AAAI-08 Workshop on
What Went Wrong and Why: Lessons from AI Research and Applications

CALL FOR PAPERS
Submissions due: April 7th, 2008


Bugs, glitches, and failures shape research and development by
charting the boundaries of technology; they identify errors, reveal
assumptions, and expose design flaws. When a system works we focus on
its input/output behavior, but when a problem occurs, we examine the
mechanisms that generated behavior to account for the flaw and
hypothesize corrections. This process produces insight and forces
incremental refinement. In a sense, failures are the mother of
necessity, and therefore the grandmother of invention.

Unfortunately, bugs, glitches, and failures are rarely mentioned in
academic discourse. Their role in informing design and development is
essentially lost. The first What Went Wrong and Why workshop during
the 2006 AAAI spring symposium [1,2] started to address this gap by
inviting AI researchers and system developers to discuss their most
revealing bugs, and relate problems to lessons learned. Revised
versions of the articles and the invited talks will be published as a
special issue of the AI-Magazine in Summer 2008 [3].

The first workshop clarified that WWWW experiences can be studied at
three different levels of abstraction: the Strategic (AI research in
general), Tactical (research area) and Execution (project or
implementation) levels. An additional category turned out to be the
study of how, why and when failures occur in the first place.

The second workshop will continue our analysis of failures in
research. In addition to examining the links between failure and
insight, we would like to determine if there is a hidden structure
behind our tendency to make mistakes that can be utilized to provide
guidance in research.

As such, we invite researchers to submit papers (8 pages in AAAI
format) connecting problems they have encountered to lessons learned
on the tactical or execution level. We would also welcome papers on
the study of failures themselves. We encourage authors to elaborate on
what they believe was the source cause of the failure, how the problem
helped them arrive at a better solution, and to suggest a broader
categorization of failures and how to utilize them. Papers should be
submitted to submission@...

Important Dates
* Submissions Due: April 7, 2008
* Notifications: April 21, 2008
* Final Papers Due: May 5, 2008
* Workshop: July 13 or 14, 2008 (TBA) in Chicago at AAAI 2008


Chairs: Mehmet H. Göker and Daniel Shapiro
Mehmet H. Göker, PricewaterhouseCoopers, CAR, (mehmet.goker@...)
Daniel Shapiro, CSLI/Stanford University, & Applied Reactivity, Inc.
(dgs@...)

Program Committee

David Aha (Naval Research Laboratory)
Ralph Bergmann (Universität Trier, Lehrstuhl für Wirtschaftsinformatik II)
Carl Hewitt (MIT EECS - emeritus)
Jean-Gabriel Ganascia (University Pierre et Marie Curie, LIP6)
David Leake (Indiana University, Computer Science Department)
Doug Lenat (Cycorp Inc.)
Ramon Lopez de Mantaras (CSIC Artificial Intelligence Research Institute)
Edwina Rissland (University of Massachusetts Amherst, Department of
Computer Science)
Ted Senator (SAIC)

References:

[1] Shapiro, D., Göker, M. (eds.), 'What Went Wrong and Why: Lessons
From AI Research and Applications', Papers from the AAAI Spring
Symposium, March 27-29, 2006, Stanford, CA. Technical Report SS-06-08,
AAAI Press, Menlo Park, 2006.

[2] A. Abdecker, R. Alami, C Baral, T. Bickmore, E. Durfee, T. Fong,
M. Göker, N. Green, M. Liberman, C. Lebiere, J. Martin, G. Mentzas, D.
Musliner, N. Nicolov, I. Nourbakhsh, F. Salvetti, D. Shapiro, D.
Schreckenghost, A. Sheth, L. Stojanovic, V. SunSpiral, R. Wray, "AAAI
Spring Symposium Reports" , AI Magazine, VOl 27, Nr. 3, Fall 2006, pp.
107-112, American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI),
Menlo Park, 2006

[3] Shapiro, D. Göker, M. (eds.), 'Special Issue on What Went Wrong
and Why", AI Magazine, Vol. 29, Number 2, Summer 2008 (to appear)