Call for Papers
1999 AAAI Spring Symposium on Search Techniques for Problem Solving
under Uncertainty and Incomplete Information
March 22-24, 1999, Stanford University
(Paper Deadline: October 30, 1998)
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To build practical AI systems, one has to address issues related to
uncertainty and incomplete information. Uncertainty and incomplete
information can result from various sources, including actuator and
sensor noise, reasoning with approximate models, limited communication
bandwidth, and insufficient domain understanding.
This symposium will focus on the selection of search strategies for
problem solving under uncertainty and incomplete information, where
the large number of contingencies can create large search spaces.
Therefore, system performance ultimately depends largely on the
efficiency of the selected search strategies. Using appropriate
search strategies can significantly increase system performance by
exploiting problem-specific knowledge and restricting the search to
the right regions of the search spaces to find satisfactory solutions
quickly.
The main purpose of the symposium is to bring together researchers and
practitioners from areas such as planning, heuristic search, robotics,
constraint satisfaction, game playing, and information gathering. We
want to discuss when and how traditional search techniques (such as
state-space search and local search) should be applied; how uncertain
and incomplete information can be exploited to control search
processes; whether there is a difference in principle between
reasoning with deterministic and probabilistic representations of
uncertain and incomplete information (for example, with constraint
networks or belief networks); how the level of uncertainty affects
problem complexity; how different search paradigms (such as heuristic
search and dynamic programming) can be combined to provide additional
pruning power; and how the structure of search spaces can be exploited
to speed up search. We also intend to explore how these search
strategies can be applied across domains and application areas, and
speculate on promising future search strategies.
The symposium will consist of one or two invited talks, followed by
short presentations and longer discussions, in an atmosphere that
encourages the interaction of researchers with different backgrounds.
There will be plenty of opportunity to discover common ground between
different fields and application domains.
All types of papers are sought, including papers describing theory,
algorithms, applications, systems, performance measures, and other
issues related to search strategies for problem solving under
uncertainty and incomplete information. Papers on work in progress
are encouraged. Other interested participants should send a short
description of their research interests with a list of relevant
publications. Suggestions for panel and group discussions are also
welcome.
Submission in postscript format should be sent, electronically, to
zhang@isi.edu. Authors should follow the general AAAI submission
guidelines (see http://www.aaai.org/Publications/Author/authorinstructions.html
for details). The maximum length is six pages, in AAAI format.
Detailed information about the symposium can be found at
http://www.isi.edu/isd/zhang/SearchStrategies.html.
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Important dates:
Abstracts or papers due on October 30, 1998.
Camera-ready version (limited to six pages) due on Jan 29, 1999.
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Organizing committee:
Weixiong Zhang (Cochair), (USC/ISI, zhang@isi.edu)
Sven Koenig (Cochair), (Georgia Tech, skoenig@cc.gatech.edu)
Tom Dean (Brown, tld@cs.brown.edu)
Rina Dechter (UC Irvine, dechter@ics.uci.edu)
Subbarao Kambhampati (Arizona State, rao@asu.edu)
Craig Knoblock (USC/ISI, knoblock@isi.edu)
Lydia Kavraki (Rice, kavraki@cs.rice.edu)
Shlomo Zilberstein (U Mass, shlomo@cs.umass.edu)