** Apologies for multiple copies due to cross-posting **
** Please distribute to anyone who might be interested **

+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Call for Papers                                                    |
|                                                                    |
| 2nd Workshop on Knowledge Discovery and Similarity in Case Based   |
| Reasoning                                                          |
|                                                                    |
| In conjunction with the 9th European Conference on                 |
| Case Based Reasoning                                               |
|                                                                    |
| September 1-4, 2008, Trier, Germany                                |
|                                                                    |
| Workshop Website: http://www.iis.uni-hildesheim.de/kds08           |
| Conference Website: http://www.wi2.uni-trier.de/eccbr08/index.php  |
|                                                                    |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+

Workshop on Knowledge Discovery and Similarity in CBR

Case-based reasoning systems rely on a variety of techniques, such as
data mining, machine learning, and knowledge discovery in order to
build, maintain, and use their knowledge resources both for domain and
system processing. In addition, these techniques rely on metrics for
determining various kinds of similarity between aspects of domain and
system knowledge. In continuation of the Workshop on Knowledge Discovery
and Similarity at the ICCBR 2007, this workshop will bring together
researchers and practitioners to explore issues and approaches for
discovering, building, maintaining, and applying the essential
underlying knowledge to build and support case-based reasoning systems.
The workshop aims to provide an interdisciplinary forum for the exchange
of new ideas and the discussion of future research directions.

We are interested in submissions on the topics related to discovering,
building, maintaining, and applying CBR knowledge sources like textual,
structural, temporal or image cases. Furthermore we encourage
contributions in the context of multiple case base or agent based
applications. Topics include, but are not limited to:

* Applications of machine learning
* Knowledge discovery
* Update of knowledge
* Outdated knowledge
* Reuse of knowledge
* Automated extraction of knowledge sources (from the WWW, from
    semi-structured documents, etc.)
* Life cycles of experiences (cases)
* Adaptation of knowledge vocabulary
* Multilingual textual or mixed content types CBR approaches
* Flexible similarity measures
* Maintenance of corporate memories
* Usage of feedback
* Maintenance of adaptation knowledge
* Maintainable knowledge
* Maintenance tools
* Combination of cases
* Practical experiences
* Deployed application
* Application oriented approaches

--------------
   Submissions
--------------

We invite paper submissions including descriptions of works in progress,
research contributions, and position statements. Submissions should
attempt to address issues relating to knowledge discovery and similarity
in case-based reasoning. Workshop papers should be submitted in Springer
LNCS format, which is the format required for the final camera ready
copy, with a maximum of 10 pages. Authors' instructions along with LaTeX
and Word macro files are available on the web at:
http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html

Submissions should be made through the workshop conference management
system http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=kds08.

---------------------
   Deadlines And Dates
---------------------

* June 6, 2008: Deadline for workshop paper submission
* June 30, 2008: Notification of acceptance for workshop papers
* July 25, 2008: Final camera ready copies due
* September 1-4, 2008: Workshops held at ECCBR 2008 (in parallel)

---------------------
   Workshop Organizers
---------------------

* Kerstin Bach, University of Hildesheim, Germany
* Miltos Petridis, University of Greenwich, UK

--------------------
   Workshop Committee
--------------------

* Enrico Blanzieri, University of Trento, Italy
* Pádraig Cunningham, University College Dublin, Northern Ireland
* Béatrice Fuchs, Claude Bernard University of Lyon, France
* Deepak Khemani, IIT Madras, India
* David Leake, Indiana University, USA
* Mirjam Minor, University of Trier, Germany
* Meike Reichle, University of Hildesheim, Germany
* David Wilson, University of North Carolina, USA
* Qiang Yang, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong

For further information do not hesitate to contact the workshop
organizers Miltos Petridis (m.petridis@...) and Kerstin Bach
(bach@...)

--
Kerstin Bach, M.Sc.
Office: + 49 (5121) 883 754     University of Hildesheim
Room:  C34 (Spl) 	    Institute of Computer Science
www.uni-hildesheim.de/en/26079.htm  Intelligent Information Systems Lab

********************************************************************
     Due to requests in the light of the just passed EU proposal
       deadline, the submission deadline has been extended to
                    Wednesday, 16 April 2008
********************************************************************
--------------------------------------------------------------------

** Apologies if you receive multiple copies of this announcement **
      ** Please forward to anyone who might be interested **


                     CALL FOR PAPERS
              for the 3rd International and
                    ECAI-08 Workshop on

          EXPLANATION-AWARE COMPUTING (ExaCt 2008)

            21 - 22 July 2008, Patras (Greece)

              http://exact2008.workshop.hm

      **NEW Paper submission deadline: April 16, 2008**
              **Old deadline: April 10, 2008**

OBJECTIVES
The increasing complexity of current knowledge-based systems
requires improved explanation capabilities. During the height
of expert systems research many workshops (including at ECAI)
addressed the issue of explanation capabilities. However,
with the decrease in expert systems research, AI explanation
research dwindled as well. Consequently, the time is ripe for
renewed investigations of explanation in AI.

Other disciplines such as cognitive science, linguistics,
philosophy of science, psychology, and education have
investigated explanation as well. They consider varying
aspects, making it clear that there are many different views
of the nature of explanation and facets of explanation to
explore. Within the field of knowledge-based systems,
explanations have been considered as an important link
between humans and machines. There, their main purpose has
been to increase the confidence of the user in the system's
result, by providing evidence of how it was derived.
Additional AI research has focused on how computer systems
can themselves use explanations, for example to guide learning.

Both within AI systems and in interactive systems, the ability
to explain reasoning processes and results can have substantial
impact. Current interest in mixed-initiative systems provides a
new context in which explanation issues may play a crucial
role. When knowledge-based systems are partners in an
interactive socio-technical process, with incomplete and
changing problem descriptions, communication between human and
software systems is a central part. Explanations exchanged
between human agents and software agents may play an
important role in mixed-initiative problem solving.

This workshop series aims to draw on multiple perspectives on
explanation, to examine how explanation can be applied to
further the development of robust and dependable systems and
to illuminate system processes to increase user acceptance
and feeling of control.

If you would like to participate in discussions on this topic
or like to receive further information about this workshop you
might consider joining the Yahoo!-group
     http://groups.yahoo.com/group/explanation-research.
Information on explanation research is also collected at
     http://on-explanation.net.


GOALS AND AUDIENCE
The main goal of the workshop is to bring researchers, scientists
from both industry and academics, and representatives from
different communities and areas such as those mentioned above,
together to study, understand, and explore explanation in
IT-applications. In addition to presentations and discussions of
invited contributions and invited talks, this workshop will
offer organised and open spaces for targeted discussions and
creating an interdisciplinary community. Demonstration sessions
will provide the opportunity to showcase explanation-enabled/
-aware applications.


TOPICS OF INTEREST
Suggested topics for contributions (not restricted on IT views):
* Models for explanations
* Integrating application and explanation knowledge
* Explanation-awareness in applications
* Methodologies for developing explanation-aware systems
* Learning to explain
* Context-aware explanation vs. explanation-aware context
* Confidence and explanations
* Security, trust, and explanation
* Requirements and needs for explanations to support human understanding
* Explanation of complex, autonomous systems
* Co-operative explanation

SUBMISSIONS AND STYLE
Workshop submissions will be electronic, in pdf format only, using
the EasyChair submission system linked from the workshop website.

Papers must be written in English and not exceed 12 pages in the
Springer LNCS format. At least one author of each accepted paper must
register for the workshop and present the contribution in order to
be published in the workshop proceedings. The workshop chairs intend
to publish a Springer LNAI book of revised selected workshop papers
if the number of submissions and their quality permits.

Those wishing to participate providing a live system demonstration
should submit a proposal. A separate call for demos will be posted
for details at the workshop website.

Those wishing to participate without paper or demo submission should
submit a brief synopsis of their relevant work by April 10, 2008.

Attendance is limited to active participants only!


IMPORTANT DATES
Submission deadline:                     April 16, 2008
Notification of acceptance:              May 10, 2008
Camera-ready versions of papers:         May 26, 2008


WORKSHOP SCHEDULE
The schedule will be made available on the workshop website. See the
workshop website for an agenda overview und links to past workshops.


INVITED TALKS
Talks by two invited speakers, each representing a different community
addressing explanation issues, are planned.


CHAIRS
Thomas R. Roth-Berghofer, trb@...
    German Research Center for AI DFKI GmbH, Germany
Stefan Schulz, schulz at e-spirit.de
   e-Spirit AG, Dortmund, Germany
David B. Leake, leake at cs.indiana.edu
   Computer Science Department, Indiana University, USA


DEMO CHAIR
Daniel Bahls, bahls at dfki.uni-kl.de
    University of Kaiserslautern, Germany


PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
Agnar Aamodt, Norwegian Uni of Science and Technology (NTNU)
David W. Aha, Navy Center for Applied Research in AI, USA
Patrick Brézillon, LIP6, France
Jörg Cassens, NTNU
Francisco Javier Díez, UNED Madrid, Spain
Babak Esfandiari, Carleton University, Canada
Pierre Grenon, IFOMIS, University of Saarbrücken, Germany
Anders Kofod-Petersen, NTNU
Hector Muñoz-Avila, Lehigh University, USA
Paulo Pinheiro da Silva, University of Texas, El Paso, USA
Enric Plaza, IIIA-CSIC, Spain
Michael M. Richter, University of Kaiserslautern, Germany
Christophe Roche, University of Savoie, France
Sven Schwarz, DFKI, Germany
Gheorghe Tecuci, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA
Douglas Walton, University of Winnipeg, Canada


--
--------------------------------------------------------------------
              Dr. Thomas Roth-Berghofer - Senior Researcher
--------------------------------------------------------------------
    DFKI GmbH, Trippstadter Str. 122, 67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Tel.: +49 (0)631 20575-133       Room        Fax: +49 (0)631 20575-102
mailto:trb@...        3.17        http://www.dfki.de/~roth/
--------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear all,

Quite a while ago, (last October, that is) I asked around about
explanation-related
material for the KI-Journal special issue on explanation. As this issue is about
to be
completed next week I would like to ask again about articles, websites,
projects,
conferences and workshops, special interest groups, etc.

Please, take a moment of your time and post the infos here or mail them to me
directly:
trb@....

Cheers, trb

--- In explanation-research@yahoogroups.com, "Thomas Roth-Berghofer" <trb@...>
wrote:
>
> Dear all,
>
> Can you point out explanation-related resources on and off the web you
> deem a must in explanation research?
>
> As most of you know I maintain a website on explanation
> (http://on-explanation.net) where I started collecting material and
> links to useful information sources / people. And it so
> happens that one of the columns of the KI journal is dedicated to resources
wrt the
> respective special issue.
>
> Thanks and best regards,
>
> trb
>

Sorry for cross-posting!

Deadline Extension!

CALL FOR WORKSHOP PROPOSALS
9th European Conference on Case-Based Reasoning (ECCBR 2008)
Trier, Germany September 1st - 4th, 2008
http://2008.eccbr.org/

The organizing committee of the 9th European Conference on Case-Based
Reasoning (ECCBR 2008) invites proposals for the Workshop Program.
Workshops will be held, at least, on one day during the conference from
Sept. 1st to 4th, 2008.

General Information:
ECCBR 2008 workshops will provide an informal setting in which
participants willhave the opportunity to discuss specific technical
topics in an atmosphere that fosters the active cross-fertilization of
ideas. Workshops that exploreinteractions between sub-areas of CBR,
focus on unique or interdisciplinary applications of CBR, and
investigate newly evolving areas of CBR are particularly encouraged.
Workshops will last about 4 hours. The format and content of each
workshop will largely be determined by each workshop organizing
committee although "mini-conference" proposals are discouraged. To
stimulate interaction and a broadexchange of ideas, ample time should be
allocated in each workshop for generaldiscussions. As in past
conferences, a time slot of about 20 minutes will be provided for the
presentation of workshop summaries to all conference attendants during
the main conference. These summaries should be presented by (one of)
each workshop's organizers.

