Overview

The Fourth Annual Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems will take place June 23-26, 2016, at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, USA.

The goal of the Advances in Cognitive Systems conference is to bring together researchers interested in building cognitive systems that focus on high-level cognition and decision making, reliance on rich, structured representations, and incorporation of insights about human thinking. This venue is for dissemination of research results pertaining to the original, yet unanswered, questions of Artificial Intelligence: to produce computational artifacts that reproduce a broad range of human cognitive abilities.

The conference welcomes work on any topic related to the representation or organization of complex knowledge structures, their use in multi-step cognition, or their acquisition from experience or instruction. Some functional capabilities that arise in this context include, but are not limited to:

Conceptual Inference and Reasoning
Memory Storage and Retrieval
Language Processing
Social Cognition and Interaction
High-level Execution and Control
Problem Solving and Heuristic Search
Cognitive Aspects of Emotion and Personality
Metacognition and Meta-level Reasoning
Structural Learning and Knowledge Capture
Cognitive Vision and High-level Perception
Paper Submission, Review, and Publication

Manuscripts are limited to 12 pages. Papers accepted for the conference will be allotted up to an additional four pages for further elaboration. Accepted papers may also be invited to appear in the online journal, Advances in Cognitive Systems. Submissions should be formatted according to instructions provided at http://www.cogsys.org/formatting, which provides Latex and Word templates. Each submission should state explicitly the problem or capability it addresses, describe its response to this problem, make claims about this approach, and provide evidence in support of these claims. Every paper should also discuss related efforts, examine limitations of the reported work, and outline plans for future research.

Because the conference aims to encourage research toward a broader understanding of intelligence, its criteria include demonstrating new functionality, integrating different facets of intelligence, presenting a novel approach to an established problem, explaining complex cognition in humans, and formally analyzing a difficult new task. We also welcome submissions on new problems or testbeds that challenge existing approaches.

Each submission will be assigned to multiple referees who will evaluate the paper for its contribution to understanding cognitive systems, clarity of claims about this contribution, convincing evidence in support of those claims, and cogent presentation of its ideas to readers. We encourage authors to examine the review form (http://www.cogsys.org/review-form-2016) before drafting their manuscripts to ensure that their submissions address all of the dimensions on which reviewers will evaluate them.

The conference aims to be as inclusive as possible while still fostering innovative research on the computational nature of intelligence. The conference FAQ page (http://www.cogsys.org/faq) attempts to clarify the scope of the event. Authors who have questions about whether their research is appropriate for the meeting should contact the Conference Chairs, via ACS2016@cs.northwestern.edu, for additional information.
Important Dates for Paper Submission

March 17 (midnight PDT): Deadline for paper submission
April 15, 2016: Decisions about paper acceptance
May 12, 2016: Deadline for final papers
May 12, 2016: Deadline for early registration
June 23-26, 2016: Conference