News Story

ECAI 2002 Double Bill for KMi

Martin Dzbor, Monday 15 Apr 2002

Two accepted research papers out of two submitted. This is the result of recent submissions by two KMi research students, Martin Dzbor and Dnyanesh Rajpathak, to the high-profile European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI) taking place in July 2002 in France.

The ECAI series is one of the most competitive, general AI-audience conferences, and is organised biannually by the European Co-ordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence. This year sees the 15th birthday of this conference, which is, according to Frank van Harmellen, the ECAI 2002 Programme Chair, “the most selective ECAI ever, with only 137 research papers accepted out of more than 500 submitted.” In parallel with this year’s ECAI, there is also a Conference on Prestigious Applications of Intelligent Systems (PAIS), which gives an overview of the most significant real-world applications of Artificial Intelligence. For the first time, ECAI will also host the first STarting AI Researchers Symposium (STAIRS), which aims to bring together doctoral students and young post-doctoral researchers in AI. See the URLs below for more details.

Dnyanesh’s paper is titled “The epistemology of scheduling problems“, and tackles the issues of constructing a generic task ontology for the domain of scheduling. Dnyanesh worked on this submission closely with his supervisors and co-authors Dr. Enrico Motta, Dr. Zdenek Zdrahal (both KMi), and Dr. Rajkumar Roy (Cranfield University). The task ontology presented in the paper looks at scheduling tasks on a generic basis, which means that the scheduling problems from the different domains can be modelled efficiently. Such an ontology may also act as a high-end reference model and enhance the reusability of knowledge based systems for scheduling. The paper also describes a few interesting scenarios validating the generic ontology, such as satellite-antennas and the scehduling of KMi research projects.

Martin’s paper was submitted to the “Design theory and AI” section. Its title is “Design as interactions of problem framing and problem solving“, and it was co-authored by Martin’s supervisor Dr. Zdenek Zdrahal (KMi). This paper addresses areas in the design research that are rather grey. Namely, it aims to define a recursive model of framing in design using formal terms, which in itself is “a rare attempt in the relevant research community“. The paper takes a novel perspective on such concepts as “reflection”, “tacit reasoning”, and “interaction of specifications and solutions”, and it already managed to raise a little controversy. Nonetheless, as the Programme Committee concluded: “Such a vision of design is not new but a formal model is innovative and constitutes an important progress in the area, even though (it) is too abstract. We propose to accept the paper as it offers a beautiful formalisation.”

The above-mentioned papers are currently under revision. However, they shall be made publicly available in the “KMi Technical Reports” series within a few weeks. In the meantime you may check Martin’s personal website (see the link below); Dnyanesh’s website is pending – keep checking regularly.