[CogSci] 2nd International Workshop on Spatial Cognition and Artificial Intelligence

Enkhbold Nyamsuren e.nyamsuren at gmail.com
Tue Jun 11 00:15:42 PDT 2019


  *** Apologies for cross-posting. Please forward to others who may be
interested ***


2nd International Workshop on Spatial Cognition and Artificial Intelligence
(SC&AI) http://tiny.cc/cosit-scai
to be held with COSIT 2019 in Regensburg, Germany; September 10th, 2019
https://cosit2019.ur.de

Deadline for expression of interest: extended to June 24th.


This full-day workshop will address issues of shared spaces between human
and artificial system, and the blurring of physical separation of human and
machine in spatial tasks and interactions.

The 2nd International Workshop on Spatial Cognition and AI (SC&AI) is
organized by the Artificial Intelligence & Cognitive Science Working
Group of TC12, the International Federation for Information Processing
Technical Committee on Artificial Intelligence (AI), and open to anybody
interested in the topic. This Working Group, and consequently the workshop,
is born from the re-emerged need to bring together members of the
international scientific community who work on both theoretical as well as
applied overlapping research areas of the two fields.

The workshop aims at bringing together researchers from different
disciplines (e.g., AI & computer science, cognitive psychology &
neuroscience, GIScience, cognitive geography & cartography, linguistics,
philosophy of mind, architecture and design, engineering, mathematics, and
others) to work on cognitively inspired spatial artificial systems.


Background and format
The use of mobile computing devices (smartphones, tablets, etc.) anytime
and everywhere has become ubiquitous today, enabling in-situ interaction,
rapid switches between physical and digital worlds, and even the blending
of these worlds in augmented reality settings. But now a whole range of new
spatial artificial systems seem set to enter our everyday environments, for
example, computerized protheses, smart homes, social robots in households
and healthcare, robotized tools in manufacture and maintenance,
self-driving vehicles, and smart cities. Self-driving vehicles (and,
arguably, smart homes) will for the first time make us humans interact and
communicate with something that actually physically contains us! The
introduction of these new systems will have effects and consequences for
both system and human behavior, which we believe have not yet been
sufficiently investigated so far. For example, all these systems operate on
different scales and in different spatial relation to us humans (on-body,
in-hand, close-by, independent-from, containing, etc.).

We see several issues arising from this development, for both humans and
systems alike. We have identified the following questions to be discussed
during the workshop (which may be subject of change due to popular demand):

   - What kind(s) of (spatial) representations do such systems need in
   order to operate successfully? Would there be a unified
   representation (mechanism / framework) for all such systems?
   - How do we as human users (want to) establish common ground with such
   systems? How does this differ between different systems, if at all? And how
   might this depend on the interaction modality used?
   - What are the cognitive effects of using / interacting with such
   systems? Should and can we control for them?

These questions will be worked on in interdisciplinary groups of 4 to 6
participants each. The workshop will be highly interactive, and we hope
to achieve some concrete outcomes. The morning sessions will be dedicated
to laying the grounds by identifying concrete topics and research questions
that the respective groups want to work on. In the afternoon, we will aim
for concrete results and making outcomes ‘tangible’; e.g., participants may
devise plans for a joint research paper (including outline, how to perform
the actual research, etc.), or participants may actually decide to
‘implement’ something (similar to a hackathon).
If there is substantial interest, we will aim for a special issue in a
relevant journal, offering an opportunity to continue collaboration and to
get results from the workshop (and beyond) published.


Schedule for the workshop day (more detailed schedule including times and
breaks to follow)

Morning:

   - Introduction to the workshop and its aims
   - Short introduction round of all participants
   - Keynote presentation tba
   - Group challenge 1: each group will be tasked to determine which of the
   workshop questions they’d like to address; and then to identify a concrete
   scenario and research questions that could be explored
   - Presentations 1: each group will briefly outline the scenario and
   questions they came up with (including some reasoning as of why),
   followed by a discussion among all participants.

Afternoon:

   - Group challenge 2: making outcomes of the morning tangible and opening
   up possibilities for concrete results, e.g.,
      - developing a joint research paper, including plans on how to do the
      research
      - ‘hackathon’
   - Presentations 2: Presentation and discussion of group work results:
   each group will have 10 minutes to present the results of tackling
   the challenge, followed by questions and discussion from the other
   participants.
   - Closing remarks and future directions, including a discussion of how
   the joint work started on the day may continue beyond the workshop.


Call for Participation
If you are interested to participate, please submit an expression of
interest in which you

   - briefly outline your (academic) background;
   - discuss why you are interested in participating in the workshop (e.g.,
   how does it relate to your work? what do you hope to get out of it?)
   - how you believe you can contribute to discussions during the day
   (e.g., what questions are you particularly interested in? what answers do
   you seek?).


Send your expression of interest as a PDF file of not more than 3 pages by
email to the workshop organizers.

Deadline for submission is Monday, June 24th.

Maria Vasardani, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
maria.vasardani2 at rmit.edu.au
Kai-Florian Richter, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden
kai-florian.richter at umu.se

http://tiny.cc/cosit-scai


-- 
Postdoctoral researcher
Utrecht University, The Netherlands
www.bcogs.info
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