The workshop organizing committee will be responsible for:
1. Producing a Call for Papers/Participation for their workshop. It
     should clarify how paper submission, selection and presentation will
     be conducted by the organizing committee. Furthermore, the
     submission procedure, format, and dates should be included, and be
     in accordance with the dates listed below;
2. Review and select presentations and papers;
3. Edit their workshop's notes and send them to the workshop
     coordinator (contact details below) in accordance with the dates
     listed.

ECCBR 2008 will provide:
- A meeting place for the workshop.
- Printing of the workshop notes.

Important Dates for Workshops:
March 28, 2008 (new):  Deadline for workshop proposal submission
April 04 , 2008 (new): Notification of acceptance for workshop proposals
May 30, 2008:          Suggested deadline for workshop paper submission
June 22, 2008:         Notification of acceptance for workshop papers
July 18, 2008:         Final camera ready copies to be received by
                         workshop organizers
August 8, 2008:        Final camera ready copies for each workshop to be
                         received by workshop coordinator
September 1-4, 2008:   Workshops held at ECCBR 2008 (in parallel)

Submission of Workshop Proposals
Members from all areas of the CBR and related communities are invited to
submit workshop proposals for review. Workshop proposals should provide
sufficient information to evaluate the quality and importance of the
topic, the goals of the workshop, and the size of the interested
community. Proposals should identify one or more chairs and a program
committee. An example layout for a proposal can be found at the end of
this call.

Proposals should be 2-4 pages and contain the following information:
- Proposed title of the workshop.
- Contact information for the proposer, including the names, postal
    addresses, phone numbers, and email address.
- A brief technical description of the workshop, specifying the workshop
    goals and the technical issues that will be its focus.
- A brief discussion of why and to whom the workshop is of interest.
- A draft call for papers.
- A preliminary workshop agenda and schedule for the workshop. This
    should include a brief description of how the organizers intend to
    conduct the workshop (e.g., discussions, panel discussions, paper
    presentations, invited talks or other types of communication).
- If available, a list of interested participants or groups. If a
    similar workshop was held in the past, include information about
    received submissions and attendance.
- Intended means of advertising the workshop.
- Contact information, including the names, postal addresses, phone
    numbers, and email addresses (if available) of the proposed workshop
    organizing committee. This committee should consist of at least two
    people with experiences in the issues to be addressed. Ideally, these
    people should not be from the same institution.

Workshop proposals should be submitted via e-mail. Please forward an
electronic copy in PDF format as soon as possible but no later than
March 28, 2008 to the workshop coordinator: eccbr-ws2008@....
Other Workshop papers should be submitted in Springer LNCS format, which
is the format required for the final camera ready copy, with a maximum
of 10 pages. Authors' instructions along with LaTeX and Word macro files
are available on the web at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html.
Any special audio-visual requirements and special room requirements must
be arranged with the workshop coordinator (Martin Schaaf) by July 18, 2008.
ECCBR reserves the right to cancel any workshop if deadlines are missed,
if too few submissions are received, or if too few attendees register for
the workshop to support the costs of holding it. In special cases, the
ECCBR organizing committee may suggest the consolidation of workshops,
to prevent the need for cancellation. To cover costs, it may be
necessary to charge workshop participants a workshop fee in addition to
the normal ECCBR 2008 conference registration fee. Please note that all
workshop participants must register for the conference while workshops
must be open to all registered participants of ECCBR 2008.

Please send proposals and further inquiries to:

Martin Schaaf
Institute of Computer Science, Intelligent Information Systems
University of Hildesheim
Phone: +49 (5121) 883 - 757
FAX: +49 (5121) 883 - 757
Email: eccbr-ws2008@...

We apologize for multiple postings!

***************************************************************
               E X T E N D E D    D E A D L I N E :

                       March 17, 2008

  9th European Conference on Case-Based Reasoning ECCBR 2008
               1-4 September 2008, Trier (Germany)
                     http://2008.eccbr.org/

***************************************************************

Due to several requests, we hereby extend the deadline for the
submission of papers to ECCBR 2008 until March 17, 2008. If you
have already submitted a paper you can also upload an improved
version till the extended deadline.

Further we are happy to announce that ECCBR 2008 will issue
TRAVEL GRANTS for students. Information about the conditions for
applications will be shortly available on the ECCBR Web page.

With best regards,
    Ralph Bergmann & Klaus-Dieter Althoff (Programm Co-Chairs)

***************************************************************

                        CALL FOR PAPERS

ECCBR 2008 is the 9th European Conference on Case-Based Reasoning
(CBR)
following a series of successful European conferences and workshops.
This
four-day conference will be held at the University of Trier in
Germany. The
conference programme will include invited talks, oral and poster
presentations as well as workshops (see separate calls) on both
fundamental
and applied research in CBR. Additionally, the Industry Day will
focus on
industrial-strength technology and industrial applications of CBR. A
new
element of the ECCBR programme is the Computer Cooking Contest (CCC)
intended as a CBR system competition (see separate call)
demonstrating the
application of case retrieval, adaptation, and combination methods for
cooking recipes.

Submission Topics
The ECCBR 2008 Program Committee invites submissions of original
research
and application papers on all aspects of Case-Based Reasoning, such
as:
- Representation, modelling, acquisition, adaptation, maintenance and
   visualization of cases, similarity measures, ontologies, and other
knowledge
   relevant for CBR
- Methods and tools for retrieval, reuse, revision and retention in
CBR
- Theoretical foundations of CBR
- Human Computer Interaction: CBR user interfaces, conversational CBR,
   personalization user modelling and context, explanation
- Distributed CBR including agent architectures, service-oriented
architectures
   or peer-to-peer networks for or involving CBR
- Integration of CBR with other methods, such as: rule-based
reasoning,
   ontological reasoning, model-based reasoning, constraint
satisfaction
problem
   solving and optimisation, information retrieval, machine learning,
   natural language processing, etc.
- CBR systems for specific tasks such as: planning, scheduling,
design,
   workflow management and process enactment, diagnosis, decision
support,
classification
- Analogical reasoning, cognitive models, creative reasoning, and
   argumentation approaches based on or related to CBR
- Formal, empirical, and psychological evaluations of CBR models,
   components, and systems
- Methodologies and tools to support the development, operation, and
   maintenance of CBR applications
- Applications of CBR, for example in customer support, electronic
   commerce, pattern recognition, image processing, legal reasoning,
education,
   manufacturing, process control, signal processing, robotics, ambient
intelligence
- CBR-related areas such as: knowledge and experience management,
   corporate memories, decision support, information retrieval,
instance-based
   learning, software reuse and engineering redesign

In addition to those general aspects, ECCBR 2008 will put a
particular focus
on two special areas with relevance to CBR. We call for conference
submissions as well as workshops related to the following areas:

The Role of CBR in the Future Internet (Area Chair: Enric Plaza)
----------------------------------------------------------------
With the Web 2.0 and 3.0 and particularly with the emergence of social
networks and social software, there is a new opportunity for CBR to
support
the sharing and reuse of experience from/for communities of people.
Related to this area, the following topics are relevant:
- Acquisition, representation and processing of personal experience,
   opinions, and practical knowledge
- Social tagging and folksonomies as representations for CBR
- Natural language processing for case extraction from text
- Reuse of experience in Wikis, Blogs, RSS-feeds and all kinds of
multi-media formats
- Emergent semantics from usage of experience in a community of users
- Combination of experience from different users or sources (ensemble
effect,
   collaborative recommendation)
- CBR in the context of the semantic web and service-oriented
architectures

CBR in Healthcare (Area Co-Chairs: Isabelle Bichindaritz, Stefania
Montani)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
-----
The opportunities for applying CBR in healthcare are significantly
increasing during the past years and expand its application beyond
traditional medical diagnosis. The following topics are relevant:
- Evidence-based medicine and CBR
- Medical decision-support systems (partially) using CBR
- CBR in point-of-care diagnostics, personalized monitoring, and
prediction
of adverse events
- CBR and knowledge discovery from electronic health records
- Case-based processing of medical guidelines
- CBR in enabling technologies for those with physical disabilities or
chronic health problems
- Integration of CBR-based solutions in health care environments
- CBR in medical imaging
- Theoretical framework for CBR in medical reasoning
- Applications of CBR in bioinformatics

Submissions
-----------
Authors must submit a full paper with a maximum of 15 pages through
the
ECCBR web site by the paper submission deadline. The details of the
submission procedure will be published in time at the ECCBR web site.
All
accepted papers will appear in the conference proceedings published by
Springer Verlag in the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence
series.

Review Criteria
---------------
Submissions must be identified as either research or application
papers and
will be reviewed using criteria appropriate to their category. Review
criteria for research papers will include scientific significance,
originality, technical quality, and clarity. Review criteria for
application
papers will include practical or economic significance, potential to
lead to
more powerful technology, technical quality, and clarity. Further, as
we aim
at highlighting contributions to the special areas amongst the
submissions
on the above topics, the authors must indicate whether a submission
should
be considered to one of these areas.

Important Dates
---------------
March 17, 2008       Extended Paper submission deadline
April 14, 2008       Acceptance notification
May 12, 2008         Camera-ready copy due

Program Chairs
-----------------
Klaus-Dieter Althoff, University of Hildesheim
Ralph Bergmann, University of Trier

Local Chair
-----------
Mirjam Minor, University of Trier

Industry Day Chair
------------------
Ralph Traphöner, empolis

Workshop Chair
--------------
Martin Schaaf, University of Hildesheim

** Apologies if you receive multiple copies of this announcement **
           ** Please forward to anyone who might be interested**

========================================================================

                          Second 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

========================================================================

You can submit you contribution for MRC 2008 now at the EasyChair
conference system: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=mrc2008

========================================================================

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.


========================================================================

                               Agenda

========================================================================

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.


========================================================================

                         Topics of Interest

========================================================================

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.

Jdifferent 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


========================================================================

                          Submissions

========================================================================

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.


========================================================================

                        Important Dates

========================================================================

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


========================================================================

                          Organisation

========================================================================

Chairs

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

   Joerg 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 Ciencias e Tecnologia
   Algarve University, Portugal


Program Committee

   - Patrick Brezillon, University of Paris 6, France
   - Henning Christiansen, Roskilde University, Denmark
   - Lorcan Coyle, University College Dublin, Ireland
   - Chiara Ghidini, FBK-irst, Italy
   - Eyke Huellermeier, University of Marburg, Germany
   - Boicho Kokinov, New Bulgarian University, Bulgaria
   - John Krogstie, Norwegian University of Science and Technology,
     Norway
   - Ana G. Maguitman, Universidad Nacional del Sur, Bahia Blanca,
     Argentina
   - 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
   - Patricia Tedesco, University of Pernambuco, Brazil
   - Santtu Toivonen, Idean, Finland
   - Jose Tribolet, Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal
   - Roy Turner, University of Maine, USA
   - Rebekah Wegener, Macquarie University, Australia


========================================================================

                    Submission deadline: March 14, 2008

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

             http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=mrc2008

========================================================================

Dear all,

For those of you who like to print out and stick flyers to your office door we
have made an
ExaCt 2008 flyer of the call for papers. You will find it on the workshop
homepage, i.e., here:
http://exact2008.workshop.hm/images/flyer-cfp-exact2008.pdf.

Cheers, trb

Apologize For Crossposting!!!

CALL FOR WORKSHOP PROPOSALS
9th European Conference on Case-Based Reasoning (ECCBR 2008)
Trier, Germany September 1st - 4th, 2008
http://2008.eccbr.org/

The organizing committee of the 9th European Conference on Case-Based
Reasoning (ECCBR 2008) invites proposals for the Workshop Program.
Workshops will be held, at least, on one day during the conference from
Sept. 1st to 4th, 2008.
General Information:
ECCBR 2008 workshops will provide an informal setting in which
participants will have the opportunity to discuss specific technical topics
in an atmosphere that fosters the active cross-fertilization of ideas.
Workshops that explore interactions between sub-areas of CBR,
focus on unique or interdisciplinary applications of CBR, and
investigate newly evolving areas of CBR are particularly encouraged.
Workshops will last about 4 hours. The format and content of each
workshop will largely be determined by each workshop organizing committee
although "mini-conference" proposals are discouraged. To stimulate
interaction and a broad exchange of ideas, ample time should be allocated
in each workshop for general discussions.
As in past conferences, a time slot of about 20 minutes will be provided
for the presentation of workshop summaries to all conference attendants
during the main conference. These summaries should be presented by (one
of) each workshop's organizers.

