IJCAI 2005 Workshop on
Reasoning, Representation, and Learning in Computer Games

IJCAI-05
http://home.earthlink.net/~dwaha/research/meetings/ijcai05-rrlcgw

Call for Participation

Description

Our goal is to encourage the study, development, integration, and evaluation of AI techniques on tasks from complex games. These challenging performance tasks are characterized by huge search spaces, uncertainty, opportunities for coordination/teaming, and (frequently) multi-agent adversarial conditions. We want to encourage dialog among researchers in a variety of AI disciplines who seek to integrate their approaches so as to develop and test theories on comprehensive intelligent agents that can function competently in virtual gaming worlds. This workshop should yield an understanding of state-of-the-art approaches for performing well in complex gaming environments, and research issues that require additional attention.

Topics relevant to this workshop include, but are not limited to, the following areas:

Complex games make good environments for studying AI-complete research, and appropriate simulators can serve as excellent platforms for posing challenging AI-hard problems. These environments can be used to focus research and development for a broad spectrum of AI techniques. We have particular interest in games with large search spaces (e.g., real-time and turn-based strategy games, role-playing games), which are challenging for current-generation AI approaches, and usually have built-in metrics/measures for evaluation. However, while complex gaming tasks can involve a wide array of AI-interesting problems (e.g., plan recognition, learning, representation, logical reasoning, search, natural language understanding), dialog among these communities is challenging due to the fractioning of sub-disciplines. Focused forums are needed to encourage communication among researchers interested in this topic.

Plans

We will include an invited speaker to summarize recent work in this area, and will also invite papers from a small but diverse set of contributors to this area. The Organizing Committee will select a subset of the submitted papers for oral presentation. In addition, we will arrange a panel that addresses popular interests among the participants. Finally, time will be reserved for a demonstration session.

Unfortunately, conducting AI research in these environments is difficult because integrating AI systems with gaming simulators can be a time-intensive process. Therefore, we will define and implement a small number of challenge problems in gaming simulators integrated with TIELT, a freely available test bed that researchers can use to access these simulators (along with some integrated AI systems). Participants are welcome to address these problems in their submissions, or to use TIELT as needed to otherwise support their research goals. (Depending on the level of participation, we may group contributions that involve these challenge problems.)

Participation Process

This one-day workshop will be held on 31 July 2005 as part of the IJCAI 2005 workshop series in Edinburgh, Scotland. This workshop is open to all (i.e., senior and junior) members of the AI community. However, the number of participants is limited to 40. Also, participants must register for this workshop to attend, although they do not need to register for the entire IJCAI'05 conference.

Our Workshop Organizing Committee will select participants through a review process. Paper submissions should be formatted according to the IJCAI 2005 formatting guidelines, but please include your name(s), affiliation(s), and email address(es) at the top of the first page as this will not be a double-blind reviewing process. Submissions should not exceed 6 pages in length, and be in PDF format. We also welcome short (max 4 pages) submissions concerning system demonstrations relevant to the workshop focus. Finally, we request a 1-page Statement of Interest from anyone who wishes to attend without submitting a paper. In these Statements, please describe your relevant interest, related projects (if any), and list a few relevant publications (if any). Please email all Submissions, Statements, or requests to be on this workshop's (moderated) mailing list to co-chair David W. Aha.

Important Dates

8 April 2005: Paper submissions
2 May 2005 (note revised date!): Accept/reject decisions on submitted papers
20 May 2005: Submission of camera-ready papers
31 July 2005: Workshop date! (Edinburgh, Scotland)

Organizing Committee

David W. Aha, Naval Research Laboratory (USA) (Co-Chair)
Daniel Borrajo, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (Spain)
Michael Buro, University of Alberta (Canada)
Pádraig Cunningham, Trinity College Dublin (Ireland)
Dan Fu, Stottler-Henke Associates, Inc. (USA)
Joahnnes Fürnkranz, TU Darmstadt (Germany)
Joseph Giampapa, Carnegie Mellon University (USA)
Héctor Muņoz-Avila, Lehigh University (USA) (Co-Chair)
Alexander Nareyek, AI Center (Germany)
Jeff Orkin, Monolith Productions (USA)
Marc Ponsen, Lehigh University (USA)
Pieter Spronck, Universiteit Maastricht (Netherlands)
Michael van Lent, University of Southern California (USA) (Co-Chair)
Ian Watson, University of Auckland (New Zealand)

WWW: http://home.earthlink.net/~dwaha/research/meetings/ijcai05-rrlcgw