MRC 2016 - Eighth International Workshop Modelling and Reasoning in Context

Context plays an increasingly important role in modern IT applications. Context sensitivity and awareness is becoming essential, not only for mobile systems, ambient computing and the internet of things, but also for a wide range of other areas, such as learning and teaching solutions, collaborative software, web engineering and health care work-flow. Advancing the use and understanding of context beyond stimuli-response systems suggests a knowledge perspective on modelling and reasoning.
From an AI perspective, one of the challenges is to integrate context with other types of knowledge as a major additional source for reasoning, decision-making, and adaptation and to form a coherent and versatile architecture. There is a common understanding that achieving desired behaviour from intelligent systems will depend on the ability to represent and manipulate information about a rich range of contextual factors.
These factors may include not only physical characteristics of the task environment, but, possibly more importantly, many other aspects including cognitive factors such as the knowledge states (of both the application and user) or emotions, and social factors such as networks, relations, roles, and hierarchies. This representation and reasoning problem presents research challenges to which methodologies derived from areas such as artificial intelligence, knowledge management, human-computer interaction, semiotics and psychology can contribute solutions.
Despite the value of diverse approaches to context, integrating findings from the social sciences into the design of context-aware systems and building psychologically plausible knowledge models remains problematic. Furthermore, it is difficult to deal with uncertainty on different levels, from interpretation of uncertain sensor input data through to identification of contexts with fuzzy borders. Moreover, the ability of the system to use explanations, both as a part of its reasoning and as a means of communication with the user, requires further consideration.
This workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners exploring modelling and reasoning issues and approaches for contextualised systems, to share their problems, techniques and success stories across different research and application areas.
Background to MRC
MRC is an interdisciplinary workshop with a focus on applications within computer science. Because of this focus the workshop primarily attracts participants from within the computer science community and specifically within artificial intelligence. However, MRC has always had a strong interdisciplinary appeal and does draw from fields such as linguistics, semiotics, philosophy, mathematics, cognitive science, social sciences and psychology as well as various sub-fields within computer science.
MRC has traditionally been held at either the bi-annual International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context (CONTEXT) or AI-related conferences such as ECAI, IJCAI and AAAI. These workshops have been successful in raising awareness about the importance of context as a major issue for future intelligent systems, especially for the use of mobile devices and current research on ubiquitous computing. At the same time, advances in methodologies for modelling and retrieving context have been made and MRC continues to provide a venue for the discussion and furthering of research into issues surrounding context.
MRC 2016 will be held at the The 22nd European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2016) in The Hague, Holland. The main conference website has more information about the location and the registration process as well as other workshops. Participants for MRC will have to register for ECAI, since there are no workshop only registrations. In particular, at least one author of any paper accepted for presentation at MRC will have to register for ECAI. If you register for ECAI, you will also get free access to sessions of the co-located Collective Intentionality Conference.