The workshop organizing committee will be responsible for:
     1. Producing a Call for Papers/Participation for their workshop. It
should clarify how paper submission, selection and presentation will be
         conducted by the organizing committee. Furthermore, the
submission procedure, format, and dates should be included, and be in
accordance
         with the dates listed below;
     2. Review and select presentations and papers;
     3. Edit their workshop's notes and send them to the workshop
coordinator (contact details below) in accordance with the dates listed.

ECCBR 2008 will provide:
     -  A meeting place for the workshop.
     -  Printing of the workshop notes.


Important Dates for Workshops:
March 7, 2008:                Deadline for workshop proposal submission
March 16, 2008:              Notification of acceptance for workshop
proposals
May 30, 2008:                 Suggested deadline for workshop paper
submission
June 22, 2008:                 Notification of acceptance for workshop
papers
July 18, 2008:                  Final camera ready copies to be received
by workshop organizers
August 8, 2008:               Final camera ready copies for each
workshop to be received by workshop coordinator
September 1-4, 2008:     Workshops held at ECCBR 2008 (in parallel)


Submission of Workshop Proposals
Members from all areas of the CBR and related communities are invited to
submit workshop proposals for review. Workshop proposals
should provide sufficient information to evaluate the quality and
importance of the topic, the goals of the workshop, and the size
of the interested community.
Proposals should identify one or more chairs and a program committee. An
example layout for a proposal can be found at the end of this call.
Proposals should be 2-4 pages and contain the following information:
     - Proposed title of the workshop.
     - Contact information for the proposer, including the names, postal
addresses, phone numbers, and email address.
     - A brief technical description of the workshop, specifying the
workshop goals and the technical issues that will be its focus.
     - A brief discussion of why and to whom the workshop is of interest.
     - A draft call for papers.
     - A preliminary workshop agenda and schedule for the workshop. This
should include a brief description of how the organizers intend
        to conduct the workshop (e.g., discussions, panel discussions,
paper presentations, invited talks or other types of communication).
     - If available, a list of interested participants or groups. If a
similar workshop was held in the past, include information about
        received submissions and attendance.
     - Intended means of advertising the workshop.
     - Contact information, including the names, postal addresses, phone
numbers, and email addresses (if available) of the proposed workshop
        organizing committee. This committee should consist of at least
two people with experiences in the issues to be addressed. Ideally,
        these people should not be from the same institution.

Workshop proposals should be submitted via e-mail. Please forward an
electronic copy in PDF format as soon as possible but no later than March 7,
2008 to the workshop coordinator: eccbr-ws2008@....
Proposals will be reviewed by the organizing committee and prospective
organizers will be notified of their decision no later than March 16, 2008.
Other Workshop papers should be submitted in Springer LNCS format, which
is the format required for the final camera ready copy, with a maximum
of 10 pages.
Authors' instructions along with LaTeX and Word macro files are
available on the web at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html.
Any special
audio-visual requirements and special room requirements must be arranged
with the workshop coordinator (Martin Schaaf) by July 18, 2008. ECCBR
reserves
the right to cancel any workshop if deadlines are missed, if too few
submissions are received, or if too few attendees register for the
workshop to support
the costs of holding it. In special cases, the ECCBR organizing
committee may suggest the consolidation of workshops, to prevent the
need for cancellation.
To cover costs, it may be necessary to charge workshop participants a
workshop fee in addition to the normal ECCBR 2008 conference
registration fee.
Please note that all workshop participants must register for the
conference while workshops must be open to all registered participants
of ECCBR 2008.
Please send proposals and further inquiries to:

Martin Schaaf
Institute of Computer Science, Intelligent Information Systems
University of Hildesheim
Phone: +49 (5121) 883 - 757
FAX: +49 (5121) 883 - 757
Email: eccbr-ws2008@...

--------------------------------------------------------------------

** Apologies if you receive multiple copies of this announcement **
      ** Please forward to anyone who might be interested **


                     CALL FOR PAPERS
              for the 3rd International and
                    ECAI-08 Workshop on

          EXPLANATION-AWARE COMPUTING (ExaCt 2008)

            21 - 22 July 2008, Patras (Greece)

              http://exact2008.workshop.hm

       **Paper submission deadline: April 10, 2008**


OBJECTIVES
The increasing complexity of current knowledge-based systems
requires improved explanation capabilities. During the height
of expert systems research many workshops (including at ECAI)
addressed the issue of explanation capabilities. However,
with the decrease in expert systems research, AI explanation
research dwindled as well. Consequently, the time is ripe for
renewed investigations of explanation in AI.

Other disciplines such as cognitive science, linguistics,
philosophy of science, psychology, and education have
investigated explanation as well. They consider varying
aspects, making it clear that there are many different views
of the nature of explanation and facets of explanation to
explore. Within the field of knowledge-based systems,
explanations have been considered as an important link
between humans and machines. There, their main purpose has
been to increase the confidence of the user in the system's
result, by providing evidence of how it was derived.
Additional AI research has focused on how computer systems
can themselves use explanations, for example to guide learning.

Both within AI systems and in interactive systems, the ability
to explain reasoning processes and results can have substantial
impact. Current interest in mixed-initiative systems provides a
new context in which explanation issues may play a crucial
role. When knowledge-based systems are partners in an
interactive socio-technical process, with incomplete and
changing problem descriptions, communication between human and
software systems is a central part. Explanations exchanged
between human agents and software agents may play an
important role in mixed-initiative problem solving.

This workshop series aims to draw on multiple perspectives on
explanation, to examine how explanation can be applied to
further the development of robust and dependable systems and
to illuminate system processes to increase user acceptance
and feeling of control.

If you would like to participate in discussions on this topic
or like to receive further information about this workshop you
might consider joining the Yahoo!-group
     http://groups.yahoo.com/group/explanation-research.
Information on explanation research is also collected at
     http://on-explanation.net.


GOALS AND AUDIENCE
The main goal of the workshop is to bring researchers, scientists
from both industry and academics, and representatives from
different communities and areas such as those mentioned above,
together to study, understand, and explore explanation in
IT-applications. In addition to presentations and discussions of
invited contributions and invited talks, this workshop will
offer organised and open spaces for targeted discussions and
creating an interdisciplinary community. Demonstration sessions
will provide the opportunity to showcase explanation-enabled/
-aware applications.


TOPICS OF INTEREST
Suggested topics for contributions (not restricted on IT views):
* Models for explanations
* Integrating application and explanation knowledge
* Explanation-awareness in applications
* Methodologies for developing explanation-aware systems
* Learning to explain
* Context-aware explanation vs. explanation-aware context
* Confidence and explanations
* Security, trust, and explanation
* Requirements and needs for explanations to support human understanding
* Explanation of complex, autonomous systems
* Co-operative explanation

SUBMISSIONS AND STYLE
Workshop submissions will be electronic, in pdf format only, using
the EasyChair submission system linked from the workshop website.

Papers must be written in English and not exceed 12 pages in the
Springer LNCS format. At least one author of each accepted paper must
register for the workshop and present the contribution in order to
be published in the workshop proceedings. The workshop chairs intend
to publish a Springer LNAI book of revised selected workshop papers
if the number of submissions and their quality permits.

Those wishing to participate providing a live system demonstration
should submit a proposal. A separate call for demos will be posted
for details at the workshop website.

Those wishing to participate without paper or demo submission should
submit a brief synopsis of their relevant work by April 10, 2008.

Attendance is limited to active participants only!


IMPORTANT DATES
Submission deadline:                     April 10, 2008
Notification of acceptance:              May 10, 2008
Camera-ready versions of papers:         May 26, 2008


WORKSHOP SCHEDULE
The schedule will be made available on the workshop website. See the
workshop website for an agenda overview und links to past workshops.


INVITED TALKS
Talks by two invited speakers, each representing a different community
addressing explanation issues, are planned.


CHAIRS
Thomas R. Roth-Berghofer, trb@...
    German Research Center for AI DFKI GmbH, Germany
Stefan Schulz, schulz at e-spirit.de
   e-Spirit AG, Dortmund, Germany
David B. Leake, leake at cs.indiana.edu
   Computer Science Department, Indiana University, USA


DEMO CHAIR
Daniel Bahls, bahls at dfki.uni-kl.de
    University of Kaiserslautern, Germany


PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
Agnar Aamodt, Norwegian Uni of Science and Technology (NTNU)
David W. Aha, Navy Center for Applied Research in AI, USA
Patrick Brézillon, LIP6, France
Jörg Cassens, NTNU
Francisco Javier Díez, UNED Madrid, Spain
Babak Esfandiari, Carleton University, Canada
Pierre Grenon, IFOMIS, University of Saarbrücken, Germany
Anders Kofod-Petersen, NTNU
Hector Muñoz-Avila, Lehigh University, USA
Paulo Pinheiro da Silva, University of Texas, El Paso, USA
Enric Plaza, IIIA-CSIC, Spain
Michael M. Richter, University of Kaiserslautern, Germany
Christophe Roche, University of Savoie, France
Sven Schwarz, DFKI, Germany
Gheorghe Tecuci, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA
Douglas Walton, University of Winnipeg, Canada


--
---------------------------------------------------------------------
-
              Dr. Thomas Roth-Berghofer - Senior Researcher
---------------------------------------------------------------------
-
    DFKI GmbH, Trippstadter Str. 122, 67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany
---------------------------------------------------------------------
-
Tel.: +49 (0)631 20575-133       Room        Fax: +49 (0)631 20575-102
mailto:trb@...        3.17        http://www.dfki.de/~roth/
---------------------------------------------------------------------
-

CALL FOR PARTCIPATION

                   1st Computer Cooking Contest
                        CCC 2008 @ ECCBR 2008

                   September 1, 2008, Trier (Germany)
                     www.computercookingcontest.net

Who says that only human beings are able to cook delicious meals? We
aim to teach our computers the haute cuisine and therefore we need
your creativity and ideas! Come to the European Conference on Case-
Based Reasoning
(ECCBR'08) in Trier and participate in the Computer Cooking Contest
(CCC)!
Write your own software application for the live competition. Show
that your program is more creative than the average kitchen user. Let
your computer's recipe creations be evaluated by a professional cook
and an international jury of scientists!

Rationales
----------

Once upon a time in the past, when we still were students, we
wondered whether there could be a software which would relieve us
from the task of matching the content of our fridge to a dish. Given
a restricted set of ingredients, the task is to cook something, where
something does taste good.
Ideally, something moreish.

Once upon a time in the present, when we were not students anymore,
we wondered whether there could be a software which would relieve us
from the task of explaining what we are doing, e.g. case-based
reasoning, to a broader audience. Given the technological state of
the art, the task is to demonstrate something, where something solves
a problem. Ideally, something moreish.

Glue the two together and you get it: The Computer Cooking Contest!

Moreish means: it tastes like more. This is the rationale behind the
contest, too. It will attract new people, e.g. students, to deal with
AI technologies such as case-based reasoning, semantic technologies,
search and information extraction. Also cooking is fun, in particular
when using a computer for the design of the menu. Furthermore, the
contest will attract the public. Since everybody knows something
about cooking, people will be curious what a computer might do about
it. Furthermore, we all have noticed the increasing interest of the
public audience in cooking, stipulated by the growing insight that
good food is mandatory for health.
Hence, the Computer Cooking Contest offers the opportunity to explain
the benefits of our technologies intelligible to all.

Competition
-----------

The Computer Cooking Contest is an open competition. Any individual,
student, research group and professional is invited to submit
software that creates a recipe for a single dish or even a three
course menu. The input will be a database of basic recipes from which
appropriate recipes must be selected, modified, or even combined. The
queries to the system consist of a number of wanted ingredients and
other requirements for the dish or menu.

The overall competition is structured into a main compulsory task and
two additional challenge tasks.

