modelling context. MRC is also concerned with varying mechanisms and techniques for reasoning with context, storage of contextual information, effective ways to retrieve it, and methods for enabling integration of context and application knowledge.

MRC invites papers on all aspects of context, from theoretical approaches over modelling, reasoning, and learning to reports on applications. This year our focus is on personalization, autonomy and privacy in relation to context. We explicitly invite contributions from other fields of study in order to further trans- and interdisciplinary approaches and further the integration of discipline specific knowledge into AI research.

Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Human-Centred approaches to context
• Context and explainability
• Context in ethical and responsible AI
• Collaboration and integration of AI in the social context
• Context, personalization and privacy
• Context in conversational systems
• Context and autonomy
• Context and causation
• 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
• Trans- and interdisciplinary issues of context
• Socio-technical issues
• Evaluation of contextualised applications
• Explanation and context
• Information ageing
• Context management
• Context awareness and context sensitivity

Committees

Chairs

• Jörg Cassens University of Hildesheim, Hildesheim, Germany
• Rebekah Wegener Paris Lodron University, Salzburg, Austria and Audaxi – Discover a better way to learn. Sydney, Australia
• Anders Kofod-Petersen Alexandra Institute, Copenhagen, Denmark and Norwegian University of Science and TechnologyTrondheim, Norway

Program Committee

• Juan Carlos Augusto Middlesex University, UK
• Tobias Baur Augsburg University, Germany
• Tarek Richard Besold Alpha Health AI Lab, Catalonia, Spain
• Ioannis Chatzigiannakis Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
• Henning Christiansen Roskilde University, Denmark
• Sten Hanke FH Joanneum, Graz, Austria
• Martin Christof Kindsmüller Brandenburg University of Applied Sciences, Germany
• Christian Kohlschein Germany
• Olya Kudina TU Delft, The Netherlands
• David Leake Indiana University Bloomington, USA
• Amy Loutfi Örebro University, Sweden
• Ana Gabriela Maguitman Universidad Nacional del Sur, Argentina
• Tobias Meisen Bergische University Wuppertal, Germany
• Grzegorz J. Nalepa AGH University of Science and Technology, Kraków, Poland
• Stella Neumann RWTH Aachen University, Germany
• Jeannie Marie Paterson The University of Melbourne, Australia
• Michaela Reisinger Austrian Institute of Technology, Vienna, Austria
• Myrthe L. Tielman TU Delft, The Netherlands
• Harko Verhagen Stockholm University, Sweden
• M. Birna van Riemsdijk University of Twente, The Netherlands

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to mrc2020@kriwi.de.