CALL FOR PAPERS: ECAI 2016

22nd European Conference on Artificial Intelligence – ECAI 2016 ( www.ecai2016.org )
29 August 2
September 2016, The Hague, The Netherlands

The biennial European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI) is Europe’s premier venue for presenting scientific results in AI. Under the general theme of “AI for human values”, the 22nd edition of ECAI will be held in the city of The Hague, in sight the Peace Palace, seat of the International Court of Justice, a location highly appropriate to the conference theme. The conference dates are 29 August – 2 September 2016, with the workshops taking place on 29 and 30
August.
We invite the submission of papers for the technical programme of the 2016 European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2016). High quality
original submissions are welcome from all areas of Artificial Intelligence. The following list of topics is indicative; other topics are welcome.

·         Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems

•        Constraints, Satisfiability, and Search

•        Knowledge Representation, Reasoning, and Logic

•        Machine Learning and Data Mining

•        Natural Language Processing

•        Planning and Scheduling

•        Robotics, Perception and Vision

•        Uncertainty in AI

•        Web and Knowledge-based

·         Information Systems

•        Cognitive Modeling and Cognitive Architectures

·         Agent-based and integrated systems

·         Multidisciplinary topics relevant to artificial intelligence

ECAI 2016 also welcomes contributions to a special topic: Artificial Intelligence for Human Values, addressing the ethical, legal, and societal impact of AI.

Important dates

•        Paper submission: 15 April 2016 (23:59:59 CET)

•        Author feedback: 29 – 31 May 2016

•        Notification of acceptance/rejection: 7 June 2016

Formatting
Submitted papers must be formatted according to the camera-ready style for ECAI’16 available at http://www.ecai2016.org/content/uploads/2015/10/ecai.tar.gz , and submitted electronically in PDF format through ecai2016.confmaster.net . Authorship is not anonymous.
Papers are allowed eight (8) pages. An additional page containing the list of references is allowed as long as this ninth page contains only references.
Short papers, not exceeding two (2) pages, may be submitted for poster presentation and will be subjected to light review.
Accepted short papers will not be published in the conference proceedings. Over-length submissions will be rejected without review.

Originality
Submissions must be original, and in particular should not previously have been formally published, accepted for publication, or be currently under review. Also, submissions must not be submitted elsewhere during the ECAI 2016 reviewing phase. These restrictions apply to journals and conferences, not to workshops and similar specialized presentations with a limited audience and without archival proceedings.

Submitting and reviewing
All long paper submissions will be subject to peer review by the ECAI 2016 Program Committee, and evaluated on the basis of:

•        significance of contribution

•        originality of contribution

•        relevance to ECAI

•        technical quality

•        presentation quality

•        scholarship
Short paper submissions will be evaluated mostly on the basis of originality and potential impact.
Submission and review of papers for ECAI 2016 will be managed via the ConfMaster system: ecai2016.confmaster.net .

2016 is a uniquely busy year for the AI reviewing community, because of the occurrence of IJCAI, ECAI and AAAI, all within months of each other. In order to ensure continuing high reviewing standards, ECAI will introduce two innovations into the reviewing process this year.
First, ECAI 2016 provides a way to improve the continuity of the reviewing process. In cases where papers were previously rejected by IJCAI2016,
and have been revised for submission to ECAI, the ECAI process will enable authors to upload the IJCAI reviews of their papers and a
response letter explaining changes in the revised submitted version, for consideration during the ECAI reviewing process. This innovation is intended to reduce the “lottery” effect which can happen when revised versions are reviewed by a new team of reviewers.
Second, Senior Programme Committee members will have the power to Summarily Reject a paper if, according to the member’s expert judgment, the paper falls too far below ECAI standards to justify further reviewing effort. This change to the reviewing procedure is intended to reduce the load on the reviewers.
These innovations are being supported by the confmaster system, so authors should follow confmaster instructions on submission of their papers.

Proceedings and presentation
The proceedings of the conference will be published by IOS Press, and made freely available on the IOS website. The chairs of ECAI 2016 are currently in negotiation with a well-known journal to seed a special issue of ECAI papers. The details of this arrangement will be confirmed shortly.
The authors will be responsible for producing camera-ready copies of papers in PDF format, conforming to the ECAI’16 formatting guidelines for inclusion in the published proceedings of the conference. At least one author of each accepted paper is required to attend the conference to present the contribution.

Workshops and events
Separate calls are issued for workshop and tutorial proposals, as well as for contributions to PAIS 2016, the Prestigious Applications of Intelligent Systems conference, and STAIRS 2016, the Starting AI Researcher Symposium.
This year ECAI will host AIckathon, the first hackathon for development of AI apps. Details of this competition, and rules for participation, will be issued separately.