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Call for Papers

DARe at ECAI 2014

Date: 19 August 2014
Prague, Czech Republic

*** Deadline: 25 May 2014 ***
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The International Workshop on

"Defeasible and Ampliative Reasoning" (DARe)

http://dare2014.yolasite.com

held on 19 August 2014
at the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2014)

-- Workshop Description and Aims --

Classical reasoning is not flexible enough when directly applied to the formalization of certain nuances of human quotidian decision making. These involve different kinds of reasoning such as reasoning with uncertainty, exceptions, similarity, vagueness, incomplete or contradictory information and many others.

It turns out that everyday reasoning usually shows the two salient intertwined aspects below:

* Ampliative aspect: augmenting the underlying reasoning by allowing more conclusions. In practical contexts, this amounts to the ability to make inferences that venture beyond the scope of the premises, somehow in an unsound but justifiable way. Prominent examples are (i) default reasoning: jumping to conclusions deemed as plausible 'by default', i.e., in the absence of information to the contrary, like applying negation as failure or adopting the closed-world assumption, and (ii) inductive and abductive reasoning: taking chances in drawing conclusions that implicitly call for further scrutiny or tests by empirical observations, like in making inductive hypothesis in scientific theories or finding abductive explanations in forensics.

* Defeasible aspect: curtailing the underlying reasoning by either disregarding or disallowing some conclusions that somehow ought not to be sanctioned. In practice, this amounts to the ability to backtrack one's conclusions or to admit exceptions in reasoning. Some examples of this are (i) retractive reasoning: withdrawing conclusions that have already been derived, like in belief contraction or in negotiation, and (ii) preemptive reasoning: preventing or blocking the inference of some conclusions by disallowing their derivation in the first place, like in dealing with exceptional cases in multiple inheritance networks and in regulatory systems.

Several efforts have been put into the study and definition of formalisms within which the aforementioned aspects of everyday reasoning could adequately be captured at different levels. Despite the progress that has been achieved, a large avenue remains open for exploration. Indeed, the literature on nonmonotonic reasoning has focused almost exclusively on defeasibility of argument forms; belief revision paradigms are restricted to an underlying classical (Tarskian) consequence relation, and even if some of the issues related to uncertainty in reasoning have been studied using probabilistic approaches and statistical methods, their integration with qualitative frameworks remain a challenge. Moreover, well-established approaches are largely based on propositional languages or haunted by the undecidability of full first-order logic. Modern applications require formalisms with a good balance between expressive power and computational complexity.

DARe aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners from core areas of artificial intelligence, cognitive sciences, philosophy and related disciplines to discuss these kinds of problems and relevant results in a multi-disciplinary forum. The goal of the workshop is to present latest research developments, to discuss current directions in the field, and to collect first-hand feedback from the community.

-- Scope of the Workshop --

DARe welcomes contributions on all aspects of defeasible and ampliative reasoning such as (but not limited to):

- Abductive and inductive reasoning
- Explanation finding, diagnosis and causal reasoning
- Inconsistency handling and exception-tolerant reasoning
- Decision-making under uncertainty and incomplete information
- Default reasoning, nonmonotonic reasoning, nonmonotonic logics, conditional logics
- Specific instances and variations of ampliative and defeasible reasoning
- Probabilistic and statistical approaches to reasoning
- Vagueness, rough sets, granularity and fuzzy-logics
- Philosophical foundations of defeasibility
- Empirical studies of reasoning
- Relationship with cognition and language
- Contextual reasoning
- Preference-based reasoning
- Analogical reasoning
- Similarity-based reasoning
- Belief dynamics and merging
- Argumentation theory, negotiation and conflict resolution
- Heuristic and approximate reasoning
- Defeasible normative systems
- Reasoning about actions and change
- Reasoning about knowledge and belief, epistemic and doxastic logics
- Ampliative and defeasible temporal and spatial reasoning
- Computational aspects of reasoning with uncertainty
- Implementations and systems
- Applications of uncertainty in reasoning

-- Submission Requirements --

We invite submissions of papers presenting original research results or position statements. The format for submissions is the same as that of ECAI 2014 (please check at: http://www.ecai2014.org/papers/). Submissions should be no longer than 5 pages in double-column format excluding references and in PDF format. There is no page limit on the list of references.

Please submit to: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=dare2014

-- Workshop Proceedings/Notes --

Accepted papers will be made available electronically in the CEUR Workshop Proceedings series (http://ceur-ws.org). Copyright of papers remain with the authors.

-- Attendance --

The selection of accepted contributions will be based on relevance, significance and the work's potential to foster discussions and cross-pollination. Therefore submissions of ongoing work are also strongly encouraged.

Please check the ECAI 2014 website for registration procedure, fees as well as cancellation policies.

-- Important Dates --

- Submission deadline: 25 May 2014
- Notification: 23 June 2014
- Camera ready: 01 July 2014
- Early registration: [TBA]
- Late registration: [TBA]
- Workshop date: 19 August 2014

-- Invited Speaker --

[TBA]

-- Workshop Co-Chairs --

- Richard Booth (Université du Luxembourg)
- Giovanni Casini (UKZN-CSIR Meraka Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research, South Africa)
- Szymon Klarman (UKZN-CSIR Meraka Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research, South Africa)
- Gilles Richard (Université Paul Sabatier, France)
- Ivan Varzinczak (UKZN-CSIR Meraka Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research, South Africa)

-- Program Committee --

- Natasha Alechina (University of Nottingham, UK)
- Carlos Areces (Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina)
- Ofer Arieli (Academic College of Tel-Aviv, Israel)
- Guillaume Aucher (University of Rennes 1 - INRIA, France)
- Christoph Beierle (FernUniversitaet Hagen, Germany)
- Mario Benevides (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
- Jean-Yves Béziau (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and Brazilian Research Council,Brazil)
- Antonis Bikakis (University College London, UK)
- Alexander Bochman (Holon Institute of Technology, Israel)
- Katarina Britz (UKZN-CSIR Meraka Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research, South Africa)
- Jim Delgrande (Simon Fraser University, Canada)
- Juergen Dix (TU Clausthal, Germany)
- Marcelo Finger (Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil)
- Michael Fink (TU Wien, Austria)
- Nina Gierasimczuk (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)
- Patrick Girard (University of Auckland, New Zealand)
- Guido Governatori (NICTA and Queensland University of Technology, Australia)
- Sven Ove Hansson (Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden)
- Andreas Herzig (IRIT CNRS, France)
- Souhila Kaci (Université Montpellier 2, France)
- Antonis Kakas (University of Cyprus)
- Gabriele Kern-Isberner (TU Dortmund, Germany)
- Willem Labuschagne (University of Otago, New Zealand)
- João Marcos (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil)
- Thomas Meyer (UKZN-CSIR Meraka Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research, South Africa)
- Maurice Pagnucco (The University of New South Wales, Australia)
- Laurent Perrussel (Université de Toulouse, France)
- Guilin Qi (Southeast University, China)
- François Schwarzentruber (ENS Rennes/IRISA)
- Sonja Smets (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)
- Umberto Straccia (CNR, Italy)
- Mirek Truszczynski (University of Kentucky, USA)
- Joost Vennekens (K.U. Leuven, Belgium)
- Peter Verdée (Universiteit Gent, Belgium)
- Petrucio Viana (Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil)
- Heinrich Wansing (Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum, Germany)
- Renata Wassermann (Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil)
- Anna Zamansky (University of Haifa, Israel)

-- Further Information --

Please note that according to ECAI policy all workshop participants are required to register for both the workshop and the main conference. ECAI reserves the right to cancel a workshop if not enough participants register.

Please visit the workshop website (http://dare2014.yolasite.com) for further information and regular updates.

Enquiries should be sent to dare.to.contact.us@gmail.com