Fifth International Workshop on Modelling and Reasoning in Context

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Call for Papers, MRC 2008

Fifth International Workshop on Modelling and Reasoning in Context

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

Submission deadline: March 14, 2008
http://events.idi.ntnu.no/mrc2008


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

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