KDS 2016 - Third Workshop on Knowledge, Data, and Systems for Cognitive Computing

As AI techniques are increasingly employed in real world applications and scenarios, their contact with humans is ever-increasing. Traditionally, most AI systems have tended to exclude humans and the vagaries that accompany them in a hermetic fashion. This has enabled the development of algorithms and even end-to-end systems that produce “optimal” artifacts while cutting humans completely out of the loop, while still operating in a world where the assumption is that humans will be the end-consumers of the artifacts produced by such systems.
Cognitive Computing is a new paradigm that seeks to replace that diffidence and sometimes even mistrust of humans with a vision of successful cooperation and teaming between humans and AI systems and agents. The key idea is to not just accommodate humans in the decision-making loop, but to go to great lengths to make such participation as natural and simple as possible. Building such cognitive computing systems and agents will thus require contributions from many (if not most) fields within AI, and some without as well.
Given the focus on interaction with humans and their inclusion “in the loop”, such cognitive computing systems must display a ‘full-stack’ focus. That is, deployment of such systems in the real world is only possible by focusing on all stages of development, starting with data and problem analysis, through algorithm design, knowledge representation and reasoning, user interaction and experience, to finally infrastructure and hardware issues required for deployment and scaling. Such focus will result in the materialization of full-stack services and systems that can fold human users into the loop while effecting change in the world (either in a virtual fashion, or a physical embodiment). We call this process the “closing of the cognitive loop”, and all contributions to the workshop will be evaluated on their ability to demonstrate the successful closing of this loop, or technical extensions to existing work that can close it.
The aim of this workshop is to bring together the work of researchers who are interested in advancing the state-of-the-art not merely in their specific sub-field of AI, but are also willing to engage in technically directed discussions on what is missing currently from their work that is needed to turn it into a full-stack service that can gainfully interact with humans and the world at large. Work that is submitted to the workshop ? whether in the form of papers, or talks ? will be expected to address this central question, and make some effort towards addressing the challenges raised by taking a stand-alone AI contribution and converting it into a cognitive computing system or service. The workshop will build on and continue themes explored in two prior workshops, one at AAAI 2014 (https://sites.google.com/site/cognitivecomputingah...) and another at IJCAI 2015 (http://cognitum.ws/).