CFP

Chance Discovery: The Discovery and Management of Chance Events
November 15-17, 2002

Sea Crest Conference Center,
North Falmouth, Massachusetts USA

Chance events are rare or novel events with potentially significant consequences for decision-making, i.e., events to be conceived as a risk or an opportunity. This symposium will be devoted to the questions: How may we predict, identify or explain chance events and their consequences? ("chance discovery") and How may we assess, prepare for or manage them? ("chance management").

An agent -- human, robot or software agent -- engaged in planning needs to adopt a view of the future: In order to decide goals, and to decide the best sequence of actions to achieve these goals, how can an agent or agents discover rare or novel events and forecast their consequences? The consequences of such events may significantly impede or facilitate the achievement of agents' goals, but their unlikeness makes them difficult to predict or explain by methods that use historical data or pattern-matching.

One can think of chance discovery as a search of maximum or minimum of a surface whose shape is unknown, in a space whose dimensions may also be unknown. The focus on the agent and its environment as one interacting system can be another viewpoint. This symposium will seek to bring together members of the AI community with people from various relevant domains listed below, to create and share approaches to chance discovery/management. Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to:

Agent systems and planning with emergent behaviors
Human-computer or agent-environment interactions
Complex systems
WWW Awareness
Knowledge discovery and data mining
Statistics and data analysis
Information retrieval
Risk analysis, prediction, assessment and management
Marketing theory and demand forecasting for innovative products
Opportunity identification in business
Social trends analysis
Social psychology
Natural disaster prediction and management
Management and decision sciences
Operations research
Philosophy of forecasting and risk
Hypothesis discovery in scientific theories.

Submissions:

Potential participants are invited to submit a paper of between 1,500 and 6000 words, proposing questions, reporting work in progress, discussing applications or providing a theoretical contribution. Please submit in PostScript format to Yukio Ohsawa:

osawa@gssm.otsuka.tsukuba.ac.jp.

• If PostScript format is not available in your environment, please
  ask Ohsawa if your submission is acceptable, before submission.

Submission: 11 May
Notification: 14 June
Final papers due: 6 September
Symposium: 15-17 November, 2002.

Information can also be obtained from the symposium web-site:

http://www.miv.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~matumura/FSS02/

or the AAAI Symposium web-site:

http://www.aaai.org/Symposia/Fall/2002/fss-02.html

Organizing Committee:

Yukio Ohsawa, University of Tsukuba (osawa@gssm.otsuka.tsukuba.ac.jp) (Chair) Simon Parsons, University of Liverpool (s.d.parsons@csc.liv.ac.uk) Peter McBurney, University of Liverpool (p.j.mcburney@csc.liv.ac.uk).