The Sixth "Starting Artificial Intelligence Research" Symposium

August, 27-28, 2012
Montpellier, France
http://www.lirmm.fr/ecai2012


We invite students and young post-doctoral AI fellows to submit their
work to the Sixth European Starting AI Researcher Symposium (STAIRS).
STAIRS is an international meeting intended to support AI researchers,
from all countries, at the beginning of their career: PhD students or
people holding a PhD for less than one year. STAIRS 2012 will be co-located
with ECAI 2012, the European Conference on AI, in Montpellier, France,
August 27-31, 2012.

STAIRS offers doctoral students and young post-doctoral AI researchers:

* a first experience on submitting and presenting a paper in an
international forum with a broad scope and a peer review process

* an opportunity to discuss and explore their research interests and
European career objectives and opportunities.

Co-located with both ECAI and PAIS, the symposium provides a unique
and valuable opportunity for young researchers to gain experience at
presenting their work in a supportive scientific environment, and
obtain constructive feedback on the technical content of the work as
well as how to present the work and other related topics. Specifically,
the objectives are: (1) to provide a setting for mutual feedback on
participants' current research; (2) to provide guidance on future research
directions; (3) to develop a supportive community of scholars and a spirit of
collaborative research; (4) to support a new generation of researchers with
information and advice on academic, research, industrial, and non-traditional
career paths; and (5) to contribute to the conference goals through interaction
with other researchers and participation in ECAI/PAIS/STAIRS conference events.


(+) Topics on Interest

Papers are welcome on all aspects of contemporary AI, including, but
not restricted to:

* Agent-based & Multiagent Systems
* Case-Based Reasoning
* Cognitive Modeling & Interaction
* Constraints, Satisfiability, and Search
* Information Retrieval & Natural Language Processing
* Knowledge Representation, Reasoning, & Logic
* Machine Learning & Data Mining
* Model-Based Reasoning
* Multidisciplinary Topics & Applications of AI
* Planning, Scheduling, & Auctions
* Robotics, Perception & Sensing
* Statistical Relational AI & Uncertainty in AI
* Web and Knowledge-based Information Systems


(+) Important Dates

Paper submission deadline:
Friday, May 25, 2012

Notification of acceptance/rejection:
Monday, June, 23 2012

Camera-Ready Copy Due:
Sunday, June 30, 2012

Conference:
August 27-28, 2012


(+) Submission

Both long (12-page) and short (6-page) papers in camery-ready format
can be submitted. Over-length submissions will be rejected without review.
Papers submitted to STAIRS should conform to presentational style and format of
IOS Press' "Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications" (FAIA) series.
Details are available on the web site

http://www.iospress.nl/service/authors/latex-and-word-tools-for-book-authors/

Each accepted long paper will be allocated TWELVE (12) pages, each short paper
SIX (6) pages in the proceedings. From the accepted long papers, both oral and
poster presentations will be selected. Accepted short papers will be poster
presentations. Authors of ECAI submission may also indicate whether they want
a submitted ECAI paper to be considered as well as a submitted STAIRS paper
in case of non-acceptance of the ECAI paper. This, however, will require
to change the format for the camera-ready copy. In contrast to ECAI,
STAIRS is using IOS Press' FAIA series format as explained above!

So, multiple submissions with ECAI and PAIS are allowed if this is clearly
indicated on a front page preceding the paper itself. In borderline
cases single submissions will be preferred over multiple submissions.
In case of multiple acceptances the author(s) are strictly required to
withdraw their paper from all but one of the events.

The proceedings of STAIRS will be published and distributed by

IOS Press' "Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications"

(FAIA) series. The authors will be responsible for producing camera-ready copies
of papers, conforming to the STAIRS 2012 formatting guidelines for inclusion
in the proceedings (see above). At least one student author of each accepted
paper or poster is required to attend the conference to present the contribution.

All submissions will be subject to LIGHT TOUCH review, with the goal
of providing constructive feedback to authors.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The first author must be a PhD student or a person holding
a PhD for less than one year. Papers not satisfying
this criterion will be rejected.


STAIRS Co-Chairs:

Kristian Kersting, kristian.kersting@iais.fraunhofer.de
(University of Bonn, Fraunhofer IAIS, Germany)

Marc Toussaint, marc.toussaint@fu-berlin.de
(Freie Universitaet Berlin, Germany)