Information
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Seventh International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR2000) Breckenridge, Colorado, USA
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Fifth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling (AIPS2000) Breckenridge, Colorado, USA
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For more information see http://www.isi.edu/aips/ or http://www.kr.org/kr/kr00/.
Explicit representations of knowledge manipulated by inference algorithms provide an important foundation for much work in Artificial Intelligence, including natural language dialogue systems, high level vision, robotics, planning, and other knowledge based systems. The KR conferences have established themselves as the leading forum for timely, in-depth presentation of progress in the theory and principles underlying the representation and computational manipulation of knowledge. The traditional very high standard of papers has been maintained at KR2000; to acknowledge this, a best paper award will be made. Expanding on that role, KR2000 will be a place for the exchange of news, issues, and results among the entire community of researchers in the principles and practices of knowledge representation and reasoning systems.
In recent years, Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling has emerged as a technology critical to production management, space systems, internet, and military applications. The International Conference on AI Planning & Scheduling will bring together researchers working in all aspects of problems in planning, scheduling, planning and learning, and plan execution. The conference will include paper presentations, invited speakers, panel discussions, workshops , and planning competition and scheduling competitions.
We look forward to seeing you in Breckenridge.
Fausto Giunchiglia, Bart Selman, and Tony Cohn, on behalf of KR2000
Steve Chien, Subbarao Kambhampati, and Craig Knoblock on behalf of AIPS2000
| Date | Time | Conference Activities | Workshops |
| . | . | KR2000 Activities | KR2000 Workshops |
| . | . | AIPS2000 Activities | AIPS2000 Workshops |
| Sunday, 9 April | . | . | |
| Monday, 10 April | . | . | |
| Tuesday, 11 April | . | . | Semantic Approximation, Granularity, and Vagueness; CollECTeR Conference on Electronic Commerce |
| . | . | ||
| Wednesday, 12 April | . | . | |
| Thursday, 13 April | . | . | |
| Friday, 14 April | . | Domain Knowledge for Efficient Planning; Decision-Theoretic Planning; Model-Theoretic Approaches to Planning |
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| Saturday, 15 April | Technical Program |
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| Sunday, 16 April | . | . | |
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| Monday, 17 April | . | . |
The AIPS2000 Conference Banquet will be held on Sunday evening, 16 April 2000. The AIPS2000 Banquet is included in AIPS2000 registration.
Workshop participants should use the common registration form. KR2000 conference registration for KR2000 workshop participants is welcome but is not mandatory.
Philip A. Bernstein (http://www.research.microsoft.com/~philbe) is a Senior Researcher in the database group of Microsoft Research and a contributor to the Microsoft Repository product group, where he was Architect from 1994-1998. He has published over 90 articles and 3 books on database systems and related topics, and has contributed to many database system products, prototypes, and standards. His latest book is "Principles of Transaction Processing" (Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 1996).
Daphne Koller received her PhD from Stanford University in 1994. After a two-year postdoc at Berkeley, she returned to Stanford, where she is now an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department. She has a broad range of interests spanning artificial intelligence, economics, and theoretical computer science. Her main research interest is in creating large-scale systems that reason and act under uncertainty. The theme underlying her work is the integration of ideas from decision theory and economics into these systems. This task raises the need for compact and natural knowledge representation schemes and for efficient inference and learning algorithms that utilize these schemes. Daphne Koller is the author of over 60 refereed publications, which have appeared in AI, theoretical computer science, and economics venues. She has served on numerous program committes, on the editorial boards of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research and of the Machine Learning Journal. She was awarded the Arthur Samuel Thesis Award in 1994, the Sloan Foundation Faculty Fellowship in 1996, the Stanford University Terman Award in 1998, and the ONR Young Investigator Award in 1999.
Malik Ghallab graduated and obtained his Ph.D. in Toulouse, France. After a Post-doc at Berkeley, he joined the French CNRS institution where he is now Directeur de Recherche, head of the Robotics and AI research group at LAAS. The group focuses the activity of 50 workers on several Machine Intelligence formal topics and experimental projects on indoor and outdoor mobile robotics. Malik Ghallab contributed to issues such as object recognition and scene interpretation; heuristics search; pattern matching, unification algorithms and knowledge compiling; temporal reasoning; plan synthesis and recognition. Some of these contributions have been industrially deployed, in particular for process supervision applications. Malik Ghallab was the director of the French national AI program. He is now the coordinator of 5 national programs in computer science, he chairs ASTI, the French society for information sciences and technologies.
