NEWSLETTER ON DECISION AND REASONING UNDER UNCERTAINTY Issue 01-0001 Editors: Salem Benferhat, Henri Prade 08.01.2001 Back issues available at http://www.ida.liu.se/ext/etai/dru/index.html ****************************************************************** !!!!!!! HAPPY NEW YEAR !!!!!! To subscribe or to correct an entry from the directory of researchers located at: http://cafe.newcastle.edu.au/salem/chercheur.html please send an email to benferhat@irit.fr or prade@irit.fr This newsletter contains: Call for papers: 1. Call for papers ISIPTA '01 : Deadline 01/15 2. Call for Papers UAI-2001 : Deadline 03/20 3. Call for papers ECSQARU-2001 : Deadline 03/30 Recent past event 4. AI and STATISTICS 2001 (January 4-7, 2001) +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1. ISIPTA '01 THE SECOND INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON IMPRECISE PROBABILITIES AND THEIR APPLICATIONS Cornell University Ithaca, NY, USA 26 - 29 June 2001 Encouraged by the success of the First International Symposium on Imprecise Probabilities and Their Applications (ISIPTA '99, Ghent, Belgium, 30 June - 2 July 1999, see the web site http://ippserv.rug.ac.be/~isipta99 for more detailed information; see http://decsai.ugr.es/~smc/isipta99/proc/proceedings.html for an electronic version of the proceedings), we have decided to create a biennial series of ISIPTA conferences on imprecise probabilities, each to take place at a different location. The Second International Symposium on Imprecise Probabilities and Their Applications (ISIPTA '01), will be held at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA, from 26 till 29 June 2001. What is imprecise probability? ------------------------------ Imprecise probability is a generic term for the many mathematical models which measure chance or uncertainty without sharp numerical probabilities. These models include belief functions, Choquet capacities, comparative probability orderings, convex sets of probability measures, fuzzy measures, interval-valued probabilities, possibility measures, plausibility measures, and upper and lower expectations or previsions. Such models are needed in inference problems where the relevant information is scarce, vague or conflicting, and in decision problems where preferences may also be incomplete. See the IPP web site for introductory articles about imprecise probabilities, an extensive bibliography, and a collection of survey articles on special types of imprecise probability models. Symposium language ------------------ The working language of the symposium will be English. No simultaneous translation in other languages will be available. Preregistration --------------- If you are planning to submit a paper or want to participate in the symposium, or if you want to receive more information ISIPTA '01, you can fill out the electronic preregistration form on the symposium web site (http://ippserv.rug.ac.be/~isipta01). How to submit a paper --------------------- Papers are encouraged on all aspects of imprecise probability and its applications. Those wishing to present a paper at the symposium should submit a short paper of 4-10 pages electronically, by 15 January 2001. LaTeX and Word style files will be made available on the symposium web site (http://ippserv.rug.ac.be/~isipta01) in the coming days. The Program Committee will decide which of these papers are accepted. The successful authors will then be invited to submit a final version of their paper, for publication in a volume of symposium proceedings (which will be available as a published book before the start of the symposium). Each accepted paper will be given the opportunity for both a brief oral presentation as well as a poster session. All the papers that are accepted for the symposium will also be made available on our web site (http://ippserv.rug.ac.be/~isipta01) well before the symposium. This will allow the participants to study the papers in some detail before they are actually presented. Symposium web site ------------------ All information relating to the symposium will in due course be published on the symposium web site: http://ippserv.rug.ac.be/~isipta01 Important dates ---------------- Paper submission deadline: 15 January 2001 Notification of acceptance: 9 March 2001 Deadline for revised papers: 30 March 2001 Symposium: 26 - 29 June 2001 - -------------- 2. UAI-2001: Call for Papers August 2-5, 2001 University of Washington Seattle, WA USA Conference hompage: http://robotics.stanford.edu/~uai01/ Uncertainty management is a key enabling technology for the development of intelligent systems. Since 1985, the Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) has been the primary international forum for exchanging results on the use of principled uncertain-reasoning methods in intelligent systems. The conference has catalyzed advances in fundamental theory, efficient algorithms, and practical applications. Theory and technology first presented at UAI have been proven by their wide application in the scientific, commercial, and industrial communities. The UAI Proceedings have become a fundamental reference for researchers and practitioners who want to know about both theoretical advances and the latest applied developments in the field. The scope of UAI is wide, covering a broad spectrum of approaches to automated reasoning, learning, decision making and knowledge