FLAIRS'2014

The 27th International FLAIRS Conference
May 21-23, 2014
Pensacola Beach, Florida, USA
Hilton Pensacola Beach Gulf Front

In cooperation with The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence

POTENTIAL AUTHORS MUST SEND A SUBMISSION OF INTENTION AS SOON AS POSSIBLE TO THE CHAIR OF THE SPECIAL TRACK.


Special Track :
« Culture-Aware AI Systems »


Topic Description:
In this era of globalization, people from different countries and cultures have the opportunity to interact directly or indirectly in many very different situations. Despite differences in their way of thinking and reasoning, their values, life styles, customs and habits, languages, religions, in a word, their cultures, they must be able to collaborate on projects, to understand each others’ views, to communicate in a way that doesn’t offend each other, to anticipate the effects of their respective actions on others and so on.

Consequently, in the last decade, the notion of cultural awareness has begun to be tackled in AI systems. A Culture-Aware System can be defined as a system where culture-related information is modeled and used to design its human-machine interface or intervenes in the task carried out by this system, whether it is reasoning, simulation or any other task involving cultural knowledge. Such systems can be classified in the following way:

- Culture-Aware Intelligent Tutoring Systems as cultures have a strong impact on people’s learning because they affect cognitive processes, such as emotion, perceptions and interactions that an individual can have with his/her environment and peers.

- Culture-Aware Educational Systems that teach intercultural skills to people who need to interact with foreigners in professional contexts, for instance, or just want to discover distant cultures. They usually integrate culturally-relevant pedagogical practices. Most of these systems have been intended for military purposes and focus on cultural issues that soldiers may encounter.

- Cross-Cultural Decision-Making Support Systems. The Cross-Cultural Decision-Making (CCDM) field specifically focuses on the intersections between Psychosocial Theory provided from the Social Sciences and methods of Computational Modeling provided from Computer Science and Mathematics. This area of research aims at increasing the efficiency of cross-cultural group interaction.
Among other challenges are, the unification and standardization of data being collected for CCDM applications/research, and the validation and verification with respect to utility and underlying Psychosocial Theory.
Solutions for both challenges require sound methods for integrating a complex set of quite different behavioral models and modeling techniques.

The purpose of this track is to bring new insights in the design of the different types of Culture-Aware Systems.
Contributions in the following sub-topics are welcomed:

- Cultural knowledge acquisition and validation methods.
- Cultural knowledge representation using schemata theory, ontologies, mind maps, semantic networks, and so on.
- Modeling of theories stemming from Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology, Emotion Theories, Sociology, Social Cognition regarding cultural behaviors, attitudes, emotions.
- Modeling of individual cognitive processes influenced by culture.
- Cultural differences in affective expression.
- Culturally-adapted user interfaces and cultural models of the learner in Culture-Aware Intelligent Tutoring Systems.
- Modeling of culturally relevant pedagogical practices in Culture-Aware Educational Systems.
- Cultural behavior models in multi-agents systems.
- Culture-specific network definition and structure.
- Information spreading in culture-specific networks.

This list is not exhaustive and any contributions which meet the definition of the track outlined above are welcomed.


Important dates :

Paper Submission Deadline: December 8, 2013

Notification of Acceptance-Rejection: January 20, 2014

Camera Ready Version Due: February 24, 2014

Conference Dates: May 21-23, 2014

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Program Committee
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Serge AGOSTINELLI, LSIS, AMU (Aix-Marseille University), France
Danielle ALLARD, UQAM, Montreal, Canada
Emmanuel BLANCHARD, ATLAS Laboratory, Mc Gill University, Montreal, Canada
Enrico BLANZIERI, DIT, University of Trento, Italy
Helen BOND, School of Education, Howard University, Washington, USA
Jacqueline BOURDEAU, TELUQ, Montreal, Canada
Colette FAUCHER (Chair), AMU (Aix-Marseille University), LSIS, Marseille, France
Fernando FERRI, Istituto di Ricerche sulla Popolazione et Politiche Sociali, CNR, Roma, Italy
Paolo GIORGINI, Dip. Ingegneria e Scienze dell'Informazione, University of Trento, Trento, Italy
Clark GLYMOUR, Dept. of Philosophy, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburg, PA, and IHMC, Pensacola, FL, USA
Patrizia GRIFONI, Istituto di Ricerche sulla Popolazione et Politiche Sociali, CNR, Roma, Italy
Eva HUDLICKA, Psychometrix Associates, Blacksburg, VA, USA
W. Lewis JOHNSON, CEO & Chief Scientist, ALELO INC, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Cat KUTAY, School of Computer Science & Engineering, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
Christine LISETTI, Affective Social Computing Laboratory,
School of Computing and Information Sciences, Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA
Douglas M. MEDIN, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA
Riichiro MISOGUCHI, Lab. Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research, Osaka University, Osaka, Japan
Martin NEUMANN, Dept. of Philosophy, University of Bayreuth, Germany
Amy OGAN, Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA
Elaine RAYBOURNE, ADL Research Scientist, Sandia National Labs, Albuquerque, NM, USA
Matthias REHM, Dpt of Architecture, Design, and Media Technology,Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark
German RIGAU, Departamento de LSI, Facultad de Informática de San Sebastián, San Sebastián, Spain
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Submission Instructions:

Submitted papers must be original, and not submitted concurrently to a journal or another conference. Double-blind reviewing will be provided, so submitted papers must use fake author names and affiliations. Papers must use the latest AAAI Press Word template or LaTeX macro package, and must be submitted as PDF through the EasyChair conference system. (N.B. Do not use a fake name for your EasyChair login; your EasyChair account information is hidden from reviewers.)

FLAIRS will not accept any paper which, at the time of submission, is under review for or has already been published or accepted for publication in a journal or another conference. Authors are also required not to submit their papers elsewhere during FLAIRS's review period. These restrictions apply only to journals and conferences, not to workshops and similar specialized presentations with a limited audience and without archival proceedings. Authors will be required to confirm that their submissions conform to these requirements at the time of submission.

Papers and Abstracts:
There are three kinds of submissions: full papers (up to 6 pages), short papers (up to 4 pages), and poster abstracts (up to 250 words). Acceptance as a full paper entails a 20 minute presentation during a regular session, while short papers and abstracts will be required to participate in the poster session. Rejected full papers may still be accepted as short papers or poster abstracts. All posters will be presented according to space and time availability. Authors may submit up to two full papers as first author, and a maximum of one poster as full author (whether short paper or poster abstract). Author names may be changed or re-ordered after reviewing; however, for budgeting reasons, registration fees will be based on the details at the time of submission and review.

See instructions for camera-ready papers here : http://www.flairs-27.info/

In cooperation with: Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence

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For any question or problem, please contact the program committee chair, Pr. Colette Faucher, at:
colette.faucher@lsis.org
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Important !
FLAIRS 2014 invited speakers :
Conference invited speakers will address the entire FLAIRS audience in plenary sessions.

William J. Clancey— Senior Research Scientist, Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition.

Jennifer Neville— Associate professor at Purdue University with a joint appointment in the Departments of Computer Science and Statistics.

Thad Starner— Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology and Technical Lead on Google's Glass.