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7th International Symposium on Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning (Corfu, Greece, May 2005)

The 7th International Symposium on Logical Formalizations of Commonsense
Reasoning

May 22-24, 2005, Corfu, Greece

http://www.iccl.tu-dresden.de/announce/CommonSense-2005/

One of the major long-term goals of artificial intelligence is to endow
computers with commonsense reasoning capabilities. Although we know how to
design and build systems that excel at certain bounded or mechanical tasks
which humans find difficult, such as playing chess, we have little idea
how to construct computer systems that do well at commonsense tasks which
are easy for humans.

Formalizing commonsense reasoning using logic-based approaches will be the
focus of the symposium. Topics of interest include, but are not limited
to:

    * change, action, and causality
    * self-aware systems
    * axiomatizations of benchmark commonsense problems
    * ontologies, including space, time, shape, and matter, and ontologies 
      of networks and structures
    * levels of granularity of ontology and reasoning
    * large commonsense knowledge bases
    * exploration of new commonsense domains in a preformal way (e.g. new 
      microworlds or benchmark problems)
    * nonmonotonic reasoning
    * formal models of probabilistic reasoning
    * formal theories of context
    * mental attitudes including knowledge, belief, intention, and 
      planning
    * belief revision, update, and merging
    * cognitive robotics
    * reasoning about multi-agent systems and social interactions among 
      agents
    * applications of formal representations to applications, such as 
      natural language processing
    * other mathematical tools for capturing common sense reasoning

The symposium aims to bring together researchers who have studied the
formalization of commonsense reasoning. The focus of the symposium is on
representation rather than on algorithms, and on formal rather than
informal methods. Papers should be rigorous and concrete. Technical papers
offering new results in the area are especially welcome; object level
theories are preferred. We especially encourage papers on either of the
two themes of this symposium, Self-awareness and the Surprise Birthday
Present Problem (see below). Survey papers, papers studying the
relationship between different approaches, and papers on methodological
issues such as theory evaluation, are also encouraged.

Symposium Themes

There will be two special themes at this year's CommonSense 2005. In
addition to the topics listed above, we encourage papers on these two
themes, and plan to organize one or more panels on these topics.

The first theme is Self-awareness: the notion of the computer having a
sense of self, being conscious of its own reasoning power, and being able
to explore itself in relation to other agents. We are especially
interested in formal theories that represent self-awareness, and/or allow
a system to reason about its own awareness.

The second theme is the Surprise Birthday Present Problem, one of the
challenge problems on the Common Sense Problem Page. We encourage
submission of papers that present solutions to this problem and to its
listed variants. Sample solutions to other challenge problems can be found
on the Common Sense Problem Page.

Invited Speakers

Peter Gaerdenfors
University of Lund

Pat Hayes
University of West Florida

John McCarthy
Stanford University

Leora Morgenstern
IBM Watson Research