The aim of the Eighth International Workshop on Nonmonotonic Reasoning is to bring together active researchers in the broad area of nonmonotonic reasoning, including belief revision, reasoning about actions, planning, logic programming, causality, probabilistic and possibilistic approaches to KR, and other related topics. As part of the program we will assess the status of the field after 20 years since its inception and discuss issues such as: significant recent achievements in the theory and automation of NMR; critical short and long term goals for NMR; emerging new research directions in NMR; practical applications of NMR; and the significance of NMR to knowledge representation and AI in general.
The program of the workshop will include special sessions on:
Contact persons:
Chitta Baral, Arizona State University (chitta@asu.edu);
Mirek Truszczynski, University of Kentucky, USA (mirek@cs.uky.edu)
The
Fourth CollECTeR
Conference on Electronic Commerce is intended to
attract researchers interested in all aspects of Electronic Commerce.
Suggested research topics include (but are not limited to):
Knowledge Management;
Intelligent Business Agents;
Ecommerce applications of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Techniques;
Electronic Payment Systems;
Intranets and Extranets;
Electronic Payment Systems;
Electronic Data Interchange;
Supply Chain Management;
Electronic Payment Systems;
Internet-based Electronic Commerce;
Virtual Communities/Community Networks;
Logistics Issues for Electronic Commerce;
Business Reengineering Issues for Electronic Commerce;
Government Electronic Procurement and Service Delivery;
Legal, Auditing or Security Issues for Electronic Commerce;
and Requirements Engineering Approaches for Electronic Commerce.
The conference offers an opportunity for all those interested in researching
Electronic Commerce to meet in a specialised venue to discuss research
activities, findings and experiences. The conference is intended to be
strongly interactive and to promote general discussion. Prior to the
conference, each paper to be presented will be sent to one or more
discussants who will facilitate the debate.
Contact persons:
Paul Swatman, Deakin University, Australia
(Paul.Swatman@deakin.edu.au);
Mary-Anne Williams, University of Newcastle, Australia
(maryanne@cafe.newcastle.edu.au)
It has been recognized in recent years that similar issues, problems, and
approaches underlie research on semantic approximation, partiality,
granularity (abstraction, precisification), and vagueness in four fields:
knowledge representation in artificial intelligence (formalization
of context, spatial and temporal knowledge bases);
formal modeling (including denotational semantics, finite model theory
and descriptive complexity) in computer science;
formal ontology in analytical philosophy;
and formal semantics and pragmatics in natural language (discourse
interpretation, semantics of plurals, tense, aspect, underspecification,
etc.)
The
Workshop on Semantic Approximation, Granularity, and Vagueness
will bring together
researchers in the computer science, artificial intelligence, linguistics,
and philosophy communities for the exchange of ideas and approaches to
address issues they may have in common, such as:
approximation, partiality, indefiniteness, and vagueness;
similarity, commonality, accessibility;
abstraction and precision: notions of semantic/pragmatic granularity;
dynamic interpretation and incremental meaning;
formal structures for domain models of approximation;
imprecise ontologies;
and computational implementations and applications.
Contact person:
Leo Obrst (lobrst@vertical.net)
The workshop program of AIPS2000 continues the highly successful
workshops track at AIPS' 98. Participants will have the
opportunity to meet
and discuss planning and scheduling issues with a selected focus, providing
an informal setting for active exchange among small groups (25-50) of
researchers, developers and users on topics of current interest. All AIPS2000 workshops will be held on 14 April 2000, prior to the main
AIPS2000 technical program.
An adversarial domain is one where agents have contrary intentions and may
act to disrupt each other's plans. Most of the perennial challenges for
planning - time, uncertainty, large search spaces, replanning, integrating
planning and execution - are inherent in adversarial problems.