The Compulsory Task involves answering queries that require the
selection and modification of recipe for a single dish. A sample
query could be to "cook a main dish with turkey, pistachio, and
pasta". An appropriate answer would be to select a recipe for
pistachio chicken and to replace chicken by turkey.

The Negation Challenge is to answer queries that involve avoiding
certain ingredients, which you donâ??t like or which are not
available.
This can be done, for example, by selecting an appropriate recipe or
by replacing or removing some ingredients from a recipe. A sample
query could
be: "I want to have a salad with tomato but I hate garlic and
cucumber". An appropriate answer would be to select an italian tomato
salad and to omit the garlic.

The Menu Challenge requires the composition of a three-course menu
based on the available recipes. For example we might ask: "I do have
a filet of beef, carrots, celery, field garlic and cucumber. Potatoes
are available, too. For the dessert, we have oranges and mint. A soup
would be preferable for the starter." In this case, a Caldo Verde as
a starter, filet steak with baked potatoes, and an orange ice cream
with mint flavour would be a good solution.

Please note that for most of the queries there is not a single
correct or best answer. Usually many different solutions are
possible, depending on your creativity or the creativity of your
software. We also do not imply any restriction on the technology to
be used. Case-based reasoning is one candidate technology, but other
approaches are certainly suitable as well.
The only restriction we impose is that the given database of recipes
must be used as a starting point. We will not provide a formal query
language.
Queries will be described in free text but the software to be
developed can use any kind of user interaction (structural/ formula-
based, conversation, text-based).

Evaluation Criteria
-------------------

All systems will be evaluated with respect to scientific/technical
quality (technical originality of the approach, usability of the
software, maintainability, and scalability) and with respect to the
culinary quality of the created recipes (appropriate to the query,
tasty, cookable, creative). The evaluation will involve a peer-review
of the papers describing the system and an assessment by an
international jury of experts including a professional cook. We also
intend to give the ECCBR attendees an additional vote.

Competition Procedure and Timeline
----------------------------------

Now: Statement of Interest
Everybody interested in participating at the CCC should visit
www.computercookingcontest.net and subscribe to the mailing list
through which all relevant information will be communicated.

September 1, 2007:
Publication of Contest Conditions and Material A detailed description
of the competition rules, an initial database of recipes in XML
format, and a first set of queries has been published. With this
information, the contest participants can start with the development
of their system.

June 2, 2008:
Qualifying Examination
To this deadline, the contest participants must submit:
- an up-to-10-page technical description of the system,
- the URL of the running system (web interface) or the executable
software (must run on Windows)
- the system results for the first set of queries.
In a peer review process, the submitted papers and the systems will
be evaluated and the best contestants are selected for participation
in the final. The finalists may of course continue to improve their
systems for the final.

August 1, 2008:
Publication of the Contest Recipes An extended database including
additional recipes will be published four weeks prior to the contest.
The extended database must be used for all queries in the
competitions' final. The contest participants must update their
system to include the new recipes.

September 1, 2008:
Computer Cooking Contest The finalist systems are demonstrated at the
Computer Cooking Contest at ECCBR. At least one person per finalist
must register for ECCBR, demonstrate the system and give a technical
presentation at the CCC workshop. The technical descriptions of the
finalist systems will be published in the ECCBR workshop proceedings.
The systems are evaluated according to the initial set of queries and
a confidential set of new queries. The new queries are different, but
similar in type and difficulty to the first set. The evaluation will
be performed by an international jury.
Separate prices will be awarded for the compulsory tasks and for the
two challenges.

Contact: Please do not hesitate to contact ccc-org2008 'at' uni-
trier.de in case you have any questions.

CALL FOR PAPERS

9th European Conference on Case-Based Reasoning ECCBR 2008
          1-4 September 2008, Trier (Germany)

                  http://2008.eccbr.org/


ECCBR 2008 is the 9th European Conference on Case-Based Reasoning
(CBR) following a series of successful European conferences and
workshops. This four-day conference will be held at the University of
Trier in Germany. The conference programme will include invited
talks, oral and poster presentations as well as workshops (see
separate calls) on both fundamental and applied research in CBR.
Additionally, the Industry Day will focus on industrial-strength
technology and industrial applications of CBR. A new element of the
ECCBR programme is the Computer Cooking Contest (CCC) intended as a
CBR system competition (see separate call) demonstrating the
application of case retrieval, adaptation, and combination methods
for cooking recipes.

Submission Topics
The ECCBR 2008 Program Committee invites submissions of original
research and application papers on all aspects of Case-Based
Reasoning, such as:
- Representation, modelling, acquisition, adaptation, maintenance and
   visualization of cases, similarity measures, ontologies, and other
knowledge
   relevant for CBR
- Methods and tools for retrieval, reuse, revision and retention in
CBR
- Theoretical foundations of CBR
- Human Computer Interaction: CBR user interfaces, conversational CBR,
   personalization user modelling and context, explanation
- Distributed CBR including agent architectures, service-oriented
architectures
   or peer-to-peer networks for or involving CBR
- Integration of CBR with other methods, such as: rule-based
reasoning,
   ontological reasoning, model-based reasoning, constraint
satisfaction problem
   solving and optimisation, information retrieval, machine learning,
   natural language processing, etc.
- CBR systems for specific tasks such as: planning, scheduling,
design,
   workflow management and process enactment, diagnosis, decision
support, classification
- Analogical reasoning, cognitive models, creative reasoning, and
   argumentation approaches based on or related to CBR
- Formal, empirical, and psychological evaluations of CBR models,
   components, and systems
- Methodologies and tools to support the development, operation, and
   maintenance of CBR applications
- Applications of CBR, for example in customer support, electronic
   commerce, pattern recognition, image processing, legal reasoning,
education,
   manufacturing, process control, signal processing, robotics,
ambient intelligence
- CBR-related areas such as: knowledge and experience management,
   corporate memories, decision support, information retrieval,
instance-based
   learning, software reuse and engineering redesign

In addition to those general aspects, ECCBR 2008 will put a
particular focus on two special areas with relevance to CBR. We call
for conference submissions as well as workshops related to the
following areas:

The Role of CBR in the Future Internet (Area Chair: Enric Plaza)
----------------------------------------------------------------
With the Web 2.0 and 3.0 and particularly with the emergence of
social networks and social software, there is a new opportunity for
CBR to support the sharing and reuse of experience from/for
communities of people.
Related to this area, the following topics are relevant:
- Acquisition, representation and processing of personal experience,
   opinions, and practical knowledge
- Social tagging and folksonomies as representations for CBR
- Natural language processing for case extraction from text
- Reuse of experience in Wikis, Blogs, RSS-feeds and all kinds of
multi-media formats
- Emergent semantics from usage of experience in a community of users
- Combination of experience from different users or sources (ensemble
effect,
   collaborative recommendation)
- CBR in the context of the semantic web and service-oriented
architectures

CBR in Healthcare (Area Co-Chairs: Isabelle Bichindaritz, Stefania
Montani)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
-----
The opportunities for applying CBR in healthcare are significantly
increasing during the past years and expand its application beyond
traditional medical diagnosis. The following topics are relevant:
- Evidence-based medicine and CBR
- Medical decision-support systems (partially) using CBR
- CBR in point-of-care diagnostics, personalized monitoring, and
prediction of adverse events
- CBR and knowledge discovery from electronic health records
- Case-based processing of medical guidelines
- CBR in enabling technologies for those with physical disabilities
or chronic health problems
- Integration of CBR-based solutions in health care environments
- CBR in medical imaging
- Theoretical framework for CBR in medical reasoning
- Applications of CBR in bioinformatics

Submissions
-----------
Authors must submit a full paper with a maximum of 15 pages through
the ECCBR web site by the paper submission deadline. The details of
the submission procedure will be published in time at the ECCBR web
site. All accepted papers will appear in the conference proceedings
published by Springer Verlag in the Lecture Notes in Artificial
Intelligence series.

Review Criteria
---------------
Submissions must be identified as either research or application
papers and will be reviewed using criteria appropriate to their
category. Review criteria for research papers will include scientific
significance, originality, technical quality, and clarity. Review
criteria for application papers will include practical or economic
significance, potential to lead to more powerful technology,
technical quality, and clarity. Further, as we aim at highlighting
contributions to the special areas amongst the submissions on the
above topics, the authors must indicate whether a submission should
be considered to one of these areas.

Important Dates
---------------
March 3, 2008        Paper submission deadline
April 14, 2008       Acceptance notification
May 12, 2008         Camera-ready copy due

Conference Chairs
-----------------
Klaus-Dieter Althoff, University of Hildesheim Ralph Bergmann,
University of Trier

Local Chair
-----------
Mirjam Minor, University of Trier

Industry Day Chair
------------------
Stefan Wess, empolis

Workshop Chair
--------------
Martin Schaaf, University of Hildesheim

** Apologies if you receive multiple copies of this announcement **
           ** Please forward to anyone who might be interested**

==============================================================================

                                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

==============================================================================

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.


==============================================================================

                                  Agenda

==============================================================================

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.


==============================================================================

                            Topics of Interest

==============================================================================

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


==============================================================================

                             Submissions

==============================================================================

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.


==============================================================================

                           Important Dates

==============================================================================

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


==============================================================================

                             Organisation

==============================================================================

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


==============================================================================

                       Submission deadline: March 14, 2008

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

==============================================================================

** Apologies if you receive multiple copies of this announcement **
      ** Please forward to anyone who might be interested **

LAST CALL FOR WORKSHOP PROPOSALS

=======================================================
=============

KI 2008 -- 31st German Conference on Artificial Intelligence
        23 - 26 September 2008, Kaiserslautern, Germany
                 http://ki2008.dfki.uni-kl.de

=======================================================
=============

KI 2008 is the 31st edition of the German Conference on Artificial
Intelligence, which traditionally brings together academic and
industrial researchers from all areas of AI. The technical programme
of KI 2008 will comprise paper and poster presentations and a
variety of workshops and tutorials.

We invite proposals for workshops to be held at the beginning of
the conference. Eligible topics include all subareas of Artificial
Intelligence, as well as their foundations and applications.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

How to Propose a Workshop

Proposals should be about two (2) pages in length. They should be
prepared in PDF or plain ASCII and sent by email to the KI 2008
Workshop Chair Thomas Roth-Berghofer (trb@...).

The proposals should be written in English and must arrive by
January 25, 2008. Each workshop proposal should contain the
following:

- A description of the workshop topic. This description should
briefly discuss why the suggested topic is of particular
interest at this time.

- A brief description of the workshop format, regarding the mix
of events such as paper presentation, invited talks, panels,
demonstrations, and general discussion.

- An indication as to whether the workshop should be considered
for a half-day or one-day meeting.

- The names and full contact information (email and postal
addresses, fax and telephone numbers) of the organising
committee (three or four people knowledgeable in the field)
and short descriptions of their relevant expertise. (Please
specify the main contact.) Strong proposals include organisers
who bring differing perspectives to the workshop topic and who
are actively connected to the communities of potential
participants.

- A list of potential attendees.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
-

Workshop organisers will be responsible for:

- Producing a call for participation. The call is due February 20,
2008. This call will be posted on the KI 2008 website. Organisers
are responsible for additional publicity such as distributing the
call to relevant newsgroups and electronic mailing lists, and
especially to potential audiences from outside the KI conference
community. Organisers are encouraged to maintain their own web
site with updated information about the workshop.

- Coordinating the production of the workshop notes. The KI 2008
Workshop Chair coordinates the collection, production, and
distribution of the working notes for the workshops. Workshop
papers and abstracts must be received by the KI 2008 Workshop
Chair no later than August 17, 2008, and volumes are limited to
a total of 200 pages.

The KI 2008 conference organisers will provide logistic support,
and meeting places for the workshops, and will determine the
dates and times of the workshops. The KI 2008 conference
organisers reserves the right to drop any workshop if the
organisers miss the above deadlines. All workshop participants
must register for the KI 2008 conference.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
-

Important Dates

Proposal deadline: 	        January 25, 2008
Notification of acceptance:  February 4, 2008
CFP for the workshops due:  February 20, 2008
Proceedings due for printing:  August 17, 2008
Workshop: 	                September 23, 2008

--------------------------------------------------------------------

KI 2008 - Workshop Chair
Dr. Thomas Roth-Berghofer (trb@...)

