Spatial and Temporal Reasoning (IICAI-09)

Draft paper submission deadline is extended to May20 2009.

A Special Session on Spatial and Temporal Reasoning will be held during the 4^th Indian International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IICAI-09). The session invites papers in all areas of spatial and temporal representation and reasoning.

The field of qualitative spatial representation and reasoning has evolved as a sub-division in its own right within the broader field of Artificial Intelligence -- recent years have witnessed remarkable advances in some of the long-standing problems of the field. For instance, new results about tractability for spatial calculi, explicit construction of models, characterization of important subclasses of relations, as well as in the development of new areas such as the emergence of integrated spatio-temporal calculi and the importing of non-monotonic techniques for dealing with various aspects intrinsic to dynamic spatial systems. Inextricably lined to space is time, i.e., spatial configurations change over time. Spatial change may also be perceived as being spatio-temporal and a lot of recent work is being devoted to providing useful and well-grounded models to be used as high level qualitative description of spatio-temporal change. Furthermore, reasoning about space also typically involves reasoning about changing spatial configurations, and in more realistic scenarios, integrated reasoning about space, actions and change. Recent work supporting this paradigm has also explicitly addressed the potential interactions between the spatial reasoning domain and the field of reasoning about actions and change.

Driven by cognitive approaches that characterize the processing of spatial information within qualitative spatial reasoning, there has been considerable influx of people from other areas within AI such as computer vision, robotics etc, working on qualitative representation and reasoning about spatial change, spatio-temporal interactions, and the formal modelling of dynamic spatial systems in general. Qualitative conceptualizations of space and tools/techniques for efficiently reasoning with them being well-established, there is now a clear felt need within the community to utilise the tools and formalisms that have been constructed in the recent years in novel application scenarios and, gauging by the content of upcoming events, even a focus on evaluation standards and benchmarking problems for qualitative formalisms.

Session Scope and Format:
The format of the session has been designed in accordance with the general goal of offering a structure for exchange. The program will include a number of presentations by the invitees representing several different aspects of spatial and temporal reasoning, followed by discussions.

This proposed special session at IICAI aims to achieve a balance between both theory and application-centric research in the spatial and temporal reasoning area. At the foundational level, of special interest to this session is research that focusses on the integration of the specialisation of qualitative spatial reasoning with general logic-based approaches for reasoning about action and change. Some of the topics deemed important include:

Temporal, spatial and spatio-temporal calculi
Qualitative reasoning, constraints for temporal and spatial knowledge
New ways to formally represent and reason about dynamic spatial systems
Use of non-monotonic techniques in spatial reasoning
Concurrency in the spatial domain
Unified approaches for the formal modelling of space, time and change
Integrated spatial and terminological reasoning
Integrated ontologies for spatial scene descriptions of indoor environments (e.g., in room-space)
Grounding of perceptual environmental data with spatial ontologies
Qualitative abstractions of low-level motion control tasks in robotics (e.g., in robotic grasping)
Exploting notions of spatio-temporal continuity (e.g., in learning behaviour from video)

At the application-level, we encourage the submission of research that demonstrates the utility of well-established qualitative spatial and temporal calculi, tools and systems in novel domains including, but not limited to, the following:

Applications involving temporal and spatial reasoning (with or without constraints) in general
Planning, explanation and simulation within dynamic spatial systems
Use of qualitative space-time methods in experimental cognitive robotics
Qualification techniques of quantitative data sources
Reasoning with qualified spatio-temporal data (e.g., abduction with S-T data streams)
Qualitative spatial modelling and reasoning in ambient intelligence systems
Applications in architectural design, sketch recognition and understanding

Although the content of the proposals that are submitted is open-ended, the session categorically invites submission of papers highlighting prototypical and complete systems. It is expected that the proposed systems, or parts thereof, in this category will involve spatial and/or temporal reasoning in some form. Of special interest to the aims of the session are systems where the application of formal qualitative spatial calculi or the application of existing reasoning tools is highlighted. In addition to the thematic requirements, selections will be made on the basis of how closely the illustrated techniques utilize existing formalizations developed in the area of qualitative spatial representation and reasoning.

Attendance and Publication:
The session will be organised as a parallel track within the conference and is open to all members of the AI community. Screening will be based on reviews and relevance to the session goals. Each paper will be peer reviewed by at least two experts in the topical area. All accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings, under the title of the session.

Special Issue:
Select contributions will be invited for publication as a part of a Special Issue of the Journal of Spatial Cognition and Computation that has been planned to build on the results of this and other thematically related events. The invited papers will be subject to extensions and another round of reviews as per the journal rules and the issue will be released in 2010. Details will be announced *selectively* in due time.

