Reasoning About Function

Special Track to be held during
The Ninth Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Symposium
( FLAIRS-96 )
May 20-22, 1996, Key West, Florida

CALL FOR PAPERS
The explicit representation and use of function knowledge is gaining considerable attention in various research communities because of:

its potential to organize and provide access to causal knowledge of an object (eg., focuses on missing causality during redesign),
the improved resolution it brings to the reasoning process (eg., discriminates among suspects during diagnosis) and
its utility in addressing the scaling problem.

Function is an abstraction of behavior, and relates behavior to human notions of utility, i.e., purpose/goal. It forms a useful bridge between objective and quantifiable knowledge about a component (of a device/organization/organism/environment/argument), and subjective notions of its use/purpose. Hence, the interest in reasoning about function.

Function has been used to motivate decisions (such as in design), discriminate among choices at hand (such as in diagnosis, vision), or explain an observation (such as in explanation generation). It is being used, in addition to structure and behavior knowledge in domains as varied as Electrical, Aerospace, Industrial and Chemical Engineering, mechatronics, Architecture, Law, Medicine, Human Physiology, and Software Engineering.

Papers are invited for the special track from researchers in all fields/domains on topics including:

Reasoning techniques that use function
Representation formalisms for function
Applications of reasoning about function: reports, results

It is expected that extended and revised versions of selected papers from this special track will be published as special issue of a journal.

IMPORTANT DEADLINES

November 15th, 1995: Submission of paper
January 19th, 1996: Notification of Acceptance/Rejection
March 18, 1996: Camera Ready Copy due to Program Chair: John Stewman

SUBMISSION DETAILS

Maximum Length: 2000 words

Preferred Submission Method:

Fold your paper into one postscript or text file: This must be anonymous, i.e., author's name and affiliation should not be included in this file;
Put it in the users/amruth directory at ftp.cs.buffalo.edu site by anonymous ftp; The file name should be the first author's last name;
Send a mail message to amruth@ultrix.ramapo.edu, listing: the name of the paper, names, affiliations, phone/fax and email addresses of all the authors, and the name of the submitted file. This step is mandatory!

Alternate Submission Method:

You may send 4 hard copies of the paper to:

Amruth Kumar,
Computer Science, TAS,
Ramapo College of New Jersey
505, Ramapo Valley Road
Mahwah, NJ 07430-1680
Ph: (201) 529-7712

FOR MORE INFORMATION

If you are unsure whether your work fits into the above topic, please refer to the following reports for clarification.

The Knowledge Engineering Review, Vol. 9(3), 9/94, pp 301-304.
Special Issues of International Journal of Applied Artificial Intelligence, Vol 8(2), 8/94 and Vol9(1), 1/95.

Please direct any enquiries to:

Amruth Kumar (amruth@ultrix.ramapo.edu)
Luca Chittaro (chittaro@dimi.uniud.it)
Co-Chairs