Since adversarial planners are often part of real-world applications the
practical aspects of planning must receive particular attention. Timeliness
becomes a big issue, with a good fast solution often preferred over a slow
optimal one. Unexpected pitfalls or opportunities must be detected and
exploited. Failure recovery and the ability to roll with the punches in a
dynamic environment is stressed.
The goals of the Workshop
on Adversarial Planning will be to
identify the state of the art in adversarial planning and the technical
challenges for future research. Contact Person: Paul Cohen, University of Massachusetts
Over the last few years there has been growing interest in how to make use
of domain knowledge to improve the efficiency of AI planning, through the
use of techniques such as domain analysis and knowledge
specification. Domain analysis is concerned with developing techniques for
analysing planning domain descriptions to extract knowledge which is
implicit in the description and which can, if exploited by a planner,
dramatically improve planning performance. This analysis might be performed
on- or off-line, with different advantages and disadvantages to each
approach. Knowledge specification is where the domain designer supplements
the domain description by including rich domain knowledge of various forms,
in order to improve the performance of planners by enabling them to exploit
this rich domain knowledge. Using combinations of these techniques many of
the staple benchmark domains are beginning to yield, suggesting that
planning is on the brink of overcoming some of the longest-standing
challenges and a significant development of the field is in sight. The
purpose of the
Workshop on Analyzing and Exploiting Domain Knowledge for Efficient
Planning is to evaluate the state of this research and to
plan ways of taking it forward in the community. Potential for
collaboration between researchers working in the automatic extraction of
knowledge and in the exploitation of rich knowledge will be explored. Contact Person: Maria Fox, University of Durham
Decision-theoretic planning combines classical and non-classical planning
techniques from artificial intelligence with decision theory (including
probability theory and utility theory) to provide a more expressive
planning model. Research on decision-theoretic planning has made
significant progress over the past few years. The challenges now are to
understand the advantages and disadvantages of the different approaches, to
study how they can be extended and combined (both with each other and with
classical planning techniques), and to develop even better approaches. We
use a broad definition of decision-theoretic planning that includes
planning techniques that deal with all types of uncertainty and plan
evaluation.
In the
Workshop on Decision-Theoretic Planning, researchers from the areas of
"planning" and "knowledge representation and reasoning" will exchange ideas
about techniques for representing uncertainty, plan generation, plan
evaluation, plan improvement, and acquisition of the necessary knowledge.
The aim of the
Workshop on Model-Theoretic Approaches to Planning
is to bring together researchers working on
different and innovative model-theoretic approaches to planning, and on the
underlying techniques (e.g, SAT, MDP, Model Checking).
Over the last few years a number of combinatorial search methods have been
applied to planning. Some of them are based on the idea that planning
problems should be solved model-theoretically. In a model-theoretic
approach to planning, planning domains are formalized as semantic models,
and planning problems are solved by searching through the models, e.g. by
checking the truth of some formula. A well known and successful example of
a model-theoretic approach to planning is Planning as Propositional
Satisfiability (SAT-planning), which has allowed the construction of
systems with interesting capabilities and performances, like SatPlan and
Blackbox. In Planning based on Markov Decision Processes (MDP-planning),
policies are constructed from stochastic automata. A more recent and
alternative approach is Planning as Model Checking. Model Checking has been
successfully applied to hardware and software verification. Symbolic Model
Checking based on Ordered Binary Decision Diagrams (OBDD's) can deal
efficiently with large state spaces. Contact Person: Paolo Traverso, Istituto per la Ricerca
Scientifica e Tecnologica
The Fourth CollECTeR Conference on Electronic Commerce
11 April 2000
Semantic Approximation, Granularity, and Vagueness
11 April 2000
AIPS2000 Workshops
Adversarial Planning
14 April 2000
Analyzing and Exploiting Domain Knowledge for Efficient Planning
14 April 2000
Decision-Theoretic Planning
14 April 2000
Model-Theoretic Approaches to Planning
14 April 2000
The AIPS2000 Planning Competition
AIPS2000 will feature the second AI planning systems competition. If you
have developed a planning system or developed an interesting planning
domain you should consider entering it in the competition. Please contact
the chair of the competition committee immediately if you are interested in
participating.
The AIPS2000 planning competition will consist of 3 separate tracks.
