[Om] Deadline Extension (28 Jan): Enabling Domain Experts to use Formalised Reasoning, Stage 2 (AISB 2013, Exeter, UK, 2-5 Apr 2013)

[Christoph LANGE]

Do-Form: Enabling Domain Experts to use Formalised Reasoning
http://cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/formare/events/aisb2013

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS

Symposium at the annual convention of the
AISB (Society for the Study of
  Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour;
  http://www.aisb.org.uk)
University of Exeter, UK
2-5 April 2013
http://emps.exeter.ac.uk/computer-science/research/aisb/

SPECIAL SESSIONS with
* Utku Ünver (market design and matching problems)
* Peter Cramton (auctions)
* Neels Vosloo (finance markets regulation)

SUBMISSION DEADLINE (extended): 28 January

This symposium is motivated by the long-term VISION of making information
systems dependable.  In the past even mis-represented units of
measurements caused fatal ENGINEERING disasters.  In ECONOMICS, the
subtlety of issues involved in good auction design may have led to low
revenues in auctions of public goods such as the 3G radio spectra.
Similarly, banks' value-at-risk (VaR) models – the leading method of
financial risk measurement – are too large and change too quickly to be
thoroughly vetted by hand, the current state of the art; in the London
Whale incident of 2012, JP Morgan claimed that its exposures were $67mn
under one of its VaR models, and $129 under another one.  Verifying a
model's properties requires formally specifying them; for VaR models, any
work would have to start with this most basic step, as regulators' current
desiderata are subjective and ambiguous.

We believe that these problems can be addressed by representing the
knowledge underlying such models and mechanisms in a formal, explicit,
machine-verifiable way.  Contemporary computer science offers a wide
choice of knowledge representation languages well supported by
verification tools.  Such tools have been successfully applied, e.g., for
verifying software that controls commuter rail or payment systems (cf. the
symposium homepage for further background).  Still, DOMAIN EXPERTS without
a strong computer science background find it challenging to choose the
right tools and to use them.  This symposium aims at investigating ways to
support them.  Some problems can be addressed now, others will bring new
challenges to computer science.

General TOPICS of interest include:

  * for DOMAIN EXPERTS: what problems in application domains could benefit
    from better verification and knowledge management facilities?
    Possible fields include:

    * Example 1 (economics):
      auctions, VaR, trading algorithms, market design

    * Example 2 (engineering):
      system interoperability, manufacturing processes, product
classification

  * for COMPUTER SCIENTISTS: how to provide the right knowledge management
    and verification tools to domain experts without a computer science
    background?

    * wikis and blogs for informal, semantic, semiformal, and formal
      mathematical knowledge;
    * general techniques and tools for online collaborative mathematics;
    * tools for collaboratively producing, presenting, publishing, and
      interacting with online mathematics;
    * automation and computer-human interaction aspects of mathematical
      wikis;
    * ontologies and knowledge bases designed to support knowledge
      management and verification in application domains;
    * practical experiences, usability aspects, feasibility studies;
    * evaluation of existing tools and experiments;
    * requirements, user scenarios and goals.

We particularly invite submissions that address the problems or that apply
the tools presented in the papers submitted for stage 1 (see "submission"
below).

THE SYMPOSIUM is designed to bring domain experts and formalisers into
close and fruitful contact with each other: domain experts will be able to
present their fields and problems to formalisers; formalisers will be
exposed to new and challenging problem areas. We will combine talks and
hands-on sessions to ensure close interaction among participants from both
sides.

World-class economists will offer dedicated HANDS-ON SESSIONS on the
following topics:

* Market design and matching problems (Utku Ünver, Boston College): These
  include matching students to schools, interns to hospitals, and kidney
  donors to recipients.  See the documentation for the 2012 Nobel Memorial
  Prize in Economic Sciences for more background information
  (http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2012/).
* Auctions (Peter Cramton, University of Maryland): Peter works on
  auctions for ICANN (the ‘knock out’ domain name auctions), Ofcom UK (4G
  spectrum auction), the UK Department of the Environment and Climate
  Change, and others.
* Finance (Neels Vosloo, Financial Services Authority UK): It is currently
  impossible for regulators to properly inspect either risk management
  models, or algorithmic trading platforms.  To what extent can techniques
  from mechanised reasoning automate some of the inspection process?