=======================================================
=============


--
=======================================================
===============
...    31st Annual German Conference on Artificial Intelligence    ...
...        Kaiserslautern, Germany, September 23-26, 2008        ...
...                  http://ki2008.dfki.uni-kl.de                  ...
=======================================================
===============
---------------------------------------------------------------------
-
           Dr. Thomas Roth-Berghofer - Senior Researcher
---------------------------------------------------------------------
-
DFKI GmbH, Trippstadter Str. 122, 67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany
---------------------------------------------------------------------
-
Tel.: +49 (0)631 20575-133       Room        Fax: +49 (0)631 20575-102
mailto:trb@...        3.17        http://www.dfki.de/~roth/
---------------------------------------------------------------------
-

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)

** Apologies if you receive multiple copies of this announcement **
      ** Please forward to anyone who might be interested **


CALL FOR WORKSHOP PROPOSALS

=======================================================
=============

  KI 2008 -- 31st German Conference on Artificial Intelligence
         23 - 26 September 2008, Kaiserslautern, Germany
                  http://ki2008.dfki.uni-kl.de

=======================================================
=============

KI 2008 is the 31st edition of the German Conference on Artificial
Intelligence, which traditionally brings together academic and
industrial researchers from all areas of AI. The technical programme
of KI 2008 will comprise paper and poster presentations and a
variety of workshops and tutorials.

We invite proposals for workshops to be held at the beginning of
the conference. Eligible topics include all subareas of Artificial
Intelligence, as well as their foundations and applications.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

How to Propose a Workshop

Proposals should be about two (2) pages in length. They should be
prepared in PDF or plain ASCII and sent by email to the KI 2008
Workshop Chair Thomas Roth-Berghofer (trb@...).

The proposals should be written in English and must arrive by
January 25, 2008. Each workshop proposal should contain the
following:

- A description of the workshop topic. This description should
briefly discuss why the suggested topic is of particular
interest at this time.

- A brief description of the workshop format, regarding the mix
of events such as paper presentation, invited talks, panels,
demonstrations, and general discussion.

- An indication as to whether the workshop should be considered
for a half-day or one-day meeting.

- The names and full contact information (email and postal
addresses, fax and telephone numbers) of the organising
committee (three or four people knowledgeable in the field)
and short descriptions of their relevant expertise. (Please
specify the main contact.) Strong proposals include organisers
who bring differing perspectives to the workshop topic and who
are actively connected to the communities of potential
participants.

- A list of potential attendees.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
-

Workshop organisers will be responsible for:

- Producing a call for participation. The call is due February 20,
2008. This call will be posted on the KI 2008 website. Organisers
are responsible for additional publicity such as distributing the
call to relevant newsgroups and electronic mailing lists, and
especially to potential audiences from outside the KI conference
community. Organisers are encouraged to maintain their own web
site with updated information about the workshop.

- Coordinating the production of the workshop notes. The KI 2008
Workshop Chair coordinates the collection, production, and
distribution of the working notes for the workshops. Workshop
papers and abstracts must be received by the KI 2008 Workshop
Chair no later than August 17, 2008, and volumes are limited to
a total of 200 pages.

The KI 2008 conference organisers will provide logistic support,
and meeting places for the workshops, and will determine the
dates and times of the workshops. The KI 2008 conference
organisers reserves the right to drop any workshop if the
organisers miss the above deadlines. All workshop participants
must register for the KI 2008 conference.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
-

Important Dates

Proposal deadline: 	        January 25, 2008
Notification of acceptance:  February 4, 2008
CFP for the workshops due:  February 20, 2008
Proceedings due for printing:  August 17, 2008
Workshop: 	                September 23, 2008

--------------------------------------------------------------------

KI 2008 - Workshop Chair
Dr. Thomas Roth-Berghofer (trb@...)

=======================================================
=============


--
=======================================================
===============
...    31st Annual German Conference on Artificial Intelligence    ...
...        Kaiserslautern, Germany, September 23-26, 2008        ...
...                  http://ki2008.dfki.uni-kl.de                  ...
=======================================================
===============
---------------------------------------------------------------------
-
            Dr. Thomas Roth-Berghofer - Senior Researcher
---------------------------------------------------------------------
-
  DFKI GmbH, Trippstadter Str. 122, 67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany
---------------------------------------------------------------------
-
Tel.: +49 (0)631 20575-133       Room        Fax: +49 (0)631 20575-102
mailto:trb@...        3.17        http://www.dfki.de/~roth/
---------------------------------------------------------------------
-

Dear all,

Can you point out explanation-related resources on and off the web you deem a
must in
explanation research?

As most of you know I maintain a website on explanation
(http://on-explanation.net) where I
started collecting material and links to useful information sources / people.
And it so
happens that one of the columns of the KI journal is dedicated to resources wrt
the
respective special issue.

Thanks and best regards,

trb

Dear all,

In preparing the special issue on explanation I am looking for recently finished
dissertations
in computer science / AI / Cognitive Sciences. Does anyone of you know about
someone who
finished his / her Ph.D. in recent years?

What's in for that person, you may ask :-) One of the journal columns is a two
page abstract
to promote special issue related dissertations.

Thanks for your time and best regards,

trb

[apologies for cross postings]

======================================================
  Call for Papers

  ** Special Issue on Explanation   **
  http://on-explanation.net/on-explanation.net/Journal_KI.html

  Journal KI - Kuenstliche Intelligenz
  http://www.kuenstliche-intelligenz.de/

  Deadline for Announcement of Submission:   25 November 2007
  Deadline for Full Paper Submission:         1 February 2008

======================================================

The explanation concept is an umbrella term that covers quite a
variety of instances and variations. The term is used in many
disciplines for very different reasons, e.g., in cognitive science,
law, education, communication science, political sciences, etc. In
addition, many disciplines such as medicine have developed their
own style and culture for explanations.

All these kinds of explanation have in common that they are part of
communication. Communication takes place among agents, which can be
human as well as software agents. Communication has always a certain
purpose and this should be a guideline for the explanation, because
it provides a way for evaluation the success of the explanation.
Evaluation criteria can therefore be of different character.

For several reasons computer support is needed, as in general for
socio-technical processes.

Furthermore it is clear that meaningful explanations require a
certain amount of intelligence and therefore artificial intelligence
(AI) is challenged. Already around in 1990ies explanations in expert
systems have been popular. Their purpose was to increase the
acceptance of results of expert systems, e.g., by justification of
unexpected consequences. The technique applied at that time was
mainly parsing by going backwards through the chain of arguments.
With this method, however, many results could not be explained.
Today the time seems to be right going towards a more comprehensive
approach.


Theoretical Aspects
-------------------
In this category one finds a number of principal questions that deal
with the nature and the success of explanations and provide the basis
for computer support. We mention some:
  - Cognitive  background
  - Objective of explanations (e.g. instruction, convincing someone)
  - Explanation and understanding
  - Explanation and acceptance
  - Explanation and teaching
  - Details versus generality
  - The role of explanation in dialogues
  - The presentation of explanations: how can explanations be
    presented? How do user characteristics influence the way
    explanations are presented?
  - Explanation and influence factors
  - Explanations and decisions
  - From the cognitive to the formal
  - Explanation and truth: Has an explanation to be exact or has it
    even to be true? Can an explanation with lies be successful? Do
    they need to be lies under certain circumstances in order to make
    communication successful?
  - Explanations as parts of processes and for improving them
  - Explanations and experiences: have they to be generated ad-hoc or
    can one use experience (CBR technology)?
  - Purpose, success and evaluation of explanations
  - Explanation and procedural programs


Practical Tasks and Systems
----------------------------
Explanations in special disciplines
  - Law
  - Medicine
  - Natural Sciences
  - Software Engineering
  - PR, Marketing

Practical structural questions:
  - Explanation and Knowledge Management
  - Explanation and CBR
  - Integration of explanation into reasoning processes


Contributions
-------------
Contributions to all mentioned subjects are welcome. Because
explanations cannot be regarded in isolation it is of central
interest to study the integration into a context. For practical
systems it is of interest to see how this integration is
performed and what the role of explanation is. For that,
reported experiences are of importance.

In all we hope to get a better understanding for this subject
that is so central for (intelligent) communication.


Submission Details
------------------
Contributions to all submission categories of the Journal are
welcome (scientific contributions/state of the art overviews,
project reports, book reviews, summaries of PhD theses, discussion
statements, dictionary entries of interesting aspects). All
submissions should be comprehensible for a broader AI audience.

The submissions should describe original contributions, and should
not have been published or submitted elsewhere. Submissions based on
conference papers should be extended and should include a reference
to the corresponding proceedings. All submissions will be reviewed
by at least two reviewers. The maximal length of a scientific
contribution/state of the art overview is 7 pages in the final
format (incl. figures), 3-4 pages for project reports, and 2 pages
for the other categories. A LaTeX style file for the submission can
be found here:
  http://www.kuenstliche-intelligenz.de/index.php?id=%3ANO-3015.
(The final version will be reformatted by the publisher.) Please
indicate the character count, your postal address, email address,
and phone number upon your submission.

More detailed information is available at
   http://on-explanation.net/on-explanation.net/Journal_KI.html

For submissions, please directly contact the guest editors. We ask
interested authors to submit abstracts in advance.


Guest Editors
-------------
Dr. Thomas Roth-Berghofer
German Research Center for Artificial
Intelligence DFKI GmbH
Trippstadter Straße 122
67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany
mailto:trb@...

Prof. Michael M. Richter
Universität Kaiserslautern
P.O. Box 3049
67618 Kaiserslautern, Germany
mailto:richter@...



--
======================================================
...    31st Annual German Conference on Artificial Intelligence    ...
  ...        Kaiserslautern, Germany, September 23-26, 2008        ...
...                  http://ki2008.dfki.uni-kl.de                  ...
======================================================
------------------------------------------------------------------
-
              Dr. Thomas Roth-Berghofer - Senior Researcher
    Technical Director Project NEPOMUK - The Social Semantic Desktop
                   http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org
------------------------------------------------------------------
-
    DFKI GmbH, Trippstadter Str. 122, 67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany
------------------------------------------------------------------
-
Tel.: +49 (0)631 20575-133       Room        Fax: +49 (0)631 20575-102
mailto:trb@...        3.17        http://www.dfki.de/~roth/
------------------------------------------------------------------
-

Apologies for cross posting.

We would like to remind you that the deadline for MRC 2007 is approaching.

================================================================================

                                Call for Papers

                                   MRC 2007

      Fourth International Workshop on Modeling and Reasoning in Context
        To be held at CONTEXT 07, Roskilde, Denmark, 20-24 August 2007

                       Submission deadline: May 15, 2007

                          http://mrc2007.workshop.hm/

================================================================================

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.


================================================================================

                            Workshop Objectives

================================================================================

The major goal of the workshop is to bring researchers 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.

MRC aims to provide a forum for scientists 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.

Besides contributed papers, this workshop will offer organised and open
spaces for targeted discussions. We note that the previous MRC meetings
were all held in conjunction with conferences on artificial intelligence
and computer science. Holding MRC 2007 at CONTEXT 2007 has the
additional goal of reaching out to other relevant disciplines and will
facilitate collaboration between different fields.


================================================================================

                            Topics of Interest

================================================================================

Areas of interest include, 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


================================================================================

                             Submissions

================================================================================

Workshop submissions will be electronic, in PDF format only, using the
EasyChair submission system. Paper submission will be opened in the
middle of March 2007. Paper length should not exceed 12 pages in the
Springer LNCS format. Guidelines and templates are available on the web
at: http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html

Papers will be published in accompanying proceedings. Provided that the
quantity and quality of submissions justifies a book or special journal
issue on context aware systems, authors of accepted papers will be
invited to submit extended versions for such a publication.

All workshop participants must register both for this workshop and the
main CONTEXT 07 conference. At least one author of each accepted paper
must attend the workshop.


================================================================================

                             Organisation

================================================================================

Workshop Organisers

    Contact: mrc2007@...

