[Om-announce] KR 2023: Calls for Applications & Systems Track, Special Session on KR & ML, Doctoral Consortium

[Theofanis I. Aravanis]

20th International Conference on

Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, KR 2023

September 2 - September 8, 2023, Rhodes, Greece

Call for Papers - Applications & Systems Track

Systems and applications incorporating Knowledge Representation and 
Reasoning (KR) have made tremendous progress over the last decades and 
become more and more pervasive in scientific, industrial and everyday 
life. Popular knowledge representation formalisms range from databases, 
ontologies, classical, probabilistic and non-monotonic logics to natural 
language, offering rich means to describe a variety of static as well as 
dynamic phenomena. Automated reasoning systems harness machine learning, 
combinatorial search and optimization methods, planning, proving, design 
and diagnosis techniques to provide powerful tools for analyzing and 
deriving conclusions from complex input data. Novel, general and 
interdisciplinary approaches are thus vital contributions at the 
intersection of science, industry and society, aiming to enhance the 
capabilities and outreach of KR principles and technologies.

This year, for the fourth time, KR 2023 will host a track on 
"Applications and Systems". The Applications and Systems Track aims at 
providing researchers and industrial practitioners with a dedicated 
forum for presentation and discussion of new ideas, research experience 
and emerging results on topics related to applications of KR formalisms 
and automated reasoning systems. This track provides the opportunity for 
fostering meaningful connections between researchers from both practical 
and theoretical areas of AI and, at the same time, offers participants 
the possibility to learn about progress made on these topics, share 
their own views and elaborate about approaches that could lead to 
effective cross-fertilisation among research in challenging KR 
applications and new innovative systems for solving them.

Expected Contributions

The Applications and Systems Track at KR 2023 invites submissions of 
papers on all aspects of the development, deployment, and evaluation of 
KR systems to solve significant and challenging application problems, 
including:

● case studies, including suitable descriptions of the problem setting, 
data and tools used, and "lessons learnt",
● use cases, including task specifications, related tasks/approaches, 
challenges, and a sketch of possible KR solution,
● benchmarks, including suitable descriptions of the dataset, reasoning 
tasks, and ideally some "solution set" or gold standard,
● system descriptions, including descriptions of the algorithm, 
implementation
● and empirical evaluation on a suitable dataset.

We welcome the above kinds of papers on a wide range of topics, 
including papers describing KR systems, tools, solvers and reasoning 
engines, as well as papers reporting on applications of KR systems in 
solving or supporting tasks related to different application areas and 
settings.

Application areas of interest include but are not restricted to: 
computational biology, computer vision and image recognition, creative 
computing, cybersecurity and blockchain, data analysis, databases and 
query answering, decision support, declarative problem solving, 
diagnosis and explanation, game theory and social choice, human-computer 
interaction, intelligent transportation and logistics, intelligent user 
interfaces, internet of things, machine learning, natural language 
processing, digital forensics, robotics and human-robot collaboration, 
semantic web and knowledge graphs, software engineering, and system 
design. We also welcome submissions talking about interdisciplinary 
applications of KR, for example in economics, education, life sciences, 
medicine, and pharmacology, among others.

Submission Guidelines and Evaluation Criteria

The Applications and Systems Track will allow contributions of both 
regular papers (9 pages) and short papers (4 pages), excluding 
references, prepared and submitted according to the authors guidelines 
in the submission page.

The track emphasizes applications of KR and development of KR systems, 
and welcomes contributions showcasing the impact of KR research as well 
as driving future research by presenting challenging data, use cases and 
problems together with observations and insights gained.

Submissions will be rigorously peer reviewed by PC members, who are 
active in applications of KR and/or development of KR systems. 
Submissions will be evaluated on the basis of the overall quality of 
their technical contribution, including criteria such as originality, 
soundness, relevance, significance, reproducibility (including 
that--depending on the nature of the contribution--proofs of main claims 
and/or empirically evaluated implementations of algorithms, empirical 
data and related scripts, etc, must be made available to allow other 
researchers to reproduce the reported results), quality of presentation, 
and understanding of the state of the art.

In this track, the selection process of the highest quality papers will 
further apply the following criteria:

● (for case studies) quality of the evaluation and significance of the 
"lessons learnt"
● (for use cases) importance and novelty of these use cases for KR
● (for system descriptions) quality of the empirical evaluation and its 
reporting
● (for benchmarks) reusability, coverage, and complexity of the datasets

Important Dates

* Submission of title and abstract: March 3, 2023
* Paper submission deadline: March 14, 2023
* Author response period: May 1-3, 2023
* Author notification: May 18, 2023
* Camera-ready papers: June 9, 2023
* Conference: September 2-8, 2023

Submission Instructions

Each submission should be in English and must be submitted 
electronically (in .pdf format) via EasyChair:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=kr2023

Chairs

● Matti Järvisalo, University of Helsinki, Finland
● Francesco Ricca, University of Calabria, Italy

=======================================================================================================================================================

Call for Papers - Special Session on KR & ML

The last few years have witnessed a growing interest in AI methods that 
combine aspects of Machine Learning (ML) with insights and methods from 
the field of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR). This trend is 
motivated by the clear complementarity of ML and KR. For instance, the 
popularity and success of ML based systems has put issues such as 
explainability, bias, fairness, sustainability, symbol grounding and so 
forth, firmly in the spotlight, and addressing these issues naturally 
leads to systems in which symbolic representations play a central role. 
On the other hand, ML also offers solutions for long-standing challenges 
in the field of KR, for instance related to efficient, neurally-guided, 
noise-tolerant and ampliative inference, knowledge acquisition, and the
limitations of symbolic representations. The synergy between ML and KR 
has the potential to lead to new advancements in fundamental AI 
challenges including, but not limited to, learning symbolic 
generalisations from raw (multi-modal) data, using knowledge to 
facilitate data-efficient learning, speeding up inference, supporting 
interpretability of learned outcomes and integration of symbolic 
planning and reinforcement learning.