Submission Requirements:
Electronic submissions are solicited in PostScript or PDF format. The papers, starting with title, authors' names, affiliations, postal and email addresses, followed by at least 3 keywords, and concluding with relevant bibliographic references. Papers should be formatted with A4 or 8.5 x 11 inch pages and not exceed 12 pages in total length, including all Figures, Tables, References and Appendices. Selection of participants will be based on relevance to the indicated focus of the session, clarity of the work submitted, and the strength of the research.

Interested authors should submit their paper in PDF or PostScript format by email to Mehul Bhatt. Please use 'IICAI-09 S-T' in the subject-line of your email. The papers *MUST* use the Springer Lecture Notes style for formatting the paper. The relevant LaTeX2e templates are avalable here: LNCS LaTeX2e, but make sure to utilise the latest templates directly from the Springer website.

Please feel free to contact the organisers if in doubt about any aspect of the session or its requirements or if your submission is not acknowledged .

Deadlines:
May 20 2009: Paper manuscripts due.
June 25 2009: Notification of acceptance.
July 6 2009: Camera ready papers and Pre-registration due.
December 16-18, 2009: Special Session and the IICAI-09 Conference.

Session Chairs

Mehul Bhatt (primary contact)
SFB/TR 8 Spatial Cognition
Universität Bremen
P.O. Box 330 440, 28334 Bremen, GERMANY
bhatt@informatik.uni-bremen.de

Shyamanta M Hazarika
Department of Computer Sc & Engineering
School of Engineering, Tezpur University
Tezpur - 784028, Assam, INDIA
smh@tezu.ernet.in

Stefan Wölfl
Department of Computer Science
Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg
Georges-Köhler-Allee
Geb. 052, Room 00-043
79110 Freiburg, GERMANY
woelfl@informatik.uni-freiburg.de

Program Committee

Amitabha Mukerjee (IITK, India)
Anthony Cohn (University of Leeds, United Kingdom)
Björn Gottfried (University of Bremen, Germany)
Brandon Bennett (University of Leeds, United Kingdom)
Christian Freksa (University of Bremen, Germany)
Diedrich Wolter (University of Bremen, Germany)
Hans Guesgen (Massey University, New Zealand)
Nico Van de Weghe (Ghent University, Belgium)

Back to Special Events


		Special Session on Spatial and Temporal Reasoning at The 4^th Indian International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IICAI-09) December 16-18, 2009, Tumkur (near Bangalore), India


