COMMONSENSE'07 - CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

[Rob Miller]

COMMONSENSE'07 - CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

We invite requests for participation in Commonsense'07, the 8th  
International Symposium on Logical Formalizations of Commonsense  
Reasoning, to be held as part of the AAAI Spring Symposium Series,  
March 26-28 2007, at Stanford University, California, USA. Persons  
wishing to attend the symposium should submit a 1-2 page research  
summary including if possible a list of relevant publications. (This  
is not required for the authors of submitted papers.) PhD students  
need only to send the tentative title and abstract of their  
dissertation. All requests for attendance should be sent to  
commonsense07 at ucl.ac.uk.

To endow computers with common sense is one of the major long-term  
goals of Artificial Intelligence research. Although we know how to  
build programs that excel at certain bounded or mechanical tasks  
which humans find difficult, such as playing chess, we have very  
little idea how to program computers to do well at commonsense tasks  
which are easy for humans. One approach to this problem is to  
formalize commonsense reasoning using mathematical logic.

The challenges to creating such a formalization include the  
accumulation of large amounts of knowledge about our everday world,  
the representation of this knowledge in suitable formal languages,  
the integration of different representations in a coherent way, and  
the development of explicit reasoning methods that use these  
representations. The scaling problem is a particular challenge. Many  
bounded tasks which we already know how to build still cannot scale  
to broad scenarios involving commonsense knowledge, such as query  
answering and web service compositon on the semantic web, corpora- 
based computational biology, diagnosis, exploration of unfamiliar  
domains by robots and autonomous vehicles, and natural-language  
question answering.

We aim at a science of commonsense reasoning that enables  
applications in such broad domains as well as a deeper understanding  
of the ways in which humans engage in commonsense reasoning. This is  
the theme of the symposium. It will bring together researchers who  
have studied the formalization of commonsense reasoning. The focus  
will be on representation rather than on algorithms, and on formal  
rather than informal methods.

Topics of interest include action and causality, ontologies, levels  
of granularity of ontology and reasoning, large commonsense knowledge  
bases, axiomatizations of benchmark commonsense problems exploration  
of new commmonsense domains in a preformal way, nonmonotonic  
reasoning, probabilistic reasoning, theories of context, mental  
attitudes, cognitive robotics, reasoning about interactions among  
agents, the Semantic Web, and natural language processing.

The symposium will be held in honor of John McCarthy, who will be 80  
years old in September 2007. John McCarthy is, of course, the father  
of formal commonsense reasoning. We hope this dedication goes some  
small way to acknowledging the enormous contribution he has made to  
the field, and the lasting leadership and vision he has provided for  
many of us.

For further information see www.ucl.ac.uk/commonsense07.