NRAC 2011 - NRAC 2011 : The 9th International Workshop on Nonmonotonic Reasoning, Action and Change

The biennial Workshop on Nonmonotonic Reasoning, Action, and Change (NRAC) is an established workshop with an active and loyal community. Since its inception in 1995, it has always been held in conjunction with IJCAI, each time with growing success. We invite submissions of research papers for presentation at NRAC 2011 edition, a 1.5-day workshop to be held in Barcelona, Spain as part of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-11) workshop program (July 16-22, 2011).

Workshop Aims
An intelligent agent exploring a rich, dynamic world, needs cognitive capabilities in addition to basic functionalities for perception and reaction. The abilities to reason nonmonotonically, to reason about actions, and to change one's beliefs, have been identified as fundamental high-level cognitive functions necessary for common sense. Research in all three areas has made significant progress during the last decades. It is, however, crucial to bear in mind the common goal of designing intelligent agents. Researchers should be aware of advances in all three fields since often advances in one field can be translated into advances in another. Many deep relationships have already been established between the three areas and the primary aim of this workshop is to further promote this cross-fertilization. A closer look at recent developments in the three fields reveals how fruitful such cross-fertilization can be.

Comparing and contrasting current formalisms for Nonmonotonic Reasoning, Reasoning about Action and Belief Revision helps identify the strengths and weaknesses of the various methods available. It is an important activity that allows researchers to evaluate the state-of-the-art. Indeed a significant advantage of using logical formalisms as representation schemes is that they facilitate the evaluation process. Moreover, following the initial success, more complex real-world applications are now within grasp. Experimentation with prototype implementations not only helps to identify obstacles that arise in transforming theoretical solutions into operational solutions, but also highlights the need for the improvement of existing formal integrative frameworks for intelligent agents at the ontological level.

For the purpose of developing practical solutions to real-world problems, some obvious questions arise: What nonmonotonic logics and what theories of action and change have been implemented? How to compare them? Which ones are implementable? What can be learned from existing applications? What is needed to improve their scope and performance? Despite the progress over the last few years, these questions and other related problems for theories of nonmonotonic reasoning, action, and change, still remain open. We hope to explore new approaches to these problems during the workshop.

This workshop will bring together researchers from all three areas with the aim to:

* Compare and evaluate existing formalisms.

* Report on new developments and innovations.

* Identify the most important open problems in all three areas.

* Identify possibilities of solution transferral between the areas.

* Identify important challenges for the advancement of the areas.

Special Theme
There will be a special theme at this year's NRAC. We especially encourage submissions that describe applications of research in the three main areas of interest of the workshop. In particular, we welcome submissions about competitions and contests that are related to the areas of interest of the workshop, such as the ICAPS Planning Competitions (http://ipc.icaps-conference.org/), the General Game Playing Competition (http://games.stanford.edu/), and the Multi-Agent Contest (http://www.multiagentcontest.org/).

We plan to devote a session of the workshop on papers that address the special theme and accompany the presentation of these papers by a panel discussion about the difficulties that arise when applying research of this field in real-world systems, as well as insights about how we can stimulate research, attract students, test and compare approaches in non-trivial domains, identify new challenges, and build a closer connection between academic research and practical applications. We also plan to arrange invited talks around the special theme.

Registration and Participation

Registration for NRAC 2011 is managed by IJCAI. Forms and Information on registration, pricing, travel and accommodation are available on the IJCAI-11 website. Participants are strongly urged to register as soon as possible to take advantage of discounted registration fees and to secure accommodation.

We welcome participation and submission from all members of the Artificial Intelligence research community.

Like previous NRAC workshops, we hope NRAC 2011 to be a highly participatory and discussion-oriented forum. The workshop will begin with a distinguished invited speaker, and will conclude with a panel on the hot issues identified during the day. Authors of accepted papers will present their work, with ample time for discussion.

A complete program will be made available as soon as a final decision on accepted papers has been made.

For details on important dates and the submission procedure, please follow the appropriate links on the menu on the left.