[PlanetKR] Commonsense-2011: CFP plus announcements

[Ernest Davis]

(Apologies for double posting)

The 10th Symposium on Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning will 
be held as part of the AAAI Spring Symposium Series, 2011, March 21-23.

The CFP follows below. There are three changes sinec earlier postings:

First, the deadline for submission to Commonsense-2011 has been postponed 
until Thursday, October 28.

Second, the page limit of 6 pages, AAAI style, applies only to the text of 
the submission. The reference list can be included on an additional page.

Third, we are delighted to announce that Peter Norvig has agreed to give 
an invited talk. Dr. Norvig is Director of Research at Google and 
co-author, with Stuart Russell, of the leading AI textbook, "Artificial 
Intelligence: A Modern Approach."

Yours,
Ernie Davis, Esra Erdem, and Patrick Doherty, co-chairs

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                           Commonsense-2011
    10th Symposium on Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning
                   AAAI Spring Symposium Series, 2011

                            CALL FOR PAPERS

We invite submissions for presentation at Commonsense-2011, to be held as
part of the AAAI Spring Symposium Series, March 21-23, 2011.

Endowing computers with common sense is a major goal of artificial 
intelligence. One approach to this problem is to characterize commonsense 
reasoning using representations based on logic or other formal theories. 
The challenges to creating such formalizations include accumulating 
knowledge about the everyday world, representing this knowledge formally, 
integrating different representations, and developing reasoning methods 
for these representations.

A decade ago, commonsense reasoning was considered visionary and long 
term, but it is now considered highly relevant for current applications, 
such as robotic systems that can interact with humans in open 
environments, and information extraction systems that use commonsense 
knowledge together with corpus-based learning to interpret natural 
language texts.  Commonsense-2011 will have a new applied track, to 
discuss what has been done in these and other areas, how the logic-based 
commonsense reasoning contributes to this enterprise, and how these trends 
should influence our research agendas in the future.

At the same time,  we  continue to encourage solutions to difficult
challenge problems of commonsense  reasoning, such as those listed on the
Commonsense Problem page at
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/leora/commonsense/ .


Topics of interest at the symposium include, but are not limited to:

I.  Formal representations, reasoning, and algorithms, for specific
commonsense  domains including
- time, change, action, and causality
- geometric space
- commonsense physical reasoning
- biology at the commonsensical level, such as zoology, botany, human
     anatomy, and so on.
- mental states and propositional attitudes, such as knowledge,
      belief,  intention, desire, and emotions
- interactions among multiple agents and social relations

II.  Preformal analysis of these domains.

III. Applications of commonsense reasoning to specific tasks including
- cognitive robotics (action and perception)
- logic-based planning
-  natural language processing, machine reading, understanding
      narrative structure, textual entailment, and query answering
- web search and web-based services. Semantic Web.
- computer vision
- computer-aided instruction
- home automation
- assistive technologies
- biomedical informatics; integrating and mapping biomedical ontologies

IV. Relations among object-level theories, such as abstraction and
contextualization

V.  Methods of deductive and plausible reasoning that are applicable to
commonsense domains and problems, including
- answer set programming
- heuristic and approximate reasoning
- nonmonotonic reasoning
- belief revision
- probabilistic reasoning

VI.  Meta-theorems about commonsense theories and techniques such as
- metalogical theorems such as completeness theorems
- computational complexity

VII. Relation of formal theories of commonsense knowledge to alternative
approaches to implementing commonsense, such as:
- large commonsense knowledge bases
- statistical and corpus-based machine learning techniques.

VIII. Relation of other fields, such as philosophy, linguistics, cognitive 
psychology, game theory, and economics to formal theories of commonsense 
knowledge.


The symposium aims to bring together researchers who have studied the 
formalization of commonsense reasoning.  We aim for rigorous and concrete 
paper submissions. While mathematical logic is expected to be the primary 
lingua franca of the symposium, we also welcome papers using a rigorous 
but not logic-based representation of commonsense domains.

In addition to technical papers, we also welcome survey papers, papers 
comparing different approaches, and methodological papers; demos of 
practical systems that use commonsense reasoning; and proposals for panel 
or open discussions.

The symposium will include technical paper sessions with extended 
discussions, invited papers, panel and open discussions, and demos of 
applied systems, particularly robotic systems. Participants will be 
researchers who study the formalization of commonsense reasoning.

Invited Speakers: 
Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google.
One or two other speakers, TBA.

Submissions:
Papers may be submitted via EasyChair:
      http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=commonsense2011
The text of papers submitted should be at most 6 pages long, in AAAI format.
The reference list does not count toward this limit.

Questions about submissions may be emailed to the chairs.

The symposium web site is at http://www.commonsensereasoning.org

Important Dates:
    October 28, 2010:    Submissions due.
    November 25, 2010:   Acceptances
    January 21, 2011:    Deadline for submitting final paper
    March 21-23, 2011:   Symposium

Program Chairs:
Ernest Davis, New York University,  USA, davise at cs.nyu.edu
Patrick Doherty,  Linkoping University, Sweden,
   patrick.doherty at liu.se
Esra Erdem,  Sabanci University, Turkey,  esraerdem at sabanciuniv.edu