IJCAI-09

NeSy'09
Fifth International Workshop on
Neural-Symbolic Learning and Reasoning

Workshop at IJCAI-09, Pasadena, California
July 11th, 2009



NeSy'05 took place at IJCAI-05, Edinburgh, Scotland, 1st of August 2005.
NeSy'06 took place at ECAI2006, Riva del Garda, Italy, 29th of August 2006.
NeSy'07 took place at IJCAI-07, Hydarabad, India, 8th of January 2007.
NeSy'08 took place at ECAI2008, Patras, Greece, 21st of July 2008.

Schedule

10.30 - 11.00 Oliver Ray and Bruno Golenia. A Neural Network Approach for First-Order Abductive Inference
11.00 - 11.30 Amitabha Mukerjee. Using attentive focus to discover action structures from perceptual data
11.30 - 12.00 Kun Tu and Hava Siegelmann. Text-based Reasoning with Symbolic Memory Model
lunch break
13:45 - 15:00 Keynote talk by Ben Goertzel, Novamente LLC on Cognitive Synergy: A Principle to Guide the Tight Integration of Heterogeneous Components in Integrative AI Systems
coffee break
15:30 - 16:00 Sebastian Bader. Extracting Propositional Rules from Feed-forward Neural Networks by Means of Binary Decision Diagrams
16:00 - 16:30 Amitabha Mukerjee and Madan Dabeeru. Symbol emergence in design
16:30 - 16:45 Leo de Penning, Bart Kappe and Karel van den Bosch. A Neural-Symbolic System for Automated Assessment in Training Simulators: A Position Paper
16:45 - 17:45 Discussion session, chaired by Luis Lamb, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

Sponsor

Retail Decisions Retail Decisions (ReD) is a payment card issuer and world leader in card fraud prevention and payment processing. A specialist supplier to the payments industry worldwide, ReD has over 20 years experience in the fraud prevention market. Its blue-chip international clients come from the global telecommunications, retail, travel, petroleum, banking and the broader e-commerce sectors. They include Wal-Mart, Macy's, Bloomingdale's, Sears, Texaco, Shell, Asda, Boots, John Lewis, The Carphone Warehouse, Comet, Travelocity, T-Mobile and Virgin Mobile. Members of the NeSy community have been investigating new ways in which neural networks can be used to help in card fraud prevention, including the use of dynamic temporal networks for fraud detection and the use of neural-symbolic knowledge extraction in the identification of new patterns of fraud.

Pictures from NeSy'09

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Call for Papers

Artificial Intelligence researchers continue to face huge challenges in their quest to develop truly intelligent systems. The recent developments in the field of neural-symbolic computation bring an opportunity to integrate well-founded symbolic artificial intelligence with robust neural computing machinery to help tackle some of these challenges.

Neural-symbolic systems combine the statistical nature of learning and the logical nature of reasoning.

The Workshop on Neural-Symbolic Learning and Reasoning is intended to create an atmosphere of exchange of ideas, providing a forum for the presentation and discussion of the key topics related to neural-symbolic integration. Topics of interest include:

Submission

Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit original papers that have not been submitted for review or published elsewhere. Submitted papers must be written in English and should not exceed 6 pages in the case of research and experience papers, and 2 pages in the case of position papers (including figures, bibliography and appendices) in IJCAI-09 format as described in the IJCAI-09 submission guidelines. All submitted papers will be judged based on their quality, relevance, originality, significance, and soundness. Papers must be submitted directly via easychair in PDF format under http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=nesy09.

Presentation

Selected papers will have to be presented during the workshop. The workshop will include extra time for audience discussion of the presentation allowing the group to have a better understanding of the issues, challenges, and ideas being presented.

Publication

Accepted papers will be published electronically in the CEUR workshop proceedings (bearing an ISSN number). Hardcopies will be distributed during the workshop. Authors of the best papers will be invited to submit a revised and extended version of their papers to a special issue of a journal.

Important Dates

Deadline for abstract submission: April 7, 2009
Deadline for paper submission: April 10, 2009
Notification of acceptance: May 8, 2009
Camera-ready paper due: May 15,
Workshop date: July 11th, 2009
IJCAI-09 main conference dates: July 11th to 17th, 2009

Admission

The workshop is open to all members of the AI community, but the number of attendees may be limited. In case of exceeded capacity preference will be given to participants with papers selected for presentation.

Keynote speaker

Ben Goertzel, Novamente LLC: Cognitive Synergy: A Principle to Guide the Tight Integration of Heterogeneous Components in Integrative AI Systems

Abstract: The concept of "cognitive synergy" is introduced, as a formalization of the idea that in a cognitive system containing multiple heterogeneous learning processes, the different processes should be connected in such a way that each one can get help from the others when it "gets stuck." The role of cognitive synergy in the OpenCog integrative AI architecture is described, with examples given involving the application of OpenCog to control animated agents in virtual worlds. The potential implications of cognitive synergy for the design of neural-symbolic systems is also discussed, in the context of an in-development system called XIA-MAN that is intended to combine neural net evolution with OpenCog to control a Nao humanoid robot.

Workshop Organisers

Artur d'Avila Garcez (City University London, UK)
Pascal Hitzler (University of Karlsruhe, Germany)

Programme Committee

Sebastian Bader, University of Rostock, Germany
Howard Blair, Syracuse University, New York, U.S.A.
Claudia d'Amato, University of Bari, Italy
Marco Gori, University of Siena, Italy
Barbara Hammer, TU Clausthal, Germany
Ioannis Hatzilygeroudis, University of Patras, Greece
Steffen Hölldobler, TU Dresden, Germany
Henrik Jacobsson, Google Zurich, Switzerland
Kristian Kersting, Fraunhofer IAIS, Sankt Augustin, Germany
Ekaterina Komendantskaya, Sophia Antipolis, France
Kai-Uwe Kühnberger, University of Osnabrück, Germany
Luis Lamb, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
Hannes Leitgeb, University of Bristol, UK
James L. McClelland, Stanford University, California, U.S.A.
Anthony K. Seda, University College Cork, Ireland
Ron Sun, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York, U.S.A.
Frank van der Velde, Leiden University, The Netherlands
Gerson Zaverucha, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Additional Information

General questions concerning the workshop should be addressed to nesy@soi.city.ac.uk.