[Event at CIG] CfP: RobOntics @ RO-MAN 2023 (submission by June 30)

[Stefano Borgo]

*International Workshop on Ontologies for Autonomous Robotics* 
(RobOntics) @ RO-MAN 2023
https://robontics.github.io


We encourage researchers interested in the fields of robotics and 
knowledge engineering to submit original extended abstract (2-4 pages) 
or papers (5-8 pages) research papers by June 30th 2023.




*Workshop Motivation*


ROBONTICS focuses on the area of robot autonomy enabled by 
knowledge-driven approaches, and in particular formal ontologies, in all 
their possible uses. It aims to foster interaction across robotics, 
ontology, and knowledge representation and reasoning, to investigate 
promising approaches and to review progress in knowledge-driven robotics.
Today ontologies are used in robotics and standardization efforts for 
robotics knowledge management. Many open problems involve autonomous 
robotic agents operating in natural, artificial or socio-technical 
environments, and several research projects in healthcare assistance, 
logistics, autonomous driving, etc, aim to bring robots into realistic 
human environments.
One of the difficulties is the amount of real-world knowledge that an 
agent needs to have to be able to act competently and autonomously. 
Further, any item of knowledge is often relevant for many agents and in 
several scenarios, and as such should be reusable. To garner trust, to 
ensure dependability, and to enable debugging, knowledge should also be 
accessible to human operators, both in terms of explaining what 
knowledge is present in a system, and of providing ways to easily amend 
it if necessary.

*Special Topic of ROBONTICS 2023*
While we maintain our usual list of topics, this edition of ROBONTICS is 
particularly interested in the problem of modeling culture and social 
scenarios (broadly understood) via ontology and other knowledge 
representation techniques.



*Important Dates*


Submission deadline: June 30, 2023
Notification: July 15, 2023
Workshop: August 28, 2023



*List of Topics* (partial)


Participants are invited to submit original extended abstract (2-4 
pages) or papers (5-8 pages) on topics such as:

-    Foundational issues:
  o    Are there some ontological approaches better suited than others 
for autonomous robotics? why?
  o    How should we ontologically model notions like capability, 
action, interaction, context etc. in robotics?
  o    How can ontology be used to model culture, cultural knowledge and 
cultural behavior?

-    Robustness:
  o    how can ontologies be used to help robots cope with the variety 
and relatively fluid structure of human environments?

-    Ontologies in the perception-action loop:
  o    what roles can ontology play in autonomous manipulation?
  o    how can ontology be used to support machine learning for object 
classification?

-    Interactivity:
  o    how can knowledge about other agents present in the environment 
be modelled?
  o    how can ontology be used to model the flow of an interaction, 
e.g., in the case of shared tasks?

-    Normed behavior:
  o    how can we ontologically represent norms and cultural expectations?
  o    how can expectations be acquired? would they be the same for 
robots and for humans?

-    Explainability:
  o    decision chains are very complex; how can these be organized and 
presented at various levels of detail for the benefit of a human user?
  o    what is an explanation? what is a good explanation? how it be 
generated from a collection of knowledge items?

*Submission Information*
Beside regular papers, position and survey papers are also welcome. All 
the contributions to the workshop must be submitted according to the IOS 
press format available from
https://www.iospress.nl/service/authors/latex-and-word-tools-for-book-authors/
Papers will be refereed and accepted on the basis of their merit, 
originality, and relevance. Each paper will be reviewed by at least two 
Program Committee members. Papers must be submitted electronically in 
PDF, using this link:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=robontics2023

*Publication*
Depending on interest, accepted works will be published in an open 
access CEUR volume as part of the new IAOA series (see 
http://ceur-ws.org/iaoa.html) or a special issue in a suitable journal 
will be organized.

Further information at the ROBONTICS website:
https://robontics.github.io


-- 
*Laboratory for Applied Ontology* (LOA), ISTC-CNR
Trento, Italy
http://www.loa.istc.cnr.it