This year, for the third time, KR2023 will host a special session on 
"Knowledge Representation and Machine Learning", which aims at providing 
researchers and practitioners with a dedicated forum for the discussion 
of new ideas and research results at the intersection of these two 
fields. This special session will provide participants with the 
opportunity to make meaningful connections and develop a shared 
understanding of the challenges involved in developing innovative AI 
solutions that rely on a combination of insights and methods from ML and 
KR.

Expected Contributions

The Special Session on KR and ML at KR2023 invites submissions of papers 
that combine aspects of KR and ML research, including the use of KR 
methods for solving ML challenges (e.g. knowledge-guided or explainable 
learning), the use of ML methods for solving KR challenges (e.g. 
efficient inference, knowledge base completion), the integration of 
learning and reasoning at modeling or solving side, and the application 
of combined KR and ML approaches to solve real-world problems.

We welcome papers on a wide range of topics, including but not limited 
to:

* Learning symbolic knowledge, such as ontologies and knowledge graphs, 
action theories, commonsense knowledge, spatial and temporal theories, 
preference models and causal models
* Logic-based, logical and relational learning algorithms
* Machine-learning driven reasoning algorithms
* Neural-symbolic learning
* Statistical relational learning
* Symbolic reinforcement learning
* Learning symbolic abstractions from unstructured data
* Explainable AI
* Expressive power of learning representations
* Knowledge-driven natural language understanding and dialogue
* Knowledge-driven decision making
* Knowledge-driven intelligent systems for internet of things and 
cybersecurity
* Architectures that combine data-driven techniques and formal reasoning

Submission Guidelines and Evaluation Criteria

The Special Session on KR and ML will allow contributions of both 
regular papers (9 pages) and short papers (4 pages), excluding
references, prepared and submitted according to the authors guidelines 
in the submission page.

The special session welcomes contributions that extend the 
state-of-the-art at the intersection of KR and ML. Therefore, KR-only or
ML-only submissions will not be accepted for evaluation in this special 
session.

Submissions will be rigorously peer reviewed by PC members who are 
active in KR and ML. Submissions will be evaluated on the basis of the 
originality, soundness, relevance and significance of the technical 
contribution, as well as the overall presentation quality.

Important Dates

* Submission of title and abstract: March 3, 2023
* Paper submission deadline: March 14, 2023
* Author response period: May 1-3, 2023
* Author notification: May 18, 2023
* Camera-ready papers: June 9, 2023
* Conference: September 2-8, 2023

Submission Instructions

Each submission should be in English and must be submitted 
electronically (in .pdf format) via EasyChair:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=kr2023

Chairs

* Tias Guns, KU Leuven, Belgium
* Luciano Serafini, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy

=======================================================================================================================================================

Call for Applications - Doctoral Consortium

The 20th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge 
Representation and Reasoning (KR 2023) invites PhD students to apply for 
the Doctoral Consortium program.

Aims and Scope

The Doctoral Consortium (DC) is a student mentoring program bringing 
together PhD students and senior researchers from the area of KR. The 
aims of the consortium are:

● to provide a forum for students to present their current research, and 
receive feedback from other students and senior researchers;
● to promote contacts among PhD students working in similar areas;
● to support students with information and advice on academic, research, 
and industrial careers.

The DC is intended for PhD students who have a specific research 
proposal and some preliminary results, but who have sufficient time 
prior to completing their dissertation to benefit from the consortium 
experience. Preference will be given to students satisfying these 
criteria, but we also encourage students to apply who are at an earlier 
or more advanced stage of the completion of their thesis. Accepted 
students will participate in several dedicated DC events, which will 
likely consist of a lightning talk session and a poster and mentoring 
session (the precise format of the DC will be finalized closer to the 
conference). Each student will be given ample time to present their work 
and therefore be able to fully benefit from direct feedback from the 
assigned senior researcher mentor and the wider KR conference audience.

Application Submission

Applications must be submitted through the EasyChair conference system:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=kr2023

Each application must contain the following elements combined into a 
single PDF document:

1. Thesis summary. A description of the problem being addressed, your 
motivation for addressing the problem, proposed plan of research, the 
progress to date (what you have already achieved and what remains to be 
done), and related work. The maximum number of pages is four 
(bibliography included) and the same style as for KR paper submissions 
should be used (see https://kr.org/KR2023/).
2. Curriculum Vitae. A description of your background and relevant 
experience (research, education, employment), maximum two pages.
3. Brief letter of recommendation. A brief letter from your thesis 
advisor that states that she/he supports your participation in the DC.
4. Optionally, a suggestion of some potential mentors with similar 
research interests, who could give good advice on technical aspects 
related to the work, and/or career opportunities.

The selection process will consider the quality of the submitted 
proposal and the stage of the student's PhD project. Doctoral students 
who submit to the DC are permitted to have previously published their 
research, and are encouraged to submit papers to KR 2023 and associated 
conferences and workshops.

Doctoral Consortium Chairs

● Tanya Braun, University of Münster (tanya.braun at uni-muenster.de)
● Nico Potyka, Imperial College London (n.potyka at imperial.ac.uk)
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