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

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

    David B. Leake
    Computer Science Department
    Indiana University, USA

    Stefan Schulz
    The e-Spirit Company, Germany


Program Committee

  - Agnar Aamodt, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
  - Steven Bogaerts, Indiana University, USA
  - Patrick Brezillon, University Paris 6, France
  - Hans-Dieter Burkhard, Humboldt University Berlin, Germany
  - Lorcan Coyle, University College Dublin, Ireland
  - Mehmet H. Goeker, PricewaterhouseCoopers, USA
  - Dominik Heckmann, Saarland University, Germany
  - Eyke Huellermeier, University of Magedeburg, Germany
  - Ana G. Maguitman, Universidad Nacional del Sur, Bahia Blanca,
    Argentina
  - Marius Mikalsen, SINTEF, Norway
  - Sven Schwarz, DFKI, Germany
  - Enric Plaza, Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, Catalonia,
    Spain
  - Thomas R. Roth-Berghofer, DFKI, Germany
  - Santtu Toivonen, VTT, Finland


================================================================================

                       Submission deadline: May 15, 2007

                          http://mrc2007.workshop.hm/

================================================================================

Please, note the later submission deadline (now matching the deadlines of
the other AAAI-2007 workshops).

----

** Apologies if you receive multiple copies of this announcement **
        ** Please forward to anyone who might be interested **


                          CALL FOR PAPERS
                   for the AAAI-07 Workshop on

             EXPLANATION-AWARE COMPUTING (ExaCt 2007)

               22 - 23 July 2007, Vancouver (Canada)

                    http://exact2007.workshop.hm/

          Paper submission deadline: now April 10, 2007


OBJECTIVES
Explanation has been widely investigated in disciplines such as
artificial intelligence, cognitive science, linguistics, philosophy
of science, and education. All these disciplines consider varying
aspects of "explanation", making it clear that there are many
different views of the nature of explanation.  Both within AI
systems and in interactive systems, the ability to explain reasoning
processes and results can have substantial impact. Within the field
of knowledge-based systems, explanations have been considered as an
important link between humans and machines to increase the confidence
of the user in the system's result, by providing evidence of how it
was derived. In mixed-initiative problem solving, explanations
exchanged between human and software agents may play an important
role in communication between humans and software systems. Additional
research has focused on how computer systems can themselves use
explanations, for example to guide learning. This workshop aims to
draw on multiple perspectives on explanation, to examine how
explanation can be applied to further the development of robust and
dependable systems and to illuminate system processes to increase
user acceptance and feeling of control.



GOALS AND AUDIENCE
The main goal of the workshop is to bring researchers, scientists
from both industry and academics, and representatives from different
communities and areas such as those mentioned above, together to
study, understand, and explore explanation in IT-applications. Besides
presentations and discussions of invited contributions and invited
talks, this symposium will offer organized and open spaces for
targeted discussions and creating an interdisciplinary community.


TOPICS OF INTEREST
Suggested topics for contributions (not restricted on IT views):
  * Models for explanations
  * Integrating application and explanation knowledge
  * Explanation-awareness in applications
  * Methodologies for developing explanation-aware systems
  * Learning to explain
  * Context-aware explanation
  * Confidence and explanations
  * Requirements and needs for explanations to support human
    understanding
  * Explanation of complex, autonomous systems
  * Cooperative explanation
  * Explanatory aspects of argumentation


SUBMISSIONS AND STYLE
Workshop submissions will be electronic, in pdf format only, using
a submission system on the workshop website.

Papers must be written in English and not exceed 5 pages in the AAAI
two-column format. At least one author of each accepted paper must
register for the workshop and present the contribution in order to
be published in the workshop proceedings.

Those wishing to participate providing a live system demonstration
should submit a proposal. A separate call for demos will be posted
for details at the workshop website.

Those wishing to participate without paper or demo submission should
submit a brief synopsis of their relevant work by April 2, 2007.

Attendance is limited to active participants only!


IMPORTANT DATES
   Submission deadline:                     April 10, 2007
   Notification of acceptance:              April 25, 2007
   Camera-ready versions of papers:         May 15, 2007


WORKSHOP SCHEDULE
The schedule will be made available on the workshop website.


INVITED TALKS
  Douglas N. Walton, Department of Philosophy, University of
    Winnipeg, Canada
  Bruce Porter, Computer Science Department, University of Texas,
    Austin, USA


CHAIRS
  Thomas R. Roth-Berghofer, trb at dfki.uni-kl.de
     DFKI GmbH / TU Kaiserslautern, Germany
  Stefan Schulz, schulz at e-spirit.de
     The e-Spirit Company GmbH, Dortmund, Germany
  David B. Leake, leake at cs.indiana.edu
     Computer Science Department, Indiana University, USA

DEMO CHAIR
  Daniel Bahls, bahls at dfki.uni-kl.de
     DFKI GmbH, Kaiserslautern, Germany


PROGRAM COMMITTEE
  David W. Aha, Navy Center for Applied Research in AI, Washington
    DC, USA
  Derek Bridge, University College Cork, Ireland
  Michael T. Cox, BBN, USA
  Jörg Cassens, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)
  Francisco Javier Díez, UNED Madrid, Spain
  Babak Esfandiari, Carleton University, Canada
  Peter Funk, Mälardalen University, Sweden
  Pierre Grenon, IFOMIS, University of Saarbrücken, Germany
  David McSherry, University of Ulster, Northern Ireland
  Hector Muñoz-Avila, Lehigh University, USA
  Paulo Pinheiro da Silva, University of Texas, El Paso, USA
  Enric Plaza, IIIA-CSIC, Spain
  Michael M. Richter, University of Kaiserslautern, Germany
  Christophe Roche, University of Savoie, France
  Sven Schwarz, DFKI, Germany
  Gheorghe Tecuci, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA



--
=======================================================
===============
...     Sixth International and Interdisciplinary Conference       ...
  ...               on Modeling and Using Context                  ...
...                   http://context-07.ruc.dk                     ...
=======================================================
===============

----------------------------------------------------------------------
              Dr. Thomas Roth-Berghofer - Senior Researcher
    Technical Director Project NEPOMUK - The Social Semantic Desktop
                   http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org
----------------------------------------------------------------------
    DFKI GmbH, Trippstadter Str. 122, 67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Tel.: +49 (0)631 20575-133       Room        Fax: +49 (0)631 20575-102
mailto:trb@...        3.17        http://www.dfki.de/~roth/
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Apologies for cross posting.

================================================================================

                                Call for Papers

                                   MRC 2007

      Fourth International Workshop on Modeling and Reasoning in Context
        To be held at CONTEXT 07, Roskilde, Denmark, 20-24 August 2007

                       Submission deadline: May 15, 2007

                          http://mrc2007.workshop.hm/

================================================================================

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.


================================================================================

                            Workshop Objectives

================================================================================

The major goal of the workshop is to bring researchers 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.

MRC aims to provide a forum for scientists 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.

Besides contributed papers, this workshop will offer organised and open
spaces for targeted discussions. We note that the previous MRC meetings
were all held in conjunction with conferences on artificial intelligence
and computer science. Holding MRC 2007 at CONTEXT 2007 has the
additional goal of reaching out to other relevant disciplines and will
facilitate collaboration between different fields.


================================================================================

                            Topics of Interest

================================================================================

Areas of interest include, 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


================================================================================

                             Submissions

================================================================================

Workshop submissions will be electronic, in PDF format only, using the
EasyChair submission system. Paper submission will be opened in the
middle of March 2007. Paper length should not exceed 12 pages in the
Springer LNCS format. Guidelines and templates are available on the web
at: http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html

Papers will be published in accompanying proceedings. Provided that the
quantity and quality of submissions justifies a book or special journal
issue on context aware systems, authors of accepted papers will be
invited to submit extended versions for such a publication.

All workshop participants must register both for this workshop and the
main CONTEXT 07 conference. At least one author of each accepted paper
must attend the workshop.


================================================================================

                             Organisation

================================================================================

Workshop Organisers

    Contact: mrc2007@...

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

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

    David B. Leake
    Computer Science Department
    Indiana University, USA

    Stefan Schulz
    The e-Spirit Company, Germany


Program Committee

  - Agnar Aamodt, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
  - Steven Bogaerts, Indiana University, USA
  - Patrick Brezillon, University Paris 6, France
  - Hans-Dieter Burkhard, Humboldt University Berlin, Germany
  - Lorcan Coyle, University College Dublin, Ireland
  - Mehmet H. Goeker, PricewaterhouseCoopers, USA
  - Dominik Heckmann, Saarland University, Germany
  - Eyke Huellermeier, University of Magedeburg, Germany
  - Ana G. Maguitman, Universidad Nacional del Sur, Bahia Blanca,
    Argentina
  - Marius Mikalsen, SINTEF, Norway
  - Sven Schwarz, DFKI, Germany
  - Enric Plaza, Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, Catalonia,
    Spain
  - Thomas R. Roth-Berghofer, DFKI, Germany
  - Santtu Toivonen, VTT, Finland


================================================================================

                       Submission deadline: May 15, 2007

                          http://mrc2007.workshop.hm/

================================================================================

** Apologies if you receive multiple copies of this announcement **
        ** Please forward to anyone who might be interested **


                          CALL FOR PAPERS
                   for the AAAI-07 Workshop on

             EXPLANATION-AWARE COMPUTING (ExaCt 2007)

               22 - 23 July 2007, Vancouver (Canada)

                    http://exact2007.workshop.hm/

             Paper submission deadline: April 2, 2007


OBJECTIVES
Explanation has been widely investigated in disciplines such as
artificial intelligence, cognitive science, linguistics, philosophy
of science, and education. All these disciplines consider varying
aspects of "explanation", making it clear that there are many
different views of the nature of explanation.  Both within AI
systems and in interactive systems, the ability to explain reasoning
processes and results can have substantial impact. Within the field
of knowledge-based systems, explanations have been considered as an
important link between humans and machines to increase the confidence
of the user in the system's result, by providing evidence of how it
was derived. In mixed-initiative problem solving, explanations
exchanged between human and software agents may play an important
role in communication between humans and software systems. Additional
research has focused on how computer systems can themselves use
explanations, for example to guide learning. This workshop aims to
draw on multiple perspectives on explanation, to examine how
explanation can be applied to further the development of robust and
dependable systems and to illuminate system processes to increase
user acceptance and feeling of control.



GOALS AND AUDIENCE
The main goal of the workshop is to bring researchers, scientists
from both industry and academics, and representatives from different
communities and areas such as those mentioned above, together to
study, understand, and explore explanation in IT-applications. Besides
presentations and discussions of invited contributions and invited
talks, this symposium will offer organized and open spaces for
targeted discussions and creating an interdisciplinary community.


TOPICS OF INTEREST
Suggested topics for contributions (not restricted on IT views):
  * Models for explanations
  * Integrating application and explanation knowledge
  * Explanation-awareness in applications
  * Methodologies for developing explanation-aware systems
  * Learning to explain
  * Context-aware explanation
  * Confidence and explanations
  * Requirements and needs for explanations to support human
    understanding
  * Explanation of complex, autonomous systems
  * Cooperative explanation
  * Explanatory aspects of argumentation


SUBMISSIONS AND STYLE
Workshop submissions will be electronic, in pdf format only, using
a submission system on the workshop website.

Papers must be written in English and not exceed 5 pages in the AAAI
two-column format. At least one author of each accepted paper must
register for the workshop and present the contribution in order to
be published in the workshop proceedings.

Those wishing to participate providing a live system demonstration
should submit a proposal. A separate call for demos will be posted
for details at the workshop website.

Those wishing to participate without paper or demo submission should
submit a brief synopsis of their relevant work by April 2, 2007.

Attendance is limited to active participants only!


IMPORTANT DATES
   Submission deadline:                     April 2, 2007
   Notification of acceptance:              April 25, 2007
   Camera-ready versions of papers:         May 15, 2007


WORKSHOP SCHEDULE
The schedule will be made available on the workshop website.


