[Om-announce] Bridging the Gap between Human and Automated Reasoning

[geoff at cs.miami.edu]

Fourth Workshop on

Bridging the Gap between Human and Automated Reasoning

a FAIM workshop (supported by IFIP TC12) Stockholm, Sweden

Reasoning is a core ability in human cognition. Its power lies in the ability to
theorize about the environment, to make implicit knowledge explicit, to
generalize given knowledge and to gain new insights. There are a lot of findings
in cognitive science research which are based on experimental data about
reasoning tasks, among others models for the Wason selection task or the
suppression task discussed by Byrne and others. This research is supported also
by brain researchers, who aim at localizing reasoning processes within the
brain.

Early work often used propositional logic as a normative framework. Any
deviation from it has been considered an error. Central results like findings
from the Wason selection task or the suppression task inspired a shift from
propositional logic and the assumption of monotonicity in human reasoning
towards other reasoning approaches. This includes but is not limited to models
using probabilistic approaches, mental models, or non-monotonic logics.
Considering cognitive theories for syllogistic reasoning show that none of the
existing theories is close to the existing data. But some formally inspired
cognitive complexity measures can predict human reasoning difficulty for
instance in spatial relational reasoning.

Automated deduction, on the other hand, is mainly focusing on the automated
proof search in logical calculi. And indeed there is tremendous success during
the last decades. Recently a coupling of the areas of cognitive science and
automated reasoning is addressed in several approaches. For example there is
increasing interest in modeling human reasoning within automated reasoning
systems including modeling with answer set programming, deontic logic or
abductive logic programming. There are also various approaches within AI
research for common sense reasoning and in the meantime there even exist
benchmarks for commonsense reasoning, like the Winograd and the COPA challenge.
Despite a common research interest - reasoning - there are still several
milestones necessary to foster a better interdisciplinary research. First, to
develop a better understanding of methods, techniques, and approaches applied 
in both research fields. Second, to have a synopsis of the relevant 
state-of-the-art in both research directions. Third, to combine methods and
techniques from both fields and find synergies. E.g., techniques and methods
from computational logic have never been directly applied to model adequately
human reasoning. They have always been adapted and changed. Fourth, we need more
and better experimental data that can be used as a benchmark system. Fifth,
cognitive theories can benefit from a computational modeling. Hence, both fields
- human and automated reasoning - can both contribute to these milestones and
are in fact a conditio sine qua non. Achievements in both fields can inform the
others. Deviations between fields can inspire to seek a new and profound
understanding of the nature of reasoning.

This is the fourth workshop in a series of successful Bridging the Gap Between
Human and Automated Reasoning workshops.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following:
- benchmark problems relevant in both fields
- approaches to tackle Benchmark problems like the Winograd Schema Challenge 
  or the COPA challenge
- limits and differences between automated and human reasoning
- psychology of deduction and common sense reasoning
- logics modeling human reasoning
- non-monotonic, defeasible, and classical reasoning

The workshop is part of the FAIM workshop program located at the Federated
Artificial Intelligence Meeting (FAIM) which includes the major conferences
IJCAI, ECAI, ICML, AAMAS, ICCBR and SoCS. The Bridging workshop is supported by
IFIP TC12.

IMPORTANT DATES
Full Paper submission deadline: 25th of April, 2018
Notification: 3rd of June, 2018
Final submission: 17th of June, 2018
Workshop: July 2018

SUBMISSION AND CONTRIBUTION FORMAT
Papers, including the description of work in progress are welcome and should be
formatted according to IJCAI guidelines. The length should not exceed 6 pages
excluding references. All papers must be submitted in PDF. Formatting
instructions and the style files can be obtained from
http://www.ijcai.org/authors_kit. The EasyChair submission site is available 
at: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=bridging2018

PROCEEDINGS
Proceedings of the workshop will be published as CEUR workshop proceedings.

ORGANIZERS
Ulrich Furbach, University of Koblenz
Sageet Khemlani, Naval Research Laboratory, Washington DC
Oliver Obst, Western Sydney University
Marco Ragni, University of Freiburg
Claudia Schon, University of Koblenz

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
- Emmanuelle Diez Saldanha, University of Dresden
- Ulrich Furbach, University of Koblenz
- Steffen Hoelldobler, University of Dresden
- Antonis C. Kakas, University Cyprus, Cyprus
- Gabriele Kern-Isberner, TU Dortmund
- Sangeet Khemlani, Naval Research Lab, USA
- Robert A. Kowalski Imperial College London, GB
- Oliver Obst, Western Sydney University
- Luis Moniz Pereira, Universidade Nova Lisboa, Portugal
- Marco Ragni, University of Freiburg
- Claudia Schon, University of Koblenz
- Frieder Stolzenburg, Harz University of Applied Sciences
- to be completed

Contact: Claudia Schon, schon at uni-koblenz.de