CARS 2015 - Second International Symposium on Collaborative Analysis and Reasoning Systems (CARS 2015)

Every successful organization which has to operate effectively in complex situations and environments is heavily reliant on collaborative sense making activities that are well-adapted to supporting decision making. These activities, in turn, entail distributed systems that combine heterogeneous human and automated resources, often provisioned on-demand for the duration of a mission or project. Examples span a wide variety of domains, e.g.: assessing the instability and conflict in war-torn country like Afghanistan, analyzing public health issues to develop and evaluate alternative bird flu contagion scenarios, or predicting a new technology’s market potential and the viability of a new start-up. There are identifiable commonalities in the analysis process across even these very different domains. Each entails:
1. Decomposition or elaboration of taskings;
2. Generating and scheduling multiple, inter-dependent subtasks and/or workflows;
3. Discovery or collection of relevant information;
4. Development of candidate hypotheses, scenarios, explanations or solutions;
5. Evaluation of products in light of evidence, often leading to iterative or recursive
information discovery or collection activities;
6. Forming a conclusion, explanation, or plan; and,
7. Communicating this to others.
The analysis process introduces new needs, requirements and difficulties related to collaboration. Hence, collaborative organizations and technologies face several challenges in the field of information analysis.
This Symposium on Collaborative Analysis and Reasoning Systems (CARS), to be held as part of the 2015 International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems (CTS 2015), will focus on the collaboration issues applicable to intelligence analysis systems and tasks, with emphasis on these seven functions. As the tasks and sub-tasks are often inter-dependent and worked on by different and disparately located analysts and groups; how can information discovered, distilled, abstracted, transformed in one step be made available in forms that can potentially guide and influence the others steps?
The symposium will address issues related to the intelligence analysis infrastructure and services design, implementation and operation. It intends to address new collaboration challenges and present new ideas and solutions to the issues raised by the collaborative analysis domain. Ideas of interest include: (1) tools to speed and de-bias cognitive processing at individual and group levels of analysis; (2) tools to support collaboration, particularly through sharing or interchange of task representations, and, (3) integrated architectures which smoothly transition users between individual and collaborative work, both synchronous and asynchronous.
The aim is to have a dedicated forum that fosters closer interactions among researchers and users communities, providing an excellent opportunity for them to meet and discuss their ideas.
We invite original contributions from researchers in academia, research institutions and industry on these emerging and important areas of information technology. Selected papers will be solicited from the best papers of CARS 2015 sessions for submitting an extended version of their papers to a special issue in a leading international journal.
CARS Symposium topics include (but are not limited to) the following:
This symposium solicits contributions that address contemporary and future challenges in intelligence analysis infrastructure and services design, implementation and operation, particularly using collaboration systems, social networks, and information technologies.
? Fundamentals and Frameworks for Collaborative Intelligence Analysis Systems
? Fundamentals and Shared Representations to Support Collaboration on Intelligence Problems
? Tools to Support Decomposition of Tasks based on a Shared Understanding of the Problem
? Tools to Support Discovery and Selection of Information Relevant to the Problem.
? Tools to Identify Connections between Information Production and Need across the Tasks
? Tools to Generate Hypotheses, Scenarios, Explanations or Solutions
? Tools to Evaluate Solutions in the Light of other Tasks and Information Sources
? Tools to Develop Conclusions, Explanations or Plans based on Solution Evaluations
? Tools to Communicate Analysis Products highlighting Potential Issues and Key Assumptions
? Tools to Speed up and Debias Cognitive Analysis at Different Levels within a Collaboration
? Collaborative Analysis Models for Cloud Computing
? Collaborative Analysis Models for Multi Agent Systems
? Collaborative Analysis Models for Grid and Cluster Architectures
? Workflow Management Systems and Issues Related to Collaborative Analysis
? Collaborative Analysis Models for Mobile and Wireless Networks
? Collaborative Analysis Models for Coalition Networks
? Collaborative Analysis Models for Social Networks