INVITED TALK
  Douglas N. Walton, Department of Philosophy, University of
    Winnipeg, Canada
  Bruce Porter, Computer Science Department, University of Texas,
    Austin, USA


CHAIRS
  Thomas R. Roth-Berghofer, trb at dfki.uni-kl.de
     DFKI GmbH / TU Kaiserslautern, Germany
  Stefan Schulz, schulz at e-spirit.de
     The e-Spirit Company GmbH, Dortmund, Germany
  David B. Leake, leake at cs.indiana.edu
     Computer Science Department, Indiana University, USA

DEMO CHAIR
  Daniel Bahls, bahls at dfki.uni-kl.de
     DFKI GmbH, Kaiserslautern, Germany


PROGRAM COMMITTEE
  David W. Aha, Navy Center for Applied Research in AI, Washington
    DC, USA
  Derek Bridge, University College Cork, Ireland
  Michael T. Cox, BBN, USA
  Jörg Cassens, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)
  Francisco Javier Díez, UNED Madrid, Spain
  Babak Esfandiari, Carleton University, Canada
  Peter Funk, Mälardalen University, Sweden
  Pierre Grenon, IFOMIS, University of Saarbrücken, Germany
  David McSherry, University of Ulster, Northern Ireland
  Hector Muñoz-Avila, Lehigh University, USA
  Paulo Pinheiro da Silva, University of Texas, El Paso, USA
  Enric Plaza, IIIA-CSIC, Spain
  Michael M. Richter, University of Kaiserslautern, Germany
  Christophe Roche, University of Savoie, France
  Sven Schwarz, DFKI, Germany
  Gheorghe Tecuci, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA



--
=======================================================
...     Sixth International and Interdisciplinary Conference       ...
  ...               on Modeling and Using Context                  ...
...                   http://context-07.ruc.dk                     ...
=======================================================

----------------------------------------------------------------------
              Dr. Thomas Roth-Berghofer - Senior Researcher
    Technical Director Project NEPOMUK - The Social Semantic Desktop
                   http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org
----------------------------------------------------------------------
   TU Kaiserslautern        Bld. 57, Room 384               DFKI GmbH
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Tel.: +49 631 205-4820                          Fax.: +49 631 205-3472
mailto:trb@...             http://www.dfki.uni-kl.de/~roth/


=======================================================
=======================================================
                        Please regard: We will move!
=======================================================
=======================================================
We will move to our new building by end of February.

The new address will be as follows:
   DFKI GmbH, Trippstadter Straße 122, 67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany

The phone/fax numbers will also change:
   Phone: +49 (0)631 20575 - 133        Secr.: +49 (0)631 20575 - 101
   Fax: +49 (0)631 20575 - 102         Email address remains the same

=======================================================

** Apologies if you receive multiple copies of this announcement **
        ** Please forward to anyone who might be interested **


                          CALL FOR PAPERS
                   for the AAAI-07 Workshop on

             EXPLANATION-AWARE COMPUTING (ExaCt 2007)

               22 - 23 July 2007, Vancouver (Canada)

                    http://exact2007.workshop.hm/

             Paper submission deadline: April 2, 2007


OBJECTIVES
Explanation has been widely investigated in disciplines such as
artificial intelligence, cognitive science, linguistics, philosophy
of science, and education. All these disciplines consider varying
aspects of "explanation", making it clear that there are many
different views of the nature of explanation.  Both within AI
systems and in interactive systems, the ability to explain reasoning
processes and results can have substantial impact. Within the field
of knowledge-based systems, explanations have been considered as an
important link between humans and machines to increase the confidence
of the user in the system's result, by providing evidence of how it
was derived. In mixed-initiative problem solving, explanations
exchanged between human and software agents may play an important
role in communication between humans and software systems. Additional
research has focused on how computer systems can themselves use
explanations, for example to guide learning. This workshop aims to
draw on multiple perspectives on explanation, to examine how
explanation can be applied to further the development of robust and
dependable systems and to illuminate system processes to increase
user acceptance and feeling of control.



GOALS AND AUDIENCE
The main goal of the workshop is to bring researchers, scientists
from both industry and academics, and representatives from different
communities and areas such as those mentioned above, together to
study, understand, and explore explanation in IT-applications. Besides
presentations and discussions of invited contributions and invited
talks, this symposium will offer organized and open spaces for
targeted discussions and creating an interdisciplinary community.


TOPICS OF INTEREST
Suggested topics for contributions (not restricted on IT views):
  * Models for explanations
  * Integrating application and explanation knowledge
  * Explanation-awareness in applications
  * Methodologies for developing explanation-aware systems
  * Learning to explain
  * Context-aware explanation
  * Confidence and explanations
  * Requirements and needs for explanations to support human
    understanding
  * Explanation of complex, autonomous systems
  * Cooperative explanation
  * Explanatory aspects of argumentation


SUBMISSIONS AND STYLE
Workshop submissions will be electronic, in pdf format only, using
a submission system on the workshop website.

Papers must be written in English and not exceed 5 pages in the AAAI
two-column format. At least one author of each accepted paper must
register for the workshop and present the contribution in order to
be published in the workshop proceedings.

Those wishing to participate providing a live system demonstration
should submit a proposal. A separate call for demos will be posted
for details at the workshop website.

Those wishing to participate without paper or demo submission should
submit a brief synopsis of their relevant work by XXXXXXX, 2007.

Attendance is limited to active participants only.


IMPORTANT DATES
   Submission deadline:                     April 2, 2007
   Notification of acceptance:              April 25, 2007
   Camera-ready versions of papers:         May 15, 2007


WORKSHOP SCHEDULE
The schedule will be made available on the workshop website.


INVITED TALK
  Douglas N. Walton, Department of Philosophy, University of
    Winnipeg, Canada


CHAIRS
  Thomas R. Roth-Berghofer, trb at dfki.uni-kl.de
    DFKI GmbH / TU Kaiserslautern, Germany
  Stefan Schulz, schulz at e-spirit.de
    The e-Spirit Company GmbH, Dortmund, Germany
  David B. Leake, leake at cs.indiana.edu
    Computer Science Department, Indiana University, USA

DEMO CHAIR
  Daniel Bahls, bahls at dfki.uni-kl.de
    DFKI GmbH, Kaiserslautern, Germany


PROGRAM COMMITTEE
  David W. Aha, Navy Center for Applied Research in AI, Washington
    DC, USA
  Derek Bridge, University College Cork, Ireland
  Michael T. Cox, BBN, USA
  Jörg Cassens, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)
  Francisco Javier Díez, UNED Madrid, Spain
  Babak Esfandiari, Carleton University, Canada
  Peter Funk, Mälardalen University, Sweden
  Pierre Grenon, IFOMIS, University of Saarbrücken, Germany
  David McSherry, University of Ulster, Northern Ireland
  Hector Muñoz-Avila, Lehigh University, USA
  Paulo Pinheiro da Silva, University of Texas, El Paso, USA
  Enric Plaza, IIIA-CSIC, Spain
  Michael M. Richter, University of Kaiserslautern, Germany
  Christophe Roche, University of Savoie, France
  Sven Schwarz, DFKI, Germany
  Gheorghe Tecuci, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

Dear colleagues,

We were successful with our proposal for a second explanation-aware
computing workshop. David Leake, Stefan Schulz, and I will organize
it again as a two day workhop. We will invite keynote speakers and
try to setup a demo session as well as a poster session.

Please start thinking about your submission :-) and expect the call
for papers soon.

Best, trb

Dear all,

This mailing list has not been very busy yet. I know ;-) Maybe we can work on
making it
interesting enough then?

David Leake, Stefan Schulz, and I submitted a proposal for a second
explanation-aware
computing workshop. Cross your fingers. We will get a response until the end of
this month.
We will inform you about the progress.

However. Do you have topics you would like to see on the Call for papers? Do you
have ideas
for discussions that could already start on this list and could play a major
part at the
workshop? What are you busy with at the moment wrt explanation?

Best,

trb

Dear explanation researchers,

As two of the invited talks at ECCBR 2006 show, explanation research
is a hot topic in case-based reasoning. Maybe some of you will
participate in this conference?

Best wishes and looking forward to meeting you again,

Thomas



** Apologies if you receive multiple copies of this announcement **
        ** Please forward to anyone who might be interested **
-------------------------------------------------------------------
                     CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

     8th European Conference on Case-Based Reasoning ECCBR 2006
                    Ölüdeniz/Fethiye, Turkey
                       4-7 September 2006

                     http://2006.eccbr.org/

          Early Registration Deadline: 1 July 2006

-------------------------------------------------------------------

The ECCBR 2006 Programme Committee invites you to the 8th European
Conference on Case-Based Reasoning. ECCBR 2006 is following a
series of successful European conferences/workshops. This four-day
conference will be held at the conference center of the Lykiaworld
Resort hotel in Ölüdeniz/Fethiye, Turkey.

The ECCBR Industry Day starts the program, followed on the second
day by workshops devoted to specific areas of interest to the CBR
community (see website). The remaining two days feature invited
talks, presentations and posters on both theoretical and applied
research in CBR.


CONFERENCE HIGHLIGHTS
=====================

Invited Talks
-------------
* David McSherry (University of Ulster, UK): "Completeness
    Criteria for Retrieval in Recommender Systems"

* Gholamreza Nakhaeizadeh (DaimlerChrysler AG, Research and
    Technology, Ulm, Germany): "Is Consideration of Background
    Knowledge in Data Driven Solutions Possible at all?"

* Edwina Rissland (National Science Foundation, North Arlington,
    USA): "The Fun Begins with Retrieval: Explanation and CBR"

For the Industry Day we managed to get hold of two successful
European CBR entrepreneurs:

* Michel Manago (kaidara Software, France)
* Stefan Wess  (empolis arvato, Germany)


Social Events
-------------
* Welcome reception: Boat tour
* Conference dinner: Turkish restaurant "Sofra" with Turkish
                      music and a belly dance performance


Main Sponsors
-------------
* DaimlerChrysler, Germany (http://www.daimlerchrysler.com)
* empolis, Germany (http://www.empolis.com)
* kaidara software, France (http://www.kaidara.com)
* Microsoft, Turkey (http://www.microsoft.com)
* PricewaterhouseCoopers, USA (http://www.pwc.com)


Registration
------------
The registration form is available from the conference website:
http://2006.eccbr.org.

Participants who register before July 1st, 2006 can benefit
from early bird special prices. Late registration will be from
July 2nd to August 1st, 2006.

Please note: There will be no on-site registration. We will have
to close registration on August 1st. The hotel is all-inclusive
and guests from outside of the hotel cannot be admitted!


