MRC 2021: Twelfth International Workshop Modelling and Reasoning in Context Bari, Italy, August 30-September 3, 2021 |
Conference website | http://mrc.kriwi.de/2021/ |
Submission link | https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=mrc20210 |
Submission deadline | June 1, 2021 |
We are happy to announce that we will be organising another workshop in a long running series on Modelling and Reasoning in Context (MRC) with a special focus on Human-Centric and Contextual Systems at INTERACT 2021. It will be the 18th International Conference promoted by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and it's Technical Committee 13 on Human–Computer Interaction. INTERACT is biannual and is IFIP’s premier HCI Research venue. The conference is planned to take place August 30th to September 3rd, 2021, in Bari, a city on the Adriatic coast of Southern Italy.
The aim is to run the workshop and the conference in Bari. The evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic will be carefully monitored and those who cannot travel due to COVID-19 will be allowed to present and participate remotely.
Context
Context has been and remains a central topic in Human-Computer Interaction in general. Context is essential for usability of and user experience with deployed systems, as evidenced through a plethora of methods and processes.
As well as these broader concerns, research on context is vital for developments within specific areas of HCI.
Human-Centred Design: Context is crucial for human-centred approaches to (intelligent) systems development. Because of the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary nature of MRC, the workshop series is ideally suited to build bridges between HCI and AI; bringing a focus on humans into the foreground of intelligent systems design and putting AI to work in a variety of application areas through facilitating the exchange of knowledge and methods for human-centred approaches.
Explainable AI: With a renewed interest in explainable systems, context is increasingly important to identify user needs and system capabilities in providing explanations of system behaviour at runtime. Research on explainable AI (XAI) within the AI communities if often centred around the transparency and interpretability of the algorithms themselves, what is needed is a focus on contextualising explanations: what makes something work as an explanation, how can explanations help users to reach their goals, and how can the effectiveness and efficiency of explanations be measured.
Explanations as Process: Even with current research supporting the value, structure and function of explanation, it can been argued that XAI is typically defined through the "explanations" (the outcome) rather than "explaining" (the process). There is compelling evidence to look at it as dialogic interaction instead.
Ambient Intelligent Systems: AmI systems are widely characterised as systems and technologies that are, among other things, embedded, context aware, context sensitive, personalised, adaptive and anticipatory, as well as exhibiting some sort of social intelligence.
Affective Computing: If not before, then at least after the move from computing at the workplace to other, potentially more leisurely areas such as games and arts, a focus on hedonic aspects of using computer systems became necessary. Affective computing as a way of dealing with the emotions of users is heavily intertwined with contextual factors.
Safety-critical Systems: Understanding the context of use and possible failure modes is crucial for the design of safety-critical systems. This holds in particular if high-risk, high-stress events are not the norm, but the exception. With advances is autonomous cars, it is crucial to make use of the extensive body of research on human and contextual factors on safety, as evidenced e.g. in the fields of cockpit automation and air traffic control.
Ethical and Responsible System Development: Context is core to ethical and responsible approaches to systems design, 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.
Autonomous Agents and Human-Robot Interaction: 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, for example through social robots.
Responsible Personalisation: Context is central to enabling a more collaborative partnership between humans and machines. But personalisation brings risks to privacy and current methods embed and hide algorithmic bias and data biases. Making context explicit helps mitigating those effects.
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.
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.
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 INTERACT conference but which would still be suitable for a workshop.
Papers should be formatted according to Springer LNCS format. Authors should consult Springer’s author guidelines and use their proceedings templates, either for LaTeX or for MS Word, to prepare their papers. Springer’s proceedings LaTeX templates are also available in Overleaf.
- Long (full) papers are allowed eighteen (18) pages.
- Short papers, not exceeding eight (8) pages, may be submitted for short or poster presentation.
- Late and breaking papers which highlight current developments or characterise open challenges are allowed six (6) pages (please note the extended deadline for late papers).
Submikssions will be made through EasyChair.
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.
Committees
Chairs
- Jörg Cassens, Institute of Computer Science, University of Hildesheim, Germany
- Rebekah Wegener, Institute for English and American Studies, Paris Lodron University, Salzburg, Austria
- Anders Kofod-Petersen, Alexandra Institute, Copenhagen, Denmark
Program committee
- TBA
Contact
All questions about submissions should be emailed to mrc2021@kriwi.de.