acquisition under uncertainty. Contributions range from those that that advance theoretical principles to those that provide insights through the empirical study of applications, from quantitative to qualitative approaches, from traditional to non-classical paradigms for uncertain reasoning, and from autonomous systems to those designed to support human decision making. We encourage submissions of papers for UAI-2001 that report on advances in the core areas of representation, inference, learning, decision making, and knowledge acquisition, as well those dealing with on insights derived from the construction and use of applications involving uncertain reasoning. TOPICS OF INTEREST Topics of interest include (but are not limited to): Foundations Representation of uncertainty and preferences Theoretical foundations of uncertainty and decision-making Uncertainty and models of causality Semantics of belief Revision of belief, combination of information from multiple sources Higher-order uncertainty and model confidence Relationships between different uncertainty calculi Principles and Methods Algorithms for reasoning and decision making under uncertainty Automated construction of inference and decision models Combination of models from different sources Control of computational processes under uncertainty Data structures for representation and inference Decision making under uncertainty Diagnosis, troubleshooting, and test selection Enhancing human-computer interaction with uncertain reasoning Explanation of results of uncertain reasoning Formal languages to represent uncertain information Hybridization of methodologies and techniques Integration of other representation languages, including logic, with uncertainty calculi Markov decision processes Methods based on probability, possibilistic and fuzzy logic, belief functions, rough sets, and other formalisms Method for learning models from noisy data Multi-agent reasoning and economic models involving uncertainty Planning under uncertainty Qualitative methods and models Reasoning at different levels of abstraction Reinforcement learning Representation and discovery of causal relationships Resource-bounded computation (inference, learning, decision making) Statistical methods for automated uncertain reasoning Temporal reasoning Time-critical decisions Uncertain reasoning and information retrieval Uncertainty and methods for learning and data mining Empirical Studies and Applications Comparison of representation and inferential adequacy of different calculi Empirical validation of methods for planning, learning, and diagnosis Experience with knowledge-acquisition methods Experimental studies of inference strategies Methodologies for problem modeling Nature and performance of architectures for real-time reasoning Uncertain reasoning in embedded, situated systems For papers focused on applications in specific domains, we suggest that the following issues be addressed in the submission: Why was it necessary to represent uncertainty in your domain? What are the distinguishing properties of the domain and problem? Why did you decide to use your particular uncertainty formalism? Which practical procedure did you follow to build the application? What theoretical problems, if any, did you encounter? What practical problems did you encounter? Did users/clients of your system find the results useful? Did your system lead to improvements in decision quality? What approaches were effective (ineffective) in your domain? What methods were used to validate the effectiveness of the system? SUBMISSION INFORMATION Deadlines: Abstracts (200 words): Monday, March 12, 2001 (11:59PM PST) Full papers: Tuesday, March 20, 2001 (11:59PM PST) The deadlines will be strictly enforced (the submission server will be closed at midnight). No extensions will be granted under any circumstances. Papers and abstracts should be submitted through http://cmt.research.microsoft.com/UAI2001/ If authors have special circumstances that prevent electronic submission, arrangements can be made directly with the program chairs below. Authors are required to submit papers in the proceedings format. Submitted papers must be no more than eight pages in proceedings format, including figures and bibliography (about 5600 words). Accepted papers will be alloted eight pages in the conference proceedings, with two additional pages available for a fee. Please see http://robotics.stanford.edu/~uai01/FormatInstructions.html for format information and access to style files. Papers submitted for review should represent original, previously unpublished work. Papers should not be under review for presentation in any other conference; however, an extended version of the paper may be under review for publication in a scientific journal. Submitted papers will be carefully evaluated on the basis of originality, significance, technical soundness, and clarity of exposition. Papers may be accepted for presentation in plenary or poster sessions. All accepted papers will be included in the Proceedings of the Seventeenth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, published by Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. An outstanding student paper will be selected for special distinction at UAI-2001. Please see the for the requirements. Other important dates: Author Notification of Accepted Papers: April 30, 