Important Dates
---------------
4 September 2006    Industry Day
5 September 2006    Workshops
6-7 September 2006  Main Conference


Conference Chairs
-----------------
Mehmet H. Göker, PwC (mehmet.goker at us.pwc.com)
Thomas R. Roth-Berghofer, DFKI (trb at dfki.uni-kl.de)

Local Chair
-----------
H. Altay Güvenir, Bilkent University
(guvenir at cs.bilkent.edu.tr)

Workshop Chair
--------------
Mirjam Minor, University of Trier
(minor at uni-trier.de)

Industry Day Chair
-------------------
Bill Cheetham, General Electric (cheetham at crd.ge.com)
Kareem S. Aggour, General Electric (aggour at research.ge.com)


Programme Committee Members
---------------------------
* Agnar Aamodt, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
* David W. Aha, Naval Research Laboratory, USA
* Esma Aimeur, University of Montreal, Canada
* Vincent Aleven, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
* Ethem Alpaydin, Bogaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey
* Klaus-Dieter Althoff, University of Hildesheim, Germany
* Josep Lluís Arcos, IIIACSIC, Spain
* Kevin Ashley, University of Pittsburgh, USA
* Brigitte Bartsch-Spoerl, BSR Consulting, Germany
* Ralph Bergmann, University of Trier, Germany
* Isabelle Bichindaritz, University of Washington, USA
* Enrico Blanzieri, University of Trento, Italy
* L. Karl Branting, LiveWire Logic, Inc
* Derek Bridge, University College Cork, Ireland
* Stefanie Bruninghaus, University of Pittsburgh, USA
* Robin Burke, DePaul University, USA
* Hans-Dieter Burkhard, Humboldt University Berlin, Germany
* Bill Cheetham, General Electric Co. NY, USA
* Susan Craw, Robert Gordon University, Scotland
* Michael T. Cox, BBN Technologies, Cambridge, USA
* Pádraig Cunningham, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
* Belén Díaz-Agudo, Univ. Complutense de Madrid, Spain
* Kurt D. Fenstermacher, University of Arizona, USA
* Peter Funk, Malardalens University, Sweden
* Ashok Goel, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
* Andrew Golding, Lycos Inc, USA
* Pedro A. Gonzalez Calero, Univ. Complutense de Madrid, Spain
* Christiane Gresse von Wangenheim, Uni. do Vale do Itajai, Brazil
* Igor Jurisica, Ontario Cancer Institute, Canada
* David Leake, Indiana University, USA
* Ramon Lopez de Mantaras, IIIACSIC, Spain
* Michel Manago, Kaidara, France
* Cynthia R. Marling, Ohio University, USA
* Lorraine McGinty, University College Dublin, Ireland
* Bruce McLaren, CMU, USA
* David McSherry, University of Ulster, Northern Ireland
* Erica Melis, Universitat des Saarlandes, Germany
* Mirjam Minor, University of Trier, Germany
* Stefania Montani, University of Eastern Piedmont, Italy
* Hector Munoz-Avila, Lehigh University, USA
* Bart Netten, Delft University, The Netherlands
* David Patterson University of Ulster, Northern Ireland
* Petra Perner, Institute of Computer Vision and Applied CS, Germany
* Enric Plaza, IIIACSIC, Spain
* Luigi Portinale, University of Eastern Piedmont, Italy
* Alun Preece, University of Aberdeen, UK
* Lisa S. Purvis, Xerox Corporation, NY, USA
* Francesco Ricci, ITC-irst, Italy
* Michael M. Richter, University of Kaiserslautern, Germany
* Edwina Rissland, University of Massachusetts/Amherst, USA
* Rainer Schmidt, Universitat Rostock, Germany
* Barry Smyth, University College Dublin, Ireland
* Raja Sooriamurthi, Indiana University, USA
* Armin Stahl DFKI, Germany
* Jerzy Surma, Warsaw School of Economics, Poland
* Henry Tirri, University of Helsinki, Finland
* Brigitte Trousse, INRIA Sophia Antipolis, France
* Ian Watson, AI-CBR, University of Auckland, New Zealand
* Rosina Weber, Drexel University, USA
* Stefan Wess, empolis, Germany
* David C. Wilson, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA
* Nirmalie Wiratunga, Robert Gordon University, Scotland
* Qiang Yang, University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong



--

----------------------------------------------------------------------
              Dr. Thomas Roth-Berghofer - Senior Researcher
                    Technical Director Project NEPOMUK
----------------------------------------------------------------------
   TU Kaiserslautern        Bld. 57, Room 384               DFKI GmbH
----------------------------------------------------------------------
mailto:trb@...             http://www.dfki.uni-kl.de/~roth/

** Apologies if you receive multiple copies of this announcement **
        ** Please forward to anyone who might be interested **
-------------------------------------------------------------------
                         CALL FOR PAPERS

     8th European Conference on Case-Based Reasoning ECCBR 2006

                    Ölüdeniz/Fethiye, Turkey
                       4-7 September 2006

                     http://2006.eccbr.org/

          Paper Submission Deadline: 13 February 2006

-------------------------------------------------------------------

ECCBR 2006 is the 8th European Conference on Case-Based Reasoning
following a series of successful European conferences/workshops.
This four-day conference will be held in the conference center of
the Lykiaworld Resort hotel in Ölüdeniz/Fethiye, Turkey.

The ECCBR Industry Day starts the program, followed on the second
day by workshops devoted to specific areas of interest to the CBR
community. The remaining two days feature invited talks,
presentations and posters on both theoretical and applied research
in CBR. Announcements concerning these events will be posted at
the website.

Submission Topics
-----------------
The ECCBR 2006 Program Committee invites submissions of original
research and application papers on all aspects of Case-Based
Reasoning. We especially encourage submissions on new areas. Example
submission areas include, but are not limited to:

* Case and knowledge representation, acquisition, modeling,
   visualization, maintenance and management for CBR
* CBR system design issues (e.g., indexing, retrieval, similarity
   assessment, and adaptation)
* System architectures and integration of CBR with other methods
* Collaborative agent architectures involving CBR
* Learning and knowledge acquisition for CBR knowledge containers
* Analogical reasoning, cognitive models, and creative reasoning
   approaches based on CBR
* Formal, empirical, and psychological evaluations of CBR models
   and systems
* Methodologies for developing and maintaining CBR applications
* Lazy- (case/instance/memory-based) learning methods
* Case-based approaches to planning, scheduling, design and robot
   navigation
* Applications of CBR (e.g., in customer support, education,
   electronic commerce, pattern recognition, image processing, legal
   reasoning, manufacturing and medicine)
* Human Computer Interaction: Adaptive interfaces, user modeling,
   customization and personalization using CBR
* CBR-related areas (e.g., corporate memories, decision support,
   information retrieval, knowledge discovery, data mining, knowledge
   and experience management, software reuse and engineering redesign)
* Computer models of case-based argumentation
* Intelligent tutoring systems teaching or employing CBR
* Explanations and CBR
* Context and CBR
* Peer-to-Peer Networks and CBR
* CBR in the Semantic Web

Papers may be accepted for presentation as talks, or as posters.

Proceedings
-----------
All accepted papers will appear in the conference proceedings
published by Springer Verlag in the Lecture Notes in Artificial
Intelligence series (http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/index.html).

Important Dates
---------------
February 13, 2006 Paper Submission Deadline
March 30, 2006 Acceptance notification
April 25, 2006 Camera-ready copy due

Conference Chairs
-----------------
Mehmet H. Göker, PwC (mehmet.goker at us.pwc.com)
Thomas R. Roth-Berghofer, DFKI (trb at dfki.uni-kl.de)

Local Chair
-----------
H. Altay Güvenir, Bilkent University
(guvenir at cs.bilkent.edu.tr)

Workshop Chair
--------------
Mirjam Minor, University of Trier
(minor at uni-trier.de)

Industry Day Chair
-------------------
Bill Cheetham, General Electric (cheetham at crd.ge.com)

Review Criteria
---------------
Submissions must be identified as either *research* or *application*
papers and will be reviewed using criteria appropriate to their
category. Review criteria for research papers will include scientific
significance, originality, technical quality, and clarity. Review
criteria for application papers will include practical or economic
significance, potential to lead to more powerful technology, technical
quality, and clarity.

Submission Procedure
--------------------
Authors must submit a full paper plus a title page by the submission
date. The title page must include: name(s) of the author(s); address,
phone number, fax number and email of the contact person; title and
abstract of the paper; a set of keywords; a statement whether the
submission is to be reviewed as a research paper or an application
paper.

The title page, the abstract and the text of the paper must be
submitted electronically through the ECCBR web site. You will find
details there in due time.


Submission Format
-----------------
Papers MUST be submitted in Springer LNCS format, which is the format
required for the final camera ready copy, with a maximum of 15 pages.
Authors instructions along with LaTeX and Word macro files are
available on the web: http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html.
All authors of accepted papers must transfer their copyrights to
Springer.

Multiple Submission Policy
--------------------------
Papers submitted to other conferences or journals must state this fact
on the title page. If a paper will appear in another conference or
journal, it must be withdrawn from ECCBR2006 before March 30, 2006.
This restriction does not apply to papers appearing in proceedings of
specialized workshops.

Author Registration Policy
--------------------------
In order for a paper to appear in the proceedings, at least one of the
authors must register for the conference by the deadline for
camera-ready copy (April 25, 2006).

Program Committee Members
-------------------------
* Agnar Aamodt, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
* David W. Aha, Naval Research Laboratory, USA
* Esma Aimeur, University of Montreal, Canada
* Vincent Aleven, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
* Ethem Alpaydin, Bogaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey
* Klaus-Dieter Althoff, University of Hildesheim, Germany
* Josep Lluís Arcos, IIIACSIC, Spain
* Kevin Ashley, University of Pittsburgh, USA
* Brigitte Bartsch-Spoerl, BSR Consulting, Germany
* Ralph Bergmann, University of Trier, Germany
* Isabelle Bichindaritz, University of Washington, USA
* Enrico Blanzieri, University of Trento, Italy
* L. Karl Branting, LiveWire Logic, Inc
* Derek Bridge, University College Cork, Ireland
* Stefanie Bruninghaus, University of Pittsburgh, USA
* Robin Burke, DePaul University, USA
* Hans-Dieter Burkhard, Humboldt University Berlin, Germany
* Bill Cheetham, General Electric Co. NY, USA
* Susan Craw, Robert Gordon University, Scotland
* Michael Cox, Wright State University, Dayton, USA
* Pádraig Cunningham, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
* Belén Díaz-Agudo, Univ. Complutense de Madrid, Spain
* Kurt D. Fenstermacher, University of Arizona, USA
* Peter Funk, Malardalens University, Sweden
* Ashok Goel, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
* Andrew Golding, Lycos Inc, USA
* Pedro A. Gonzalez Calero, Univ. Complutense de Madrid, Spain
* Christiane Gresse von Wangenheim, Uni. do Vale do Itajai, Brazil
* Igor Jurisica, Ontario Cancer Institute, Canada
* David Leake, Indiana University, USA
* Ramon Lopez de Mantaras, IIIACSIC, Spain
* Michel Manago, Kaidara, France
* Cynthia R. Marling, Ohio University, USA
* Lorraine McGinty, University College Dublin, Ireland
* Bruce McLaren, CMU, USA
* David McSherry, University of Ulster, Northern Ireland
* Erica Melis, Universitat des Saarlandes, Germany
* Mirjam Minor, University of Trier, Germany
* Stefania Montani, University of Eastern Piedmont, Italy
* Hector Munoz-Avila, Lehigh University, USA
* Bart Netten, Delft University, The Netherlands
* David Patterson University of Ulster, Northern Ireland
* Petra Perner, Institute of Computer Vision and Applied CS, Germany
* Enric Plaza, IIIACSIC, Spain
* Luigi Portinale, University of Eastern Piedmont, Italy
* Alun Preece, University of Aberdeen, UK
* Lisa S. Purvis, Xerox Corporation, NY, USA
* Francesco Ricci, ITC-irst, Italy
* Michael M. Richter, University of Kaiserslautern, Germany
* Edwina Rissland, University of Massachusetts/Amherst, USA
* Rainer Schmidt, Universitat Rostock, Germany
* Barry Smyth, University College Dublin, Ireland
* Raja Sooriamurthi, Indiana University, USA
* Armin Stahl DFKI, Germany
* Jerzy Surma, Technical University of Wroclaw, Poland
* Henry Tirri, University of Helsinki, Finland
* Brigitte Trousse, INRIA Sophia Antipolis, France
* Ian Watson, AI-CBR, University of Auckland, New Zealand
* Rosina Weber, Drexel University, USA
* Stefan Wess, empolis, Germany
* David C. Wilson, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA
* Nirmalie Wiratunga, Robert Gordon University, Scotland
* Qiang Yang, University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong

--

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              Dr. Thomas Roth-Berghofer - Senior Researcher
                    Technical Project Director NEPOMUK
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   TU Kaiserslautern        Bld. 57, Room 384               DFKI GmbH
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mailto:trb@...             http://www.dfki.uni-kl.de/~roth/

Dear fellow explanation researchers,

Here is the bibliographic information on an article I mentioned
briefly at the symposium.

Best, trb


@inproceedings{Cohnitz2000,
      Author = {Daniel Cohnitz},
      Booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fourth International Congress of
the Society for Analytic Philosophy},
      Editor = {Ansgar Beckermann and Christian Nimtz},
      Note = {\url{http://www.gap-im-netz.de/gap4Konf/Proceedings4/pdf/
6%20Wt03%20Cohnitz.pdf} [Last access: 2005-11-27]},
      Title = {Explanations are like salted peanuts},
      Year = {2000}}


--
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        Dr. Thomas Roth-Berghofer - http://thomas.roth-berghofer.de
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