NRAC'13 Call for papers

[Hannes Straß]

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IJCAI-2013 Workshop NRAC'13

Tenth International Workshop on Nonmonotonic Reasoning, Action and Change

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3-5 August, 2013, Beijng, China


* Web site: http://innovation.it.uts.edu.au/nrac2013/

* First 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 2013, a one-day workshop to be held in 
Beijing, China as part of the International Joint Conference on 
Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-13) workshop program.

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 two 
decades of the past century. 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. This workshop has the specific aim of 
promoting cross-fertilization. The interaction fostered by the biannual 
NRAC workshops has helped to facilitate solutions to the frame problem, 
ramification problem and other crucial issues on the research agenda.

Much recent research into reasoning about actions has been devoted to 
the design and implementation of languages and systems for Cognitive 
Robotics. Successful case studies demonstrate the applicability of these 
results for furnishing autonomous robots with high-level cognitive 
capabilities that enable plan-oriented behavior. Advancing the field of 
Cognitive Robotics, current research in reasoning about actions focuses 
on two crucial aspects of robots acting in open, real-world 
environments: Reasoning about knowledge and belief, and dealing with a 
challenge known as the qualification problem.

Autonomous, mobile robots choose most of their actions conditioned on 
the state of their environment. As their information about the world 
state is generally limited, robots are equipped with sensors for the 
purpose of acquiring information about the external world. The use of 
sensing actions is often an integral part of a successful plan, and in 
order to devise these plans robots need an explicit representation of 
what they believe the world looks like and how sensing affects their 
beliefs. Moreover, the execution of a plan needs to be constantly 
monitored and beliefs have to be revised in accordance with new 
observations. One goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers 
from the two areas of reasoning about actions and theory change, in 
order to join their effort of developing theories and designing systems 
for intelligent use of sensors and belief revision.

Intelligent agents acting in open environments inevitably face the 
qualification problem, that is, the executability of an action can never 
be predicted with absolute certainty; unexpected circumstances, albeit 
unlikely, may at any time prevent the agent from performing an intended 
action. Planning and acting under this proviso requires the agent to 
rigorously assume away, by default, all of the numerous possible but 
unlikely qualifications of their actions, lest the agent be unable to 
devise plans which, although not guaranteed of success, are perfectly 
reasonable. Assuming away unlikely but not impossible qualifications 
means that, if to the surprise of the agent an action actually fails, 
then the default conclusion should no longer be adhered to. In this 
respect the entire process is intrinsically nonmonotonic, which shows 
the increasing importance of pursuing the interrelation between 
reasoning about actions and nonmonotonic reasoning.

Comparing and contrasting our 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 reach. An 
implementational testbed is a primary means by which existing theories 
of nonmonotonic reasoning, action and change are evaluated. 
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.

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

Compare and evaluate existing formalisms.
Report on new developments.
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.

This workshop at IJCAI-2013 will provide a unique opportunity for 
researchers from all three fields to be brought together at a single 
forum with the prime objective to communicate important recent advances 
in each field and exchange ideas. As these fundamental areas mature it 
is vital that researchers maintain a dialogue through which they can 
cooperatively explore common links. The workshop's goal will be to work 
against the tendency of these rapidly advancing fields to drift apart.

* Special theme

This year's special theme is the qualification problem. That is, we 
especially encourage submissions that deal with any aspect of the 
fundamental problem of assuming away by default unexpected circumstances 
preventing the successful execution of an action. These aspects include, 
but are not limited to:

- New technical solutions for (aspects of) the qualification problem.
- Comparison of existing approaches to the qualification problem.
- The distinction between endogenous and exogenous qualifications, that 
is, those that can be explained within the theory vs. those that the 
theory can accommodate but not explain.
- The distinction between strong and weak qualifications, that is, 
circumstances that prevent an action from being executed altogether vs. 
circumstances that prevent an action from producing a desired effect.

* Important Dates (tentative):
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19 April, 2013 - submission deadline
20 May, 2013 - author notification
7 June, 2013 - final versions due

Paper submission is managed through EasyChair, for details see the 
workshop web site.

* Workshop co-chairs:
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Jianmin Ji, University of Science and Technology of China
Hannes Strass, Leipzig University, Germany
Xun Wang, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia

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