1^st International Workshop on
Spatio-Temporal Reasoning
and Learning
2022

co-located with IJCAI-ECAI-2022

STRL 2024 @ IJCAI 2024, Jeju, South Korea

You may find details about the third edition of STRL at: https://www.lirmm.fr/strl2024/

Introduction

Opposing the false dilemma of logical reasoning vs machine learning, we argue for a synergy between these two paradigms in order to obtain hybrid AI systems that will be robust, generalizable, and transferable. Indeed, it is well-known that machine learning only includes statistical information and, therefore, is not inherently able to capture perturbations (interventions or changes in the environment), or perform reasoning and planning. Ideally, (the training of) machine learning models should be tied to assumptions that align with physics and human cognition to allow for these models to be re-used and re-purposed in novel scenarios. On the other hand, it is also the case that logic in itself can be brittle too, and logic further assumes that the symbols with which it can reason are already given. It is becoming ever more evident in the literature that modular AI architectures should be prioritized, where the involved knowledge about the world and the reality that we are operating in is decomposed into independent and recomposable pieces, as such an approach should only increase the chances that these systems behave in a causally sound manner.

The aim of this workshop is to formalize such a synergy between logical reasoning and machine learning that will be grounded on spatial and temporal knowledge. We argue that the calculi associated with the spatial and temporal reasoning community, be it qualitative or quantitative, naturally build upon physics and human cognition, and could therefore form a module that would be beneficial towards causal representation learning. As an example, in the on-going IJCAI Angry Birds competitions (http://aibirds.org/angry-birds-ai-competition.html), machine learning models generally struggle to achieve good performance, because there is no sufficient encoding of spatial and temporal structure and relations; shooting a bird with a given trajectory can clearly have some very well determined effect (based on the laws of physics), which could in turn cause a chain of effects to occur, but machine learning models are not able to capture this behavior, for the reasons mentioned earlier. A (symbolic) spatio-temporal knowledge base could provide a dependable causal seed upon which machine learning models could generalize, and exploring this direction from various perspectives is the main theme of this workshop.

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Call For Papers

Topics

In this workshop, we invite the research community in artificial intelligence to submit works related to the proposed integration of spatial and temporal reasoning with machine learning, revolving around the following topic areas:

• Real-world problems / applications of spatio-temporal reasoning and learning
• Challenges in spatio-temporal reasoning and learning
• Neuro-symbolic approaches for spatio-temporal reasoning and learning
• Probabilistic world models for spatio-temporal reasoning and learning
• Probabilistic inference for spatio-temporal reasoning and learning
• Datasets for spatio-temporal reasoning and learning
• Metrics for assessing spatio-temporal reasoning and learning methods
• Limitations in machine learning for spatio-temporal reasoning and learning; how far can machine learning go?
• Relation between causal reasoning and spatial and temporal reasoning

The list above is by no means exhaustive, as the aim is to foster the debate around all aspects of the suggested integration.

Submission

Guidelines

Papers should be formatted according to the IJCAI-ECAI 2022 formatting guidelines and submitted as a single PDF file. We welcome submissions across the full spectrum of theoretical and practical work including research ideas, methods, tools, simulations, applications or demos, practical evaluations, and surveys. Submissions that are 2 pages long (excluding references and appendices) will be considered for a poster, and submissions that are at least 4 pages and up to 6 pages long (excluding references and appendices) will be considered for an oral presentation. All papers will be peer-reviewed in a single-blind process and assessed based on their novelty, technical quality, potential impact, clarity, and reproducibility (when applicable). Workshop submissions will be handled by EasyChair; the submission link is as follows: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=strl2022

All questions about submissions should be emailed to strl2022 at easychair.org.

Important Dates

Be mindful of the following dates:

• May 13, 2022, May 20, 2022: Workshop Paper Due Date
• June 3, 2022: Notification of Paper Acceptance
• June 17, 2022: Camera-ready Papers Due
• July 24, 2022: Workshop Date

Note: all deadlines are AoE (Anywhere on Earth).

Proceedings

The accepted papers will appear on the workshop website. We also intend to publish the workshop proceedings with CEUR-WS.org; this option will be discussed with the authors of accepted papers and is subject to the CEUR-WS.org preconditions. We note that, as STRL 2022 is a workshop, not a conference, submission of the same paper to conferences or journals is acceptable from our standpoint.

Update: The back-link to the URL of the workshop proceedings published with CEUR-WS.org is now available at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3190/.

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Workshop Program

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Organization

Organizing Committee

Dr. Michael Sioutis is a Research Fellow with the Faculty of Information Systems and Applied Computer Sciences at the University of Bamberg, Germany. His general interests lie in Artificial Intelligence, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Data Mining, Logic Programming, and Semantic Web. His expertise lies in Qualitative Spatial and Temporal Reasoning.	Dr. Zhiguo Long is a Lecturer with the School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence at the Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, China. His research interests include fundamental and practical techniques in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, especially in Qualitative Spatial and Temporal Reasoning, and representation problems in Machine Learning and Computer Vision.	Dr. John Stell is a Senior Lecturer with the School of Computing at the University of Leeds, United Kingdom. While working at Leeds he has also studied Fine Art part time at Leeds College of Art, graduating with a first class degree in 2010. He has used this interdisciplinary background to combine research in Computer Science with work on spatial concepts in the Digital Humanities.	Prof. Jochen Renz is a Professor with the School of Computing, CECS, at the Australian National University, Australia. Since 2012 he has been organizing the Angry Birds AI Competition, held annually as part of IJCAI. His research has been focusing on theoretical and practical aspects of Spatial and Physical Reasoning and on integrating it with other AI/ML areas to solve challenging problems.

Program Committee

• Bettina Finzel, University of Bamberg, Germany
• Bo Peng, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, China
• Esra Erdem, Sabancı University, Istanbul, Turkey
• Jie Hu, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, China
• Marjan Alirezaie, Örebro University, Sweden
• Ute Schmidt, University of Bamberg, Germany
• Zoe Falomir, Jaume I University, Spain
• Devendra Singh Dhami, Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany
• Diedrich Wolter, University of Bamberg, Germany
• Fabio Cozman, University of São Paulo, Brazil
• Fredrik Heintz, Linköping University, Sweden
• Hans Guesgen, Massey University, New Zealand
• Hua Meng, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, China
• Jae Hee Lee, University of Hamburg, Germany
• Jakob Suchan, German Aerospace Center (DLR), Germany
• Jean-François Condotta, Artois University, France
• Jochen Renz, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia (co-chair)
• John Stell, University of Leeds, United Kingdom (co-chair)
• Kristian Kersting, Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany
• Matt Duckham, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
• Mehul Bhatt, Örebro University, Sweden
• Michael Sioutis, University of Bamberg, Germany (co-chair)
• Steven Schockaert, Cardiff University, Wales
• Tianrui Li, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, China
• Zhiguo Long, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, China (co-chair)
• Zied Bouraoui, Artois University, France

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Venue

The workshop will take place on July 24, 2022 in the room named Gallerie 11-12 at the Messe Wien Exhibition and Congress Center, in Vienna, Austria.

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