call for papers, previous message

From:     cox@cc.gatech.edu (Michael Cox)
Subject:  CFP: Representing Mental States and Mechanisms
Date:     27 Aug 1994 17:30:38 -0400


		   REPRESENTING MENTAL STATES AND MECHANISMS

		       AAAI 1995 Spring Symposium Series
			      March 27 - 29, 1995
			     Stanford University,
			     Stanford, California
				       

			    CALL FOR PARTICIPATION


The ability to reason about  mental states and cognitive mechanisms facilitates
performance at a variety of tasks.  The purpose of this symposium is to enhance
our ability  to  construct programs that  employ  commonsense knowledge  of the
mental world in  an explicit representational format  that can be shared across
domains  and     systems.     Such knowledge    can,    for  example,    assist
story-understanding  programs to understand characters  that learn, forget, pay
attention, make a  decision, and  change their   mind.  The  need to  represent
knowledge of    mental activity transcends   usual disciplinary   boundaries to
include most  reasoning  tasks where systems  interact   with users, coordinate
behaviors with   autonomous   agents, or    consider  their own   beliefs   and
limitations.  For example, distributed problem-solving agents can use knowledge
of mental phenomena to predict and explain the  behavior of cooperating agents.
In machine learning, a system's knowledge  of its own mental states, capacities
and mechanisms crucially determines the  reliability with which it can diagnose
and  repair  reasoning failures.   The focus  of the  symposium, however, is on
representation   of  the  mental    world   and   the  sharing/reuse  of   such
representations,  rather than the     applications that  such   representations
support.

Important questions to consider:

 o  (SHARABILITY) What tools / techniques can facilitate the sharing of
    representations among researchers?

 o  (REUSE) What portions of  the representation  can  be  transferred
    across reasoning tasks?

 o  (ARCHITECTURE) How can functional models of reasoning-components be
    represented explicitly?

 o  (LOGICAL FORM) What statements can be logically asserted about  the
    self and its beliefs? What benefits arise from such representations?

 o  (APPLICATIONS) How can knowledge of  mental phenomena  be  used in
    tasks ranging  from student instruction to  intelligent  interface
    control?

 o  (INTROSPECTION) What must an intelligent  system know about its own
    mental states and processes?

	      PLEASE MONITOR THE WEB FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:
     ftp://ftp.cc.gatech.edu/pub/ai/symposia/aaai-spring-95/home_page.html

The  symposium will  consist  of invited  talks,  individual presentations, and
group    discussion.  "Key  position"  papers   describing  possible topics for
submitted papers will be available at the network address listed above.  If you
wish   to present,  submit up  to  12  pages (fewer  pages   are encouraged) in
12-point,  with  1" margins.   Others interested  in attending should  submit a
research abstract   or position paper  (3-pp.   max).  Financial  assistance is
available for student participation.

Submit 1 postscript copy to

                  freed@picasso.arc.nasa.gov

or 4 hardcopies to Michael Freed, MS 262-2 NASA ARC, Moffett Field, CA, 94035.


SUBMISSION DATES:

Submissions for the symposia  are  due on October   28, 1994.  Notification  of
acceptance will be given by November 30, 1994.   Material to be included in the
working notes of the symposium must be received by January 20, 1995.


ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:

Co-chairs -
Michael Cox    cox@cc.gatech.edu           
               (Georgia Tech, AI/Cognitive-Science Group, College of Computing)
Michael Freed  freed@picasso.arc.nasa.gov
               (NASA Ames Research Center,                 Human Factors Group)

Gregg Collins  (Northwestern University,    Institute of the Learning Sciences)
Bruce Krulwich (Andersen Consulting,  Center for Strategic Technology Research)
Cindy Mason    (NASA Ames Research Center,       Artificial Intelligence Group)
John  McCarthy (Stanford  University,           Department of Computer Science)
John  Self     (Lancaster University,                  Department of Computing)
-- 
COX,MICHAEL T                   |      "Discus,                   
AI / Cognitive-Science Group    |       starred with premonitions,
College of Computing            |       throw yourself            
Georgia Institute of Technology |       out of yourself."         
Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0280     |                                 
Internet: cox@cc.gatech.edu     |              	     -- Paul Celan
Mosaic file://ftp.cc.gatech.edu/pub/ai/students/cox/cox.html