SUBMISSIONS

We solicit submissions on any of the TOPICS outlined initially but prefer
submissions that specifically address topics identified in the earlier
submission Stage 1.  In Stage 1 we had solicited

* from DOMAIN EXPERTS descriptions of "nails": canonical models and
  problems in their domain that might benefit from better verification and
  knowledge management facilities.  Descriptions should focus on aspects
  of these models that domain users find particularly problematic, and
  suspect might be aided by formalisation tools

* from COMPUTER SCIENTISTS descriptions of "hammers": formalisation,
  verification and knowledge management tools, with an emphasis on how
  they could be applied in a concrete real-world setting, or tailored to
  such application domains.

Commented versions of these submissions are now online at
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/formare/events/aisb2013/stage1.php.
A tool whose description is submitted to Stage 2 could, e.g., be motivated
with a Stage 1 problem, and sketch how the tool could, or will, be applied
in this domain.  Each submission will be refereed by three PC members on
average.  Submissions will be judged based on the PC's views of the
likelihood of contributing to a better matching of hammers (formalisation
and verification tools) to nails (domain problems).

At this stage we accept PDF submissions in any layout but count 1200 words
as one page for fair comparison.  We invite research and position papers,
as well as tool and system descriptions, from 3 to 10 pages.  Besides PDFs
we invite the submission of formalised knowledge representations with
human-readable annotations.

To submit a paper, please go to the Do-Form EasyChair page
(http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=doform2013) and follow the
instructions for Stage 2 there.

FINAL VERSIONS

Final versions should be prepared in LaTeX according to the AISB
formatting guidelines linked from the symposium homepage.  For the final
version, non-PDF submissions should be accompanied by a PDF abstract of 2
to 4 pages.  Electronic proceedings (with an ISBN) will be made available
to the convention delegates on a memory stick, and on the AISB website.

Given a sufficient number of high-quality submissions, we will invite
authors to submit revised and extended versions to a SPECIAL ISSUE of a
relevant JOURNAL.  (E.g., co-chair Manfred Kerber is on the editorial
board of Mathematics in Computer Science.)

IMPORTANT DATES

   * Submission (Stage 2): 28 January 2013
   * Notification: 18 February 2013
   * Final versions due: 4 March 2013
   * Symposium: 2-5 April 2013 (days to be fixed)
   * AISB Convention: 2-5 April 2013

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

    1. Bill Andersen, Highfleet, US
    2. Rob Arthan, Lemma 1, Reading, UK
    3. Christoph Benzmüller, Free University of Berlin, Germany
    4. Peter Cramton, University of Maryland, US
    5. James Davenport, University of Bath, UK
    6. Michael Grüninger, University of Toronto, Canada
    7. Manfred Kerber, University of Birmingham, UK (co-chair)
    8. Michael Kohlhase, Jacobs University Bremen, Germany
    9. Christoph Lange, University of Birmingham, UK (co-chair)
   10. Till Mossakowski, University of Bremen, Germany
   11. Colin Rowat, University of Birmingham, UK (co-chair)
   12. Todd Schneider, Raytheon, US
   13. Richard Steinberg, London School of Economics, UK
   14. Geoff Sutcliffe, University of Miami, US
   15. Theodore L Turocy, Centre for Behavioural and Experimental Social
       Science, University of East Anglia, UK
   16. Makarius Wenzel, University of Paris Sud, France
   17. Wolfgang Windsteiger, RISC / JKU Linz, Austria

COMMENTS/QUESTIONS/ENQUIRIES to be sent to DoForm2013 at easychair.org