Fully automated planners
This track will be very similar to the STRIPS and ADL tracks run at
AIPS-98. In particular, domains and problems will be specified using an
updated version of the PDDL description language. There will be a range of
domains, using a range of the expressive features of PDDL. In particular, a
number of the domains will be restricted to actions specified using the
STRIPS formalism, while other domains will also involve features like
conditional effects and complex preconditions, like the ADL formalism. A
planning system need not be able to handle all domains in order to enter the
competition.
The planning systems can employ various forms of domain preprocessing and
analysis. However, all of this processing must be fully automatic. The
system must take only the PDDL domain description as input. After the
domain description is processed the systems must then proceed to solve the
suite of test problems, again fully automatically. Hand tailored planning systems
This is a new track for the competition. The planning domains will be
specified in advance using the PDDL description language. After the domain
is released the contestants will have a fixed period of time in which to
configure their system for this domain (e.g., if their system takes
additional domain dependent information the contestants will have this time
to create and add the relevant information). At the end of this period
testing will commence. The planning systems must be able to take as input a
suite of problems (specified in the PDDL language) and output correct plans
(also in a specific format). The planning systems will not, however, be
required to take the PDDL domain description as input. Rather during the
configuration period the competitors will have to create a domain
description suitable for their system. The planning systems will be ranked
using some of the same criteria as in the fully automated strips track. It
should also be noted that the ranking criteria will attempt to take into
account the customization effort required by the competing systems. Planning with resources
This will be a test track for the competition. That is, it will not be a
fully fledged competition track, but rather will be a track that we hope to
evolve into a proper competitive track in the future. In this track the
planning systems must be able to deal with resources which might include
real valued costs and time. We hope to extend PDDL so that we can specify
domains involving resources, but some of the test domain may be specified
in other formats. The domains will involve actions that consume and produce
metric resources. They may also have actions that can be run concurrently
and that produce different effects over time. During the testing each
problem will have a well specified cost function. The systems must
construct correct plans that attempt to optimize this cost function.
| 7 January 2000 | Competitors must register with the competition chair |
| 1 March 2000 | Preliminary rounds of the competition commence |
| 14-17 April 2000 | Final rounds of the competition |
More information about the competition can be found at
http://www.cs.toronto.edu/aips2000/
Contact Person: Fahiem
Bacchus, University of Toronto
(fbacchus@cs.toronto.edu)
| 7 February 2000 | Competitors must register with the competition chair |
| 1 March 2000 | Example problems and generators available |
| 3 April 2000 | Preliminary rounds of the competition commence |
| 14-17 April 2000 | Final rounds of the competition |
Additional information on the AIPS2000 Scheduling Competition will be
posted on the AIPS2000 web site as
it is available.
Contact Person: David E. Smith, NASA Ames Research Center
(desmith@arc.nasa.gov)
Preregistration is highly recommended as accommodations may not be available near the time of the conference.
| Tuesday, 11 April | 5:00PM - 7:00PM |
| Wednesday, 12 April | 8:00AM - 5:00PM |
| Thursday, 13 April | 8:00AM - 5:00PM |
| Friday, 14 April | 8:00AM - 12:00 Noon |
| Saturday, 15 April | 8:00AM - 5:00PM |
| Sunday, 16 April | 8:00AM - 5:00PM |
| Monday, 17 April | 8:00AM - 5:00PM |
| . | Early (Postmarked or faxed by 8 February 2000) |
Late and on-site (Postmarked or faxed after 8 February 2000) |
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| . | Regular | Student | Regular | Student |
