NRAC 2011: Call for papers

[Stavros Vassos]

  -- Please accept our apologies if you receive multiple postings --
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		    9th International Workshop on
	     Nonmonotonic Reasoning, Action and Change
			     (NRAC 2011)

		July 17 (full day) & 18 (morning) 2011

			   Barcelona, Spain
		(held in conjunction with IJCAI 2011)

	 URL: http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/~ssardina/NRAC2011

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CALL FOR PAPERS
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The biennial Workshop on Nonmonotonic Reasoning, Action, and Change (NRAC) is
an established workshop with an active and loyal community. Since its inception
in 1995, it has always been held in conjunction with IJCAI, each time with
growing success. We invite submissions of research papers for presentation at
NRAC 2011 edition, a 1.5-day workshop to be held in Barcelona, Spain as part
of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-11)
workshop program (July 16-22, 2011).


Workshop Aims

An intelligent agent exploring a rich, dynamic world, needs cognitive
capabilities in addition to basic functionalities for perception and reaction.
The abilities to reason nonmonotonically, to reason about actions, and to
change one's beliefs, have been identified as fundamental high-level cognitive
functions necessary for common sense. Research in all three areas has made
significant progress during the last decades. It is, however, crucial to bear in
mind the common goal of designing intelligent agents. Researchers should be
aware of advances in all three fields since often advances in one field can be
translated into advances in another. Many deep relationships have already been
established between the three areas and the primary aim of this workshop is to
further promote this cross-fertilization. A closer look at recent developments
in the three fields reveals how fruitful such cross-fertilization can be.

Comparing and contrasting current formalisms for Nonmonotonic Reasoning,
Reasoning about Action and Belief Revision helps identify the strengths and
weaknesses of the various methods available. It is an important activity that
allows researchers to evaluate the state-of-the-art. Indeed a significant
advantage of using logical formalisms as representation schemes is that they
facilitate the evaluation process. Moreover, following the initial success, more
complex real-world applications are now within grasp. Experimentation with
prototype implementations not only helps to identify obstacles that arise in
transforming theoretical solutions into operational solutions, but also
highlights the need for the improvement of existing formal integrative
frameworks for intelligent agents at the ontological level.

For the purpose of developing practical solutions to real-world problems, some
obvious questions arise: What nonmonotonic logics and what theories of action
and change have been implemented? How to compare them? Which ones are
implementable? What can be learned from existing applications? What is needed to
improve their scope and performance? Despite the progress over the last few
years, these questions and other related problems for theories of nonmonotonic
reasoning, action, and change, still remain open. We hope to explore new
approaches to these problems during the workshop.

This workshop will bring together researchers from all three areas with the aim
to:

 * Compare and evaluate existing formalisms.
 * Report on new developments and innovations.
 * Identify the most important open problems in all three areas.
 * Identify possibilities of solution transferral between the areas.
 * Identify important challenges for the advancement of the areas.


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SPECIAL THEME
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There will be a special theme at this year's NRAC. We especially encourage
submissions that describe applications of research in the three main areas of
interest of the workshop. In particular, we welcome submissions about
competitions and contests that are related to the areas of interest of the
workshop, such as the ICAPS Planning Competitions
(http://ipc.icaps-conference.org/), the Answer Set Programming Competition
(http://www.mat.unical.it/aspcomp2011), the General Game Playing Competition
(http://games.stanford.edu/), and the Multi-Agent Contest
(http://www.multiagentcontest.org/).

We plan to devote a session of the workshop on papers that address the special
theme and accompany the presentation of these papers by a panel discussion about
the difficulties that arise when applying research of this field in real-world
systems, as well as insights about how we can stimulate research, attract
students, test and compare approaches in non-trivial domains, identify new
challenges, and build a closer connection between academic research and
practical applications. We also plan to arrange invited talks around the
special theme.


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IMPORTANT DATES
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The dates below are tentative;  please check the workshop Web page for confirmed
dates.

Submission deadline: 			March 14, 2011
Notification date: 			April 25, 2011
Camera ready submission deadline: 	May 16, 2011
Workshop: 				July 17 (full day) & 18 (morning), 2011
IJCAI-2011 conference: 			July 16-22, 2011


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REGISTRATION AND PARTICIPATION
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Registration for NRAC 2011 is managed by IJCAI. Forms and Information on
registration, pricing, travel and accommodation are available on the IJCAI-11
website. Participants are strongly urged to register as soon as possible to
take advantage of discounted registration fees and to secure accommodation.

We welcome participation and submission from all members of the Artificial
Intelligence research community.

Like previous NRAC workshops, we hope NRAC 2011 to be a highly participatory
and discussion-oriented forum. The workshop will begin with a distinguished
invited speaker, and will conclude with a panel on the hot issues identified
during the day. Authors of accepted papers will present their work, with ample
time for discussion.

A complete program will be made available as soon as a final decision on
accepted papers has been made.


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SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS
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NRAC-11 paper submissions must be formatted according to the IJCAI-11 paper
guidelines at http://ijcai-11.org/.

Papers must not exceed 8 formatted pages. Overlength papers will not be
accepted for publication. Papers must be submitted electronically in PDF format
by the due date. More details about the deadline for submission and notification
of acceptance will follow.

Please ensure the author names and affiliation are under the title.

Submissions should emphasize and justify their innovation and significance.

Please note: Papers should describe new unpublished work. Accepted IJCAI-11
Papers and Posters will not be accepted at NRAC-11.

Submission website:

	http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=nrac2011

Printed proceedings will be offered as working notes to delegates, and will be
published online (with an ISBN) through the ePress of the University of
Technology, Sydney.


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PROGRAMME COMMITTEE (partial)
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Xiaoping Chen, University of Science and Technology China, China
Jim Delgrande, Simon Fraser Unviersity, Canada
Jérôme Lang, Universite Paul Sabatier, France
Thomas Meyer, Meraka Institute, South Africa
Michael Thielscher, University of NSW, Australia
Sheila McIlraith, University of Toronto, Canada
Eduardo Fermé University of Madeira, Portugal
Dongmo Zhang, University of Western Sydney, Australia
Mehdi Dastani, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Giuseppe De Giacomo, Sapienza Universita' di Roma, Italy
Christian Fritz, PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), USA
Leora Morgenstern, IBM Watson Research Center, USA

[others to be confirmed]


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ORGANISING COMMITTEE
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Sebastian Sardina, RMIT University, Australia
Stavros Vassos, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece
Pavlos Peppas, University of Patras, Greece
Andreas Herzig, Universite Paul Sabatier, France

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STEERING COMMITTEE
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Gerhard Brewka, University of Leipzig, Germany
Leora Morgenstern, IBM Research, USA
Maurice Pagnucco, University of NSW, Australia
Pavlos Peppas, University of Patras, Greece
Michael Thielscher, Dresden University of Technology, Germany
Mary-Anne Williams, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia