Call for Papers
SARA 2011
Ninth Symposium on
Abstraction, Reformulation, and Approximation
July 17-18, 2011
Parador de Cardona, Spain
(near Barcelona, location of IJCAI 11, July 19-22)
Website: http://logic.stanford.edu/sara2011/

The ninth Symposium on Abstraction, Reformulation and Approximation will be held on July 17-18, 2011 at the Parador de Cardona in Catalonia, Spain, 60 miles Northwest of Barcelona. The symposium will be co-located with the Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS), which will be held at the Parador de Cardona immediately before SARA. SARA 2011 will be followed by the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 11), which will be held in Barcelona.

The Symposium will consist primarily of paper presentations, discussion sessions, and invited presentations. This year, our keynote speaker will be Stuart Russell from the University of California at Berkeley. All papers presented at the Symposium will appear in a published proceedings.
Submission Topics

The aim of the Symposium is to provide a forum for interaction among researchers in all areas of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science with an interest in Abstraction, Reformulation, or Approximation (ARA). Submissions are requested on the following topics (but are not restricted to these topics).

* Theory of Abstraction, Reformulation, and Approximation.

* Methods for selecting which of several applicable ARA techniques is best for a given problem.

* Techniques for automatically constructing and selecting appropriate abstractions, reformulations, and approximations.

* Empirical and theoretical studies of the costs and benefits of ARA.

* Applications of ARA to automated reasoning, automatic programming, cognitive modeling, constraint programming, constraint satisfaction, databases, design, diagnosis, general game playing, general problem solving, machine learning, planning, robotics, scheduling, search, simulation, theorem proving.

* Fielded applications demonstrating the benefits of ARA.

Submission Format

Researchers who wish to attend the symposium must submit in one of the following forms:

* Full paper: Full paper submissions must report on substantial, original and previously unpublished research.

* Extended abstract: Extended abstracts on research that will be submitted to, has been submitted to, or has already been published in archival conferences or journals. However, researchers are encouraged to submit full papers, if possible. Please indicate in your submission if it is an "extended abstract".

* Research summary: Researchers should submit a short report describing research questions that they are engaged in that is relevant to ARA.

Full papers should not exceed 8 pages in AAAI format; extended abstracts should not exceed 4 pages; and research summaries should not exceed 2 pages.
Submission website: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sara2011.
Important Dates
April 15 Submission deadline
May 6 Author notification
June 3 Camera-ready submission
July 17-18 SARA 2011

Organization
Conference Chairs Michael Genesereth, Stanford University, USA
Peter Revesz, University of Nebraska - Lincoln, USA
Publicity Chair Miroslav Velev, Aries Design Automation

Program Committee:
Scot Anderson Southern Adventist University, USA
Chris Beck University of Toronto, Canada
Rada Chirkova North Carolina State University, USA
Berthe Choueiry University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA
Marie desJardins University Maryland Baltimore County, USA
Ariel Felner Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
Rafael Martinez Gasca University of Seville, Spain
Hector Geffner Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
Michael Genesereth Stanford University, USA
Robert Holte University of Alberta, Canada
Bart Kuijpers Hasselt University, Belgium
Ian Miguel University of St Andrews, UK
Peter Revesz University of Nebraska - Lincoln, USA
Marie-Christine Rousset University of Grenoble, France
Wheeler Ruml University of New Hampshire, USA
Nathan Sturtevant University of Denver, USA
Miroslav Velev Aries Design Automation, USA
Toby Walsh University of New South Wales, Australia