2001 Camera-ready Copy of Accepted Papers due: June 4, 2001 Workshops and Tutorials: Thursday, August 2, 2001 Technical Program: Friday, August 3-Sunday, August 5, 2001 CONFERENCE ORGANIZATION Please direct general inquiries to the General Conference Chair at moises@cs.stanford.edu. Inquiries about the conference program and submission requirements should be directed to the Program Co-Chairs, Jack Breese and Daphne Koller, at uai01-pchairs@cs.stanford.edu. CONFERENCE AREA CHAIRS Greg Cooper, University of Pittsburgh Adnan Darwiche, UCLA Rina Dechter, UC Irvine Didier Dubois, IRIT Nir Friedman, Hebrew University Danny Geiger, Technion Lluis Godo, IIIA David Heckerman, Microsoft Research Eric Horvitz, Microsoft Research Michael Jordan, UC Berkeley Leslie Kaelbling, MIT Uffe Kjaerulff, Aalborg University Michael Kearns, AT&T Labs-Research Michael Wellman, University of Michigan CONFERENCE CHAIRS General Conference Chair: MoisÈs Goldszmidt Peakstone Corporation 155A Moffett Park Drive Sunnyvale, CA 94089 USA Phone: +1 (408) 752-1024 Fax : +1 (408) 752-1040 E-mail: moises@peakstone.com --- Program Co-chairs: Jack Breese Microsoft Research One Microsoft Way Redmond, WA 98052 USA Phone: +1 (425) 936-2969 Fax: +1 (425) 936-7329 E-mail: breese@microsoft.com --- Daphne Koller Computer Science Department Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305-9010 USA Phone: +1 (650) 723-6598 Fax: +1 (650) 725-1449 E-mail: koller@CS.Stanford.EDU ------------------------------------------------------------------- 3. First Call for Papers Sixth European Conference on Symbolic and Quantitative Approaches to Reasoning with Uncertainty ECSQARU-2001 September 19th - 21th, 2001, Toulouse, France http://www.irit.fr/ECSQARU-2001/Ecsqaru-2001.html The 2001 ECSQARU Conference will be devoted to methods for reasoning and decision making under uncertainty, including both qualitative and numeric methods, as applied to problems in artificial intelligence. We seek papers on fundamental theoretical issues, on representational issues, on computational techniques, and on applications of uncertain reasoning using traditional or alternative paradigms of uncertain reasoning. Topics of Interest: Topics of interest include (but are not limited to): foundations of uncertainty concepts, reasoning and decision making under uncertainty, belief updating and inconsistency handling, default reasoning, similarity-based reasoning, empirical studies of reasoning strategies, uncertainty in ill-defined environments, automated planning and acting, machine learning for uncertainty formalisms, information fusion and pooling of uncertain evidence, game theoritic agents, algorithms for uncertain inference, implementation of uncertainty systems, etc Submission of Papers: Submitted papers will be evaluated on the basis of originality, significance, technical soundness, and clarity of exposition. We strongly encourage electronic submission of papers. To submit a paper electronically, send an Email message to both of the Program Co-Chairs (see email addresses below) that includes the following information (in this order): Paper title (plain text), Author names (plain text), Surface mail and email address for a contact author (plain text), A short abstract including keywords or topic indicators (plain text), Paper body (Postscript format). Authors unable to submit papers electronically should send the first four items electronically to the Email addresses below, and 5 copies of the complete paper to one of the Program Co-Chairs at the addresses listed below. Instructions for preparing papers in proceedings format The conference proceedings will be published by Springer Verlag as a volume in the LNCS/LNAI series: http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/index.html Hence we strongly recommend the authors to submit their paper in LNCS/LNAI format. Instructions for authors can be found at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html If you are a LaTeX2e user, you can directly dowload the lncs macro-package ftp://trick.ntp.springer.de/pub/tex/latex/llncs/latex2e/ Papers length: Submited papers should not be longer than 12 pages. Important dates: The following is a provisional table: Submission of papers: March 30th, 2001 Acceptance decision by: May 10th, 2001 Camera ready copy due: June 15th, 2001 Inquiries: Salem Benferhat IRIT, Université Paul Sabatier 118 route de Narbonne 31062 Toulouse Cedex 04, France Tel: +33 5 61 55 85 51 Fax: +33 5 61 55 62 39 Email: benferhat@irit.fr Philippe Besnard IRIT, Université Paul Sabatier 118 route de Narbonne 31062 Toulouse Cedex 04, France Tel: +33 5 61 55 81 23 Fax: +33 5 61 55 62 39 Email: besnard@irit.fr http://www.irit.fr/ECSQARU-2001/Ecsqaru-2001.html ----------- 4. AI and STATISTICS 2001 Eighth International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics January 4-7, 2001, Hyatt Hotel, Key West, Florida http://www.ai.mit.edu/conferences/aistats2001/ Tutorials (January 4) David Edwards (Novo Pharmaceutical Company) "Graphical models for mixed data : an introduction to the theory and practice" Yoav Freund (AT&T Research) "Predicting More -- Assuming Less, new methodologies in statistical inference" David MacKay (University of Cambridge) "Error correcting codes and belief propagation" Main program (January 5-7) Program chairs: Thomas Richardson, University of Washington Tommi Jaakkola, MIT