ECCAI Bullettin #3, 2015
Call for bids to Host ECAI2020
The biennial European Conference on AI is organized every even-numbered year, by ECCAI, jointly with one of the member associations of ECCAI. The ECCI Board hereby invite bids to host the 2020 conference.
Previous ECAI conferences were held at Brighton (1974), Edinburgh (1976), Hamburg (1978), Amsterdam (1980), Orsay (1982), Pisa (1984), Brighton (1986), Munich (1988), Stockholm (1990), Vienna (1992), Amsterdam (1994), Budapest (1996), Brighton (1998), Berlin (2000), Lyon (2002), Valencia (2004), Riva del Garda (2006), Patras (2008), Lisbon (2010), Montpellier (2012), and Prague (2014), with ECAI-2016 due to be held in The Hague; ECAI-2018 will be a joint conference with IJCAI, and will be held in Stockholm.
Any member society of ECCAI may submit a bid to ECCAI for organizing ECAI- 2020.
TIMETABLE
1 July 2016: deadline for submission of bids
August 2016: presentation of bids & selection at ECCAI General Assembly
PROCESS
Guidelines for bids:
http://www.eccai.org/admin/ecaiproc.shtml
Submit your bid through the easychair system:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=eccaibids2020
NB: please upload a single PDF file containing the bid, and for "title" use the city name and country of the bid.
It would be extremely helpful if you could informally indicate your intention to submit a bid by email to Mike Wooldridge <mjw@cs.ox.ac.uk> no later than 1 May 2016.
AI Related Schools
NICTA 4th International Optimisation Summer School
Kiola, New South Wales, Australia January 22- 27, 2016 http://tinyurl.com/optschool
9th International Summer School on Automated Planning and Scheduling
June 8-11, 2016, London, UK
http://icaps16.icaps-conference.org/
ECCAI Fellows 2016 -- CALL for NOMINATIONS
Deadline for nominations: Tuesday 01 March 2016
INTRODUCTION
Nominations are sought for ECCAI Fellows 2016. The ECCAI Fellows program was initiated in 1999 to recognize individuals who have made significant, sustained contributions to the field of artificial intelligence (AI) in Europe. The ECCAI Fellows Program honors only a very small percentage of the total membership of all ECCAI member societies (up to a maximum of 3%). Each Fellow will receive a Certificate signed by the ECCAI Chair. The names of the recently elected Fellows are published each year on the ECCAI Webpages and in the ECCAI Bulletin. At each ECAI conference a Fellows lunch will be sponsored by ECCAI to honor the recently elected Fellows.
WHO IS ELIGIBLE TO BE AN ECCAI FELLOW?
To be eligible for consideration, candidates **must** be a current member of an ECCAI member organisation (see http://www.eccai.org/member/ for a list of member societies). Usually only individuals who have made contributions to AI for a decade or more after receiving their PhD (or are at an equivalent career stage) will be selected.
WHO CAN MAKE A NOMINATION?
There are two ways that an individual can be nominated:
A nomination can be made by an ECCAI member society. See
http://www.eccai.org/member/ for a list of member societies.
Please, note that for each member society the number of nominations is limited to a maximum of **three**.
A nomination can be made by two ECCAI fellows, who must be from different countries.
WHAT IS THE NOMINATION PROCESS?
A nomination must be a **single** PDF document, including the following:
a statement confirming which ECCAI member society the candidate is
currently a member of;
a comprehensive current CV of the candidate;
three separate letters of reference, each of which should clearly make the
case why the individual is considered appropriate for ECCAI fellowship.
The nomination document should be submitted via EasyChair:
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=fellows2016
(the system will ask for an abstract - this can be omitted). Please include the name of the nominee in the title of the submission.
Nominations must be submitted no later than Tuesday 01 March 2016.
We hope to complete the evaluation process by May 2016. The nominators will be informed of the decision for any nomination(s) they made.
HOW WILL NOMINATIONS BE EVALUATED?
All nominations will be evaluated by the ECCAI fellows committee. The key criterion of evaluation will be whether the nominee has achieved exceptional distinction in AI in Europe. Distinction may be evidenced in several ways -- fellows' accomplishments range from pioneering advances in the theory of AI, to unusual accomplishments in AI technology and applications. Leadership in ECCAI or ECCAI member societies, support of forums for the exchange of ideas, and exceptional service for the international AI community may will also be considered in the selection process.
Most fellowship nominations are for technical contributions, and for most of these, the case is usually based on the nominee's scientific achievements as documented in their publication record. In evaluating such a publication record, the fellowship committee will look for clear evidence of scientific excellence, which may, for example, come in the form of a citation record that indicates a profound influence on the field, a publication record of exceptional quality, or technical results of unusual depth, insight, and impact. Note that other forms of technical contribution evidence will also be considered, such as patent awards or statements of longstanding contribution to an industrial AI group effort that has been influential in the field generally; again, clear evidence should be provided of such influence.
The fellowship committee will in all cases ultimately make decisions based on their professional judgment of the overall quality of the case.