	Draft paper submission deadline is extended to May20 2009. A Special Session on Spatial and Temporal Reasoning will be held during the 4^th Indian International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IICAI-09). The session invites papers in all areas of spatial and temporal representation and reasoning. The field of qualitative spatial representation and reasoning has evolved as a sub-division in its own right within the broader field of Artificial Intelligence -- recent years have witnessed remarkable advances in some of the long-standing problems of the field. For instance, new results about tractability for spatial calculi, explicit construction of models, characterization of important subclasses of relations, as well as in the development of new areas such as the emergence of integrated spatio-temporal calculi and the importing of non-monotonic techniques for dealing with various aspects intrinsic to dynamic spatial systems. Inextricably lined to space is time, i.e., spatial configurations change over time. Spatial change may also be perceived as being spatio-temporal and a lot of recent work is being devoted to providing useful and well-grounded models to be used as high level qualitative description of spatio-temporal change. Furthermore, reasoning about space also typically involves reasoning about changing spatial configurations, and in more realistic scenarios, integrated reasoning about space, actions and change. Recent work supporting this paradigm has also explicitly addressed the potential interactions between the spatial reasoning domain and the field of reasoning about actions and change. Driven by cognitive approaches that characterize the processing of spatial information within qualitative spatial reasoning, there has been considerable influx of people from other areas within AI such as computer vision, robotics etc, working on qualitative representation and reasoning about spatial change, spatio-temporal interactions, and the formal modelling of dynamic spatial systems in general. Qualitative conceptualizations of space and tools/techniques for efficiently reasoning with them being well-established, there is now a clear felt need within the community to utilise the tools and formalisms that have been constructed in the recent years in novel application scenarios and, gauging by the content of upcoming events, even a focus on evaluation standards and benchmarking problems for qualitative formalisms. Session Scope and Format: The format of the session has been designed in accordance with the general goal of offering a structure for exchange. The program will include a number of presentations by the invitees representing several different aspects of spatial and temporal reasoning, followed by discussions. This proposed special session at IICAI aims to achieve a balance between both theory and application-centric research in the spatial and temporal reasoning area. At the foundational level, of special interest to this session is research that focusses on the integration of the specialisation of qualitative spatial reasoning with general logic-based approaches for reasoning about action and change. Some of the topics deemed important include: Temporal, spatial and spatio-temporal calculi Qualitative reasoning, constraints for temporal and spatial knowledge New ways to formally represent and reason about dynamic spatial systems Use of non-monotonic techniques in spatial reasoning Concurrency in the spatial domain Unified approaches for the formal modelling of space, time and change Integrated spatial and terminological reasoning Integrated ontologies for spatial scene descriptions of indoor environments (e.g., in room-space) Grounding of perceptual environmental data with spatial ontologies Qualitative abstractions of low-level motion control tasks in robotics (e.g., in robotic grasping) Exploting notions of spatio-temporal continuity (e.g., in learning behaviour from video) At the application-level, we encourage the submission of research that demonstrates the utility of well-established qualitative spatial and temporal calculi, tools and systems in novel domains including, but not limited to, the following: Applications involving temporal and spatial reasoning (with or without constraints) in general Planning, explanation and simulation within dynamic spatial systems Use of qualitative space-time methods in experimental cognitive robotics Qualification techniques of quantitative data sources Reasoning with qualified spatio-temporal data (e.g., abduction with S-T data streams) Qualitative spatial modelling and reasoning in ambient intelligence systems Applications in architectural design, sketch recognition and understanding Although the content of the proposals that are submitted is open-ended, the session categorically invites submission of papers highlighting prototypical and complete systems. It is expected that the proposed systems, or parts thereof, in this category will involve spatial and/or temporal reasoning in some form. Of special interest to the aims of the session are systems where the application of formal qualitative spatial calculi or the application of existing reasoning tools is highlighted. In addition to the thematic requirements, selections will be made on the basis of how closely the illustrated techniques utilize existing formalizations developed in the area of qualitative spatial representation and reasoning. Attendance and Publication: The session will be organised as a parallel track within the conference and is open to all members of the AI community. Screening will be based on reviews and relevance to the session goals. Each paper will be peer reviewed by at least two experts in the topical area. All accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings, under the title of the session. Special Issue: Select contributions will be invited for publication as a part of a Special Issue of the Journal of Spatial Cognition and Computation that has been planned to build on the results of this and other thematically related events. The invited papers will be subject to extensions and another round of reviews as per the journal rules and the issue will be released in 2010. Details will be announced selectively in due time. Submission Requirements: Electronic submissions are solicited in PostScript or PDF format. The papers, starting with title, authors' names, affiliations, postal and email addresses, followed by at least 3 keywords, and concluding with relevant bibliographic references. Papers should be formatted with A4 or 8.5 x 11 inch pages and not exceed 12 pages in total length, including all Figures, Tables, References and Appendices. Selection of participants will be based on relevance to the indicated focus of the session, clarity of the work submitted, and the strength of the research. Interested authors should submit their paper in PDF or PostScript format by email to Mehul Bhatt. Please use 'IICAI-09 S-T' in the subject-line of your email. The papers MUST use the Springer Lecture Notes style for formatting the paper. The relevant LaTeX2e templates are avalable here: LNCS LaTeX2e, but make sure to utilise the latest templates directly from the Springer website. Please feel free to contact the organisers if in doubt about any aspect of the session or its requirements or if your submission is not acknowledged . Deadlines: May 20 2009: Paper manuscripts due. June 25 2009: Notification of acceptance. July 6 2009: Camera ready papers and Pre-registration due. December 16-18, 2009: Special Session and the IICAI-09 Conference. Session Chairs Mehul Bhatt (primary contact) SFB/TR 8 Spatial Cognition Universität Bremen P.O. Box 330 440, 28334 Bremen, GERMANY bhatt@informatik.uni-bremen.de Shyamanta M Hazarika Department of Computer Sc & Engineering School of Engineering, Tezpur University Tezpur - 784028, Assam, INDIA smh@tezu.ernet.in Stefan Wölfl Department of Computer Science Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg Georges-Köhler-Allee Geb. 052, Room 00-043 79110 Freiburg, GERMANY woelfl@informatik.uni-freiburg.de Program Committee Amitabha Mukerjee (IITK, India) Anthony Cohn (University of Leeds, United Kingdom) Björn Gottfried (University of Bremen, Germany) Brandon Bennett (University of Leeds, United Kingdom) Christian Freksa (University of Bremen, Germany) Diedrich Wolter (University of Bremen, Germany) Hans Guesgen (Massey University, New Zealand) Nico Van de Weghe (Ghent University, Belgium) Back to Special Events