StarAI 2013 - Workshop on Statistical Relational Artificial Intelligence (StarAI)

AAAI-13 Workshop on Statistical Relational Artificial Intelligence
(StarAI), July 15 2013, Bellevue, Washington, USA
Workshop Webpage: http://www.cs.wfu.edu/~snataraj/StaRAI/starai.htm
TOPIC:
The main purpose of the "Third Workshop on Statistical Relational AI
(StarAI)" is to bring together researchers and practitioners from two
sub-fields of AI: logical (or relational) AI and probabilistic (or
statistical) AI. (The first and second StarAI workshops were held in
conjunction with AAAI-2010 and UAI-2012 respectively, and were among
the most popular workshops at the respective conferences.) Despite the
fact that the two fields share many key features and often solve
similar problems and tasks, research in them has progressed
independently with little or no interaction. Moreover, the two fields
often use different notation and terminology making sharing results
rather difficult and cumbersome. Our long term goal is to change this
by achieving a synergy between logical and statistical AI and this
workshop will serve as a stepping stone towards realizing this big
picture view on AI.
Since its inception in the late 90s, StarAI has enjoyed great success.
Perhaps, its main success stories has been lifted probabilistic
inference -- probabilistic inference algorithms that exploit symmetry.
Symmetries of models have been explored in many AI tasks such as
(mixed) integer programming, SAT, CSP, and MDPs. Surprisingly,
however, until recently, symmetries have not been the subject of
interest within probabilistic inference. Powerful representation and
reasoning StarAI tools have enabled several new applications in
diverse domains such as social networks, natural language processing,
Bio-informatics, the Web, robotics and computer vision.
The focus of the workshop will be on general-purpose representation,
reasoning and learning tools for StarAI as well as practical
applications. Specifically, the workshop will encourage active
participation from researchers in the following communities that focus
on building general-purpose tools: Satisfiability (SAT), constraint
satisfaction and programming (CP), (inductive) logic programming (LP
and ILP), graphical models and probabilistic reasoning (UAI),
statistical learning (NIPS and ICML), graph mining (KDD and ECML PKDD)
and probabilistic databases (VLDB and SIGMOD). It will also actively
involve researchers in the following, more applied communities:
natural language processing (ACL and EMNLP), information retrieval
(SIGIR, WWW and WSDM), vision (CVPR and ICCV), semantic web (ICSW and
ESWC) and Robotics (RSS and ICRA).
We believe that the current state-of-the-art in almost all the
subareas listed above provides us with a unique opportunity for
attempts at deepening the connections across them. Such connections
were partly established in previous StarAI workshops and time is ripe
to push StarAI research to the next level.
SUBMISSION:
We anticipate a one-day workshop with about 50 participants. The
workshop will include several contributed talks and posters, three
invited speakers, and a panel discussion. Those interested in
attending should submit either a technical paper (AAAI style, 6 pages
maximum) or a position statement (AAAI style, 2 pages maximum) in PDF
format via the following EasyChair site:
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=starai...
Key Dates:
* Papers due: Apr 14, 2013
* Notification: Apr 30, 2013
* Camera-ready due: May 9, 2013
* Day of Workshop: July 15, 2013
All submitted papers will be carefully peer-reviewed by multiple
reviewers and low-quality or off-topic papers will not be accepted.
For more information, please see the workshop website:
http://www.cs.wfu.edu/~snataraj/StaRAI/starai.htm
INVITED SPEAKERS:
Dan Suciu (University of Washington, USA)
Prasad Tadepalli (Oregon State University, USA)
Toby Walsh (NICTA and University of New South Wales, Australia)
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:
Vibhav Gogate (The University of Texas at Dallas, USA,
vgogate-AT-hlt.utdallas.edu),
Kristian Kersting (Univ. of Bonn, Fraunhofer IAIS, Germany,
kristian.kersting-AT-iais.fraunhofer.de),
Sriraam Natarajan (Wake Forest School of Medicine, USA,
snataraj-AT-wakehealth.edu),
David Poole (University of British Columbia, Canada, poole-AT-cs.ubc.ca).