Cognitum 2017 - 3rd Workshop on Cognitive Knowledge Acquisition and Applications (Cognitum 2017)

Following the success of the well-attended First and Second Workshops on Cognitive Knowledge Acquisition and Applications, we are excited to continue this workshop series at IJCAI 2017 in Melbourne, Australia. This workshop focuses on disseminating work that bridges cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence in an informal setting that promotes lively discussion and community-building among the participants.
Cognitive systems are able to learn and reason in a manner that facilitates their natural and fruitful interaction with humans. Ultimately, this interaction aims to extend and enhance human cognition, not by having cognitive systems operate as subsidiary workers that solve problems for humans, but by having cognitive systems act as expert assistants able to collaborate with humans and provide them with advice in a form compatible with how humans naturally process and understand information.
Knowledge acquisition is central to the design of such cognitive systems. Knowledge should be in a form that allows systems to explain their inferences and accept user feedback. At the same time, knowledge acquisition should exhibit characteristics akin to those of human learning, so that humans can relate to it and be able to interact with it as if it were a knowledgeable colleague. Thus, we mean “cognitive” in the workshop’s title to characterize both the form of knowledge and the process of its acquisition.
Unlike the significant body of work on mining the web for facts or answers to specific questions (e.g., NELL, IBM’s Watson system for Jeopardy!), the workshop’s emphasis is on the acquisition of general inference rules that can be applied by a cognitive system in novel situations to elaborate what has been sensed with plausible and useful inferences. Along with computational efficiency, scalability, autonomy, and formal analysis of the process, key is also the use of naturalistic algorithms. We are more interested in contributions that propose acquisition processes that could potentially err more (when typical humans would also err), but are simple and intuitive, rather than acquisition processes that use heavy computational machinery to improve performance at the expense of psychological validity.
Since knowledge acquisition cannot proceed independently of other aspects of cognition, like perception, reasoning, and decision making, we also welcome contributions on other aspects of cognition, as long as they are directly tied to knowledge acquisition within a unified framework. We particularly encourage the demonstration of (prototype) cognitive systems that implement the proposed frameworks and discuss solutions to pragmatic concerns that had to be addressed.
We welcome ongoing and exciting preliminary work. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Formal frameworks for acquiring cognitive knowledge.
- Principled evaluation of acquired cognitive knowledge.
- Psychologically-guided design of the acquisition process.
- Considerations related to scalability and parallelization.
- Active choice among available learning data/resources.
- Representation languages for cognitive knowledge.
- Static versus temporal/causal cognitive knowledge.
- Interaction of acquisition with perception and reasoning.
- Alternative acquisition methods (e.g., crowdsourcing).
- Acquisition from media other than text (e.g., video).
- Architecture and implementation of cognitive systems.
- Real-world applications that utilize cognitive knowledge.
As part of this third instantiation of the workshop, we particularly encourage work on the theme:
Intelligent Assistants: Explaining Inferences and Accepting User Feedback
--- Important Dates ---
May 9, 2017: Submission deadline
June 6, 2017: Acceptance notification
July 18, 2017: Final PDF file deadline
August 20, 2017: Workshop in Melbourne, Australia (tentative)
--- Submission Instructions ---
Papers must be formatted according to the IJCAI 2017 guidelines (http://ijcai-17.org/FormattingGuidelinesIJCAI-17.z...), and be at most 6 pages long, plus an additional bibliography page. Submissions (in PDF) are accepted through EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cognitum20...
--- Workshop Organizers ---
Loizos Michael, Open University of Cyprus
Erik T. Mueller, Capital One
--- Program Committee ---
David Buchanan, Elemental Cognition/Bridgewater Associates
Ernest Davis, New York University
James Fan, customerserviceai.com
Hannaneh Hajishirzi, University of Washington
Antonis Kakas, University of Cyprus
Zachary Kulis, Capital One
Joohyung Lee, Arizona State University
Rob Miller, University College London
Henry Minsky, Google/Nest Labs
J. William Murdock, IBM
Ravi Palla, Capital One
John Prager, IBM
Alessandra Russo, Imperial College London
Claudia Schulz, Imperial College London
Biplav Srivastava, IBM
Gyorgy Turan, University of Illinois at Chicago