Positions available
Post Doctoral Scholarship at IIIA-CSIC, Barcelona
The Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA-CSIC) offers a three-year Post- doctoral COFUND grant (part of the Horizon 2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions programme) in the area of agent-based simulation of socio-cognitive systems.
Research theme
The applicant is expected to contribute to the development of conceptual and technological foundations for agent-based simulation of socio-cognitive systems (i.e., systems where the interplay between the behaviour of the individuals and their social context is the key feature).
Closing date for application: February 2nd, 2016.
Starting date: July 2nd, 2016 although a later date may be negotiated
Stipend: The annual salary is 36.100 € per year before taxes and includes health insurance. In addition, there is a single 3.000€ relocation grant and an annual budget for travel and training support.
For further information visit http://www.iiia.csic.es/en/current-offers/2015/post-doctoral-fellowship- agent-based-simulation-socio-cognitive-systems
or contact Dr Pablo Noriega (pablo@iiia.csic.es)
AI-related conferences
30th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2016)
February 12–17, 2016, Phoenix, Arizona US
http://www.aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI/aaai16.php
8th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (ICAART 2016)
February 24–26, 2016, Rome, Italy
www.icaart.org
5th International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods (ICPRAM 2016)
February 24–26, 2016, Rome, Italy
www.icpram.org
International Conference on Agents and Multi-Agent systems (AAMAS 2016)
May 9-13, 2016 Singapore
http://sis.smu.edu.sg/aamas2016
9th Hellenic Conference on Artificial Intelligence (SETN'16)
May 18-20, 2016, Thessaloniki, Greece
http://setn2016.csd.auth.gr/
Annual Meeting of the International Association for Computing and Philosophy (IACAP 2016)
June 14-17, Ferrara Italy
http://www.iacap.org/iacap-2016/.
26th International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS 2016)
June 12-17, 2016, London, UK
http://icaps16.icaps-conference.org/
11th International Conference on the Practice and Theory of Automated Timetabling
August 23 – 26, 2016, Udine, Italy http://www.patatconference.org/patat2016/
ECAI European Conference on Artificial Intelligence
August 29 – September 2, 2016, The Hague, The Netherland
http://www.ecai2016.org/
Awards
Professor Jack Copeland is the receiver of the 2016 Covey Award. The award is presented each year by the Int. Association for Computing and Philosophy (http://www.iacap.org/awards/) in recognition of the work of senior scholars with a substantial record of innovative research in the field of computing and philosophy broadly conceived. Professor Copeland will give the Covey Award Lecture during IACAP’16.
Magazines
AI Magazine Vol 36 n. 2
http://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/issue/view/210/showToc
AI Magazine Vol 36 n. 3
http://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/issue/view/211/showToc
AI Communications Volume preprint available
http://content.iospress.com/journals/ai-communications/Preprint/Preprint
News from AI Communications
Eva Onaindia took over Maria Fox as co-editor in chief.
Hence the new co-editors-in-chief are:
Eva Onaindia, Polytechnical University of Valencia.
Daniele Magazzeni, King's College London.
The renewed Editorial Board will be updated and communicated on AI Communications soon.
Report from ACAI 2015
The 2015 Advanced Course on Artificial Intelligence (http://www.cril.fr/acai15) was organized in Lille (France) by the Centre de Recherche en Informatique de Lens (CRIL) from October 25th to October 30th.
The school was centered on Constraint Solving Techniques in Artificial Intelligence. The aim was to give to the participants a coherent view of key concepts and recent developments about SAT, CSP, ASP and Knowledge Compilation.
The school consisted of 4 Fundamental Courses, focusing on
Boolean SATisfiability Problems (Ines Lynce),
Constraint Satisfaction Problems (Ian Gent),
Answer Set Programming (Torsten Schaub),
Knowledge Compilation (Pierre Marquis). and of 5 Advanced Courses, focusing on
SATisfiability Modulo Theory (Albert Oliveras),
SAT for Data Mining (Lakhdar Saïs),
Weighted Constraint Satisfaction Problems (Martin Cooper),
XCSP 3.0 Format (Christophe Lecoutre),
Evaluation & Competitions of Solvers (Daniel Le Berre and Olivier
Roussel).
The school has been successful, with 70 participants coming from 11 countries (France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Austria, Poland, Ireland, Greece, Spain, Sweden, Slovenia - ranked by number of participants).
The organizers would like to thank ECCAI for its support and funding, but also
the other ACAI’15 sponsors: CRIL (Centre de Recherche en Informatique de Lens), CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), Université d’Artois, and AFPC (Association Française pour la Programmation par Contraintes).
The ACAI’15 Organizers: Sylvie Coste-Marquis, Sébastien Konieczny, Daniel Le Berre, Pierre Marquis, Srdjan Vesic.
Contact Information
This bullettin is edited by Michela Milano, DISI Università di Bologna michela.milano@unibo.it.
For advertising AI-related conferences, schools and journal issues, please contact the editor.