

Call for Papers - Semantic Cities at AAAI 2012

From: Freddy Lecue <freddy.lecue@ie.ibm.com>
Date: Tue, 7 Feb 2012 10:19:50 +0000
To: public-lod@w3.org
Message-ID: <OFB2AF6F20.695E6E11-ON8025799D.00379EFC-8025799D.0038C161@ie.ibm.com>

Apologies for cross-postings.

Call for Papers:

The AAAI 2012 Workshop on Semantic Cities
Toronto, Ontario, Canada;  July 22-26, 2012


Cities around the world aspire to provide superior quality of life to their
citizens. An increasing number have realized that opening access to their
data, and building semantic models to abstract as well as interconnect
them; can unleash economic growth while addressing sustainability issues.
We call cities that enable such capabilities as, "semantic cities".

In a Semantic City, available resources are harnessed safely, sustainably
and efficiently to achieve positive, measurable economic and societal
outcomes. Enabling City information as a utility, through a robust
(expressive, dynamic, scalable) and (critically) a sustainable technology
and socially synergistic ecosystem could drive significant benefits and
opportunities. Data (and then information and knowledge) from people,
systems and things is the single most scalable resource available to City
stakeholders to reach the objective of semantic cities.

Two major trends are supporting semantic cities: open data and semantic
web. Open data is the idea that certain data should be freely available to
everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from
copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control. A number of cities and
government have made their data publicly available, prominent being London
(UK), Chicago (USA), Washington DC (USA), Dublin (Ireland). Semantic web as
the technology to inter-connect heterogeneous data has matured and it is
being increasing used in the form of Linked Open Data and formal
ontologies. Thus, a play-field for more AI research-driven technologies for
cities has emerged.

In this context, the aims of the workshop are to:
1. Draw the attention of the AI community to the research challenges and
opportunities in semantic cities.
2. Draw the attention on the multi-disciplinary dimension and its impact on
semantic cities e.g., transportation, energy, water management
3. Identify unique issues of this domain and what new techniques may be
needed. As example, since governments and citizens are involved, data
security and privacy are first-class concerns.
4. Promoting more cities to become semantic cities
5. Elaborating a (semantic data) benchmark for testing AI techniques on
semantic cities
6. Provide a platform for sharing best-practices and discussion

We encourage submissions that show the relevance or application of AI
technologies for computational sustainability domains. Apart from focus on
foundational technologies for semantic cities (information management,
knowledge management, ontology, inference model, data integration), we want
to promote illustrative use-cases using the semantic cities foundation.
Examples are transportation (traffic prediction, personal travel
optimization, carpool and fleet scheduling), public safety (suspicious
activity detection, disaster management), healthcare (disease diagnosis and
prognosis, pandemic management), water management (flood prevision, quality
consumption forecasting) and buildings (energy conservation, fault
detections). We also encourage submissions that address unique
characteristics of standard AI enabling sustainability problems, like
optimization, reasoning, planning and learning. Outside AI, we encourage
submission from communities engaged in open data and corresponding
standardization efforts, to make their work available at this AI forum.

Topics of interest include, but not restricted to, are:

1. Process to open city (government) data
2. Platforms to manage government data
3. Provenance, access control and privacy-preserving issues in open data
4. Data cities interoperability
5. Semantic models, especially those built collaboratively and evolving
6. Data integration and organization in semantic cities (social media
feeds, sensor data)
7. Internet of Things in semantic cities
8. Robust inference models for semantic cities
9. Semantic Event detection and classification
10. Applications in semantic cities
11. Spatio-temporal analysis and visualization
12. User interaction in exploring semantic data of cities
13. Knowledge representation and reasoning challenges
14. Knowledge acquisition, evolution and maintenance
15. Challenges with managing and integrating real-time and historical data
16. Managing "big data"
17. Integrated systems
18. Applied AI models for semantic cities
19. Issues in scaling out AI techniques for semantic cities
20. Case Studies, successes, lessons learnt
21. Public datasets and competitions

Workshop Plan:

Workshop Format: The workshop will consist of papers and poster
presentations, a panel, an invited talk, and discussion sessions, in a one
full day schedule. The invited talk will invite a leading expert in the
field to present their research and vision of future work. The panel will
focus on connecting the AI researchers to the various challenges that the
targeted domain brings.

Submission Guidelines: All papers submissions must be in AAAI format
(http://www.aaai.org/Publications/Templates/AuthorKit.zip). They can be one
of two types. The first is regular research papers which can be up to 6
pages long and are expected to present a significant contribution. The
second is short submission of up to 4 pages which describes a position on
the topic of the workshop or a demonstration/ tool. All submissions will be
handled electronically via Easychair: http://goo.gl/BBsdW

Important Dates:

    • March 30, 2012: Paper Submission Deadline
    • April 20, 2012: Notification Decision
    • May 8, 2012: Camera Ready Due
    • June 1, 2012: Early registration date
    • July 22-23, 2012: Workshop date

The Organizers/ Co-Chairs:

Biplav Srivastava
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne, USA
Email: sbiplav at in.ibm.com

Freddy Lecue
IBM Research Smarter Cities Technology Centre, Dublin, Ireland
Email : freddy lecue at ie.ibm.com

Anupam Joshi
University of Maryland, College Park, USA
Email: joshi at cs.umbc.edu

Program Committee:

To be announced.
Received on Tuesday, 7 February 2012 10:26:05 UTC