| KR2000 | US$420.00 | US$180.00 | US$500.00 | US$240.00 |
| KR2000 banquet | US$70.00 | US$70.00 | US$70.00 | US$70.00 |
| KR2000 guest registration (reception only) |
US$20.00 | US$20.00 | US$20.00 | US$20.00 |
| NMR2000 with KR2000 | US$150.00 | US$125.00 | US$150.00 | US$125.00 |
| NMR2000 without KR2000 | US$200.00 | US$150.00 | US$200.00 | US$150.00 |
| CollECTeR with KR2000 | US$125.00 | US$100.00 | US$125.00 | US$100.00 |
| CollECTeR without KR2000 | US$150.00 | US$125.00 | US$150.00 | US$125.00 |
| Other KR2000 one-day workshops with KR2000 |
US$95.00 | US$95.00 | US$95.00 | US$95.00 |
| Other KR2000 one-day workshops without KR2000 |
US$125.00 | US$125.00 | US$125.00 | US$125.00 |
| AIPS2000 | US$400.00 | US$150.00 | US$475.00 | US$200.00 |
| AIPS2000 workshops without AIPS2000 |
US$50.00 | US$50.00 | US$50.00 | US$50.00 |
| AIPS2000 guest registration (banquet and reception only) |
US$50.00 | US$50.00 | US$50.00 | US$50.00 |
| Discount for both KR2000 and AIPS2000 |
US$50.00 | US$30.00 | US$50.00 | US$40.00 |
AAAI
AIPS2000/KR2000 Registration
445 Burgess Drive
Menlo Park, California 94025-3442
U. S. A.
Fax: +1 650 321-4457
Telephone: +1 650 328-3123
Email: kr@aaai.org aips@aaai.org
KR2000, AIPS2000, and NMR2000 have reserved a block of rooms at The Village at Breckenridge at reduced conference rates from Tuesday night, 11 April 2000 through Monday night, 17 April 2000. Rooms are also available at the conference rate from 8 April 2000 through 20 April 2000. To qualify for these rates, reservations must be made by contacting the hotel directly and identifying yourself as a KR2000, AIPS2000, or NMR2000 attendee.
Room availability is limited so attendees are encouraged to reserve their rooms by 8 FEBRUARY 2000. All reservation requests must be accompanied by, or followed within 10 days of booking by, a first night room deposit including tax. Personal/company checks or credit cards are acceptable forms for deposit funds. The hotel will not hold any reservations unless guaranteed by one of the above methods. Final payment of the ENTIRE room booking is due within 14 days of the arrival date. Failure to submit deposits or full amounts will result in the forfeiture of your space. Cancellation outside of 48 hours will result in a refund of the deposit less a $25 cancellation fee. Cancellation within 48 hours of arrival will result in full forfeiture of all monies received.
PLEASE NOTE: Early departures are not permitted without penalty of full payment.
Contact information for the conference hotel is:
The Village at Breckenridge
P. O. Box 8329
535 South Park Ave.
Breckenridge, CO 80424 U. S. A.
Phone (from North America): 1 (877) 428-7829
Phone (from other locations): +1 970 453-2000
Conference rates at The Village at Breckenridge (plus taxes of about 11%):
| Room Type | Rate (Single or Double) |
| Liftside Studio | US$95.00 |
| Village Hotel (2 Queen Beds) | US$85.00 |
| Village Hotel (1 Queen/2 Bunks) | US$85.00 |
| Plaza 1 Bedroom Condo | US$125.00 |
| Plaza 2 Bedroom Condo | US$165.00 |
| Plaza 3 Bedroom Condo | US$225.00 |
| Breckenridge Mountain Lodge (2 Queen Beds) | US$75.00 |
| Great Divide Lodge | US$110.00 |
Check-in time: 4:00 pm
Check-out time: Prior to 10:00 am
Distance to conference center: adjacent (BML and GDL 2-3 blocks)
Cut-off date for reservations: 5:00 PM MDT, March 9, 2000
Probably the easiest way to travel to Breckenridge is to fly into Denver International Airport and take ground transportation from there. Ground transportation via van shuttle can be arranged from Report Express at +1 970 468-7600 or www.resort-express.com. The current fare is US$45 each way. All major car rental companies rent cars at Denver International Airport.
The weather in April there is cold, with highs averaging 48F (9C) and lows averaging 17F (-8C). Expect lots of snow, as April is the snowiest month in Summit County.
University of Leeds |
ITC-IRST Bart Selman Cornell University | ||
KSL, Stanford University |
U. Newcastle |
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Bell Labs Research |
Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory |
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology Subbarao Kambhampati Arizona State University Craig Knoblock Information Sciences Institute, USC |
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology Dana Nau University of Maryland |
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Colorado State University |
Cornell University |
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Schindler Lifts S.A. |
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University of Toronto |
NASA Ames Research Center |
Last modified: 18 January 2000