Call for Participation


IJCAI-97 Workshop: Modeling and Reasoning about Function


* Workshop Objectives

The emphasis on function in knowledge modeling and reasoning has become
widespread in many problem solving research areas from the traditional
diagnosis and design, to autonomous agents on the World Wide Web, to
assisting in the recognition of objects by vision systems and
facilitating text understanding for device descriptions.  The
effectiveness of such approaches relies on purpose-oriented organization
of knowledge about processes and/or artifacts and the subsequent
application of this knowledge to achieve a variety of reasoning goals.

This workshop will bring together practitioners in various areas for
discussion of current issues, to assess organizing frameworks and
terminologies, to evaluate specific models, and share current research
results.  Building on the success of workshops at AAAI'93, AAAI'94,
IJCAI'95, and AAAI'96, this workshop will concentrate on transforming
the mutual understanding gained in the earlier workshops into a coherent
approach that will allow us to define the notion of function in general
research on problem solving and spur new activity in uncharted
application areas. As a feature of this year's workshop, a panel
discussion session is planned which encourages mutual understanding
between approaches for function research in AI community and those in
design community. 

For an overview of activities in the Function-based Reasoning Community
please browse http://huckleberry.sfsu.edu/ on the World Wide Web.


* Workshop Date and Participation Requirements

This one-day workshop will be held on August 25, 1997 (tentative). The
workshop will be limited to 40 participants. All participants must
register for the IJCAI'97 conference and will be charged $50 as the
workshop participation fee.


* Workshop Format

9:00 - 12:00 Presentations focusing on 
              - recent research results on modeling and reasoning
                technologies about function
              - application oriented research results on function

13:00 - 15:00 Poster session and Software demonstration
15:00 - 17:00 Panel discussion focusing on
               - what function is
               - what current technologies can model and reason about
                 function
               - what cannot be modeled and reasoned from the viewpoints
                 of applications such as design, diagnosis, and so on
               - research topics to be tackled in this community


* Submission Requirements

Three types of submissions are possible:
(1) Ten page research paper
(2) Two pages abstract describing relevant research, list of
    publications, and biosketch
(3) Five page description of software tool and/or methodology

All participants are requested to submit (2). Participants who are
planning to make a presentation or a poster should submit (1). And,
participants who are going to make a software demonstration should
submit (3).

Discussants in the panel session will be selected among participants by
the organizing committee.

Send Five hard copies to:

Yasushi Umeda, Workshop Chair
Yayoi 2-11-16, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113, Japan
Engineering Research Institute, School of Engineering,
the University of Tokyo
Phone: +81-3-3812-2111 (ex. 7776)
Fax: +81-3-5800-5791
email: umeda@zzz.pe.u-tokyo.ac.jp


* Timetable

- Submission Deadline: March 1, 1997
- Notification Date: March 31, 1997
- Camera Ready Copies Due: April 20, 1997


* Organizing Committee

Dean Allemang, Organon Motives, Inc., USA
dta@organon.com

Luca Chittaro, Universita di Udine, ITALY 
chittaro@dimi.uniud.it

Ashok K. Goel,  Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
goel@cc.gatech.edu

Jack Hodges, San Francisco State University, USA
hodges@huckleberry.sfsu.edu

Amruth N. Kumar, Ramapo College of New Jersey, USA 
amruth@ramapo.edu

James K. McDowell, Michigan State University, USA
mcdowelj@cps.msu.edu

Chris Price, University of Wales, UK
cjp@aber.ac.uk

Jon Sticklen, Michigan State University, USA
sticklen@cps.msu.edu 

Yasushi Umeda (chair)
Faculty of Engineering, the University of Tokyo, Japan
umeda@zzz.pe.u-tokyo.ac.jp