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Call for Papers

MRC 2008

Fifth International Workshop on Modelling and Reasoning in Context

In conjunction with
the Third International Conference on Human Centered
Processes (HCP-2008), at Delft University of Technology

Submission deadline: March 14, 2008

http://events.idi.ntnu.no/mrc2008

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Where traditional software applications "know" by design in which
situations they are to function, applications in pervasive computing and
ambient intelligence do not necessarily have this luxury. Due to the
very nature of the dynamism in the world with which these systems
interact, they have to dynamically adapt their behaviour in run time. To
do this, they must be able to somehow interpret the environment in which
they are situated. This ability is often referred to as being context
aware, or even situation aware. Being aware of the environment
facilitates the ability to adapt behaviour by being context sensitive.

Context sensitive processing plays a key role in many modern IT
applications, with context-awareness and context-based reasoning
essential not only for mobile and ubiquitous computing, but also for a
wide range of other areas such as collaborative software, web
engineering, personal digital assistants, information sharing, health
care workflow and patient control, adaptive games, and e-Learning solutions.

From an intelligent systems perspective, one of the challenges is to
integrate context with other types of knowledge as an additional major
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 many other aspects such as the knowledge states (of
both the application and user), emotions, etc. This representation and
reasoning problem present research challenges to which methodologies
derived amongst others from artificial intelligence, knowledge
management, human-computer interaction, and psychology can contribute
solutions.

One specific problem is to deal with uncertainty on different levels,
from interpretation of uncertain sensor input data up to identification
of contexts with fuzzy borders. Another issue is how to integrate
findings from the social sciences and psychology into the design of
context aware systems and how to build psychologically plausible
knowledge models.

A third aspect is the ability of the system to use explanations, both as
a part of its reasoning and as a means of communication with the user.

This workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners
exploring modelling and reasoning issues and approaches for context
sensitive systems, from a broad range of areas, to share their problems
and techniques across different research and application areas. The
workshop will examine mechanisms and techniques for structured storage
of contextual information, effective ways to retrieve it, and methods
for enabling integration of context and application knowledge.

The Modeling and Reasoning in Context workshop series, established in
2004, provides a forum for scientists and practitioners addressing the
above issues to exchange and discuss issues and ideas in a friendly,
cooperative environment.


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Agenda

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The workshop will last two full days and will be organised into three
main parts.

The first part will consist of short presentations of the accepted
papers, grouped into sessions. Each session will be followed by a
discussion period. The goal of these sessions is to introduce the work
of all the participants.

The second part will consist of three panel discussion sessions, each
dedicated to one specific issue. The suggested issues are "key issues
for modelling context", "key issues for reasoning in context" and one
"open topics", but are subject to change dependent on the interests of
the attendees and the nature of submissions. The goal of these panels is
to discuss the various approaches to each of these basic issues and to
identify the critical problems in need of attention and the most
promising research directions.

The workshop will be concluded with an open discussion summarising the
most important lessons learned.


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Topics of Interest

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The major goal of the workshop is to bring researchers, scientists from
both industry and academia, and representatives from different
communities together to study, understand, and explore issues of
development and application of IT systems utilising context.

Besides contributed papers, this workshop will offer organised and open
spaces for targeted discussions. We note that the three first MRC
meetings were all held in conjunction with conferences on artificial
intelligence and computer science. We continue the success from last
year, where the workshop was held at CONTEXT 2007, and holding MRC 2008
at HCP will enable us to further reach out to other relevant disciplines
and communities and facilitate collaboration between different fields.

Areas of interest includes, but are not limited to:

* Generic and specific context models
* Explicit representations
* Representation of and reasoning with uncertainty
* Retrieval of context and context information
* Context-based retrieval and reasoning
* Socio-technical issues
* Context awareness and context-sensitivity
* Context awareness in applications
* Evaluation of context-aware applications
* Explanation and context
* Mobile context
* Information aging
* Context focusing and context switching
* Context management


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Submissions

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Workshop submissions will be electronic, in PDF format only, using the
EasyChair submission system through the workshop website. Paper length
should not exceed 12 pages in the Springer LNCS format. Guidelines and
templates are available at the Springer website
(http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html).

Three members of the program committee will review each submission. A
review form will direct submitters to evaluate submissions for
appropriateness, technical strength, originality, presentation, and
overall evaluation, as well as recording the reviewer’s confidence in
the topic.

Papers will be published in accompanying proceedings. Authors of
accepted papers will be invited to submit extended versions for
inclusion in a book or a special journal issue on context aware systems.


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Important Dates

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* Submission of papers: March 14, 2008
* Notification: April 4, 2008
* Camera-ready copies: April 11, 2008
* MRC Workshop: June 9-10, 2008


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Organisation

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Chairs

Anders Kofod-Petersen
Department of Computer and Information Science
Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Jörg Cassens
Department of Computer and Information Science
Norwegian University of Science and Technology

David B. Leake
Computer Science Department
Indiana University, USA

Marielba Zacarias
Faculdade de Cièncias e Tecnologia
Algarve University, Portugal


Preliminary Program Committee

- Patrick Brézillon, University of Paris 6, France
- Henning Christiansen, Roskilde University, Denmark
- Lorcan Coyle, University College Dublin, Ireland
- Chiara Ghidini, FBK-irst, Italy
- Eyke Hüllermeier, University of Marburg, Germany
- Boicho Kokinov, New Bulgarian University, Bulgaria
- John Krogstie, Norwegian University of Science and Technology,
Norway
- Enric Plaza, Spanish Council for Scientific Research, Spain
- Thomas R. Roth-Berghofer, German Research Center for Artificial
Inteligence, Germany
- Hedda Schmidtke, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, Korea
- Stefan Schulz, The e-Spirit Company, Germany
- Sven Schwarz, German Research Center for Artificial Inteligence,
Germany
- Patrícia Tedesco, University of Pernambuco, Brazil
- Santtu Toivonen, Idean, Finland
- José Tribolet, Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal
- Roy Turner, University of Maine, USA
- Rebekah Wegener, Macquarie University, Australia


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Submission deadline: March 14, 2008

http://events.idi.ntnu.no/mrc2008

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