Accepted Symposia

1. AI, Games & Virtual Reality

2. AI, robots and public engagement

3. Assessing Agency, Moral and Otherwise: Beyond the Machine Question

4. The 18th Worskhop on Computational Models of Natural Argument (CMNA18)

5. The 5th Computational Creativity Symposium

6. Cybernetic Serendipity Reimagined

7. Digital Behaviour Intervention for Cyber-Security

8. Emotion Modelling and Detection in Social Media and Online Interaction

9. Philosophy after AI: mind, language and action

10. The 2nd Symposium on Social Interactions in Complex Intelligent Systems (SICIS)

AI, Games & Virtual Reality

The AI, Games & VR Symposium, acts as a meeting place for researchers and practitioners from academia, education and industry who are involved with the design, development and evaluation of AI in the context of games or virtual reality and any other form of immersive experience (e.g. 360 videos) It focuses on the application of artificial intelligence or intelligent-like techniques, frameworks and theories to the creation of interactive engaging intelligent games. It will address the following areas of research and practice:

• The use of AI techniques (planning, learning, evolution etc.) in games, VR and the game/VR design process.
• The design and engineering of AI components in commercial games, virtual environments, VR technology, Immersive experiences
• AI for serious games, gamification, virtual environments
• Automatic or semi-automatic procedural content generation
• Intelligent or adaptive player interaction
• AI for player/user analytics and modelling player/user behaviour or experience.
• Agent pathfinding and decision-making in games and virtual reality applications
• Using games or simulations as a platform for building intelligent agents
• Environmental simulations for games/VR/immersive experiences
• Interactive narrative generation
• Intelligent Narrative Technologies
• Player perceptions of game AI, VR AI, Immersive experience AI
• Experimental AI & Games, AI & VR, AI & immersive experience Papers connecting games to all areas of computational intelligence and traditional AI are considered.

AI, robots and public engagement

A great deal of attention has been paid in recent years to the question of ethics and responsible innovation in researching artificial intelligence and robotics. A key aspect of this has been improved attempts to create a full and frank dialogue between those who build these systems and that nefarious entity known as ‘the public’: the policy-makers, politicians, legal experts, and the rest of the ‘stakeholders’. Despite improved efforts, however, most of the public seems to remain largely misinformed as to the development of robotics and AI, causing some wild expectations, unfounded optimism, and fears, both founded and unfounded, that will have dramatic impacts upon research. So while there seems to be a (near) universal acknowledgement that there is a need to engage with the public in our research, it seems that this is something that we can still do much better than we presently are.

This symposium will bring together researchers, those with expertise in public engagement and those with a specific interest in helping guide conversations on robots and AI in terms of ethics, responsible research and the social impacts of new research. This may also include experts public engagement offering workshops in how to organise events, how to talk to the public and specific stakeholder groups, and how best to make meaningful impacts (e.g. on policy).

A public event will accompany the symposium, to be announced.

Assessing Agency, Moral and Otherwise: Beyond the Machine Question

Robotization and other forms of automation increasingly find themselves among the most heard buzz words throughout the manufacturing sector and beyond. Beyond the mundane assembly-line robots, one hears about self-driving cars, “killer” battlefield robots, sex robots, prototype care robots. Laypersons and researchers alike talk about the more sophisticated examples in a way that appears to ascribe them agency and, in some cases, stops little short of personhood: describing them as having feelings, weighing choices, making decisions wrong and right. How much is hype and how much substance? To what extent are people speaking metaphorically – and aware of doing so – to what extent do they really mean what they are saying? Are existing artefacts – or, if not, can potential future artefacts be – agents in any substantial sense? Can they be moral agents, capable of making moral decisions and being held responsible for the consequences? Most importantly, how do the answers to these questions shape our ethical interactions with machines that, in some important ways at least, remind us of ourselves? How do they inform our assignments of moral responsibility?

This symposium takes as its starting point that questions of artefactual agency and machine ethics are red herrings. What matters is what qualifies any purported agent as an agent and what qualifies certain agents – whatever their origins – as moral agents.

The 18th Worskhop on Computational Models of Natural Argument (CMNA18)

The series of workshops on Computational Models of Natural Argument is continuing to attract high quality submissions from researchers around the world since its inception in 2001. Like the past editions, CMNA XVIII acts to nurture and provide succor to the ever growing community working on Argument and Computation, a field developed in recent years overlapping Argumentation Theory and Artificial Intelligence. The workshop focuses on the issue of modelling "natural" argumentation. Contributions are solicited addressing, but not limited to, the following areas of interest:

• The characteristics of “natural” arguments (e.g. ontological aspects, cognitive issues, legal aspects).
• The linguistic characteristics of natural argumentation, including discourse markers, sentence format, referring expressions, and style.
• The generation of natural argument
• Corpus argumentation results and techniques
• Argumentation mining
• Models of natural legal argument
• Rhetoric and affect: the role of emotions, personalities, etc. in argumentation.
• The roles of licentiousness and deceit and the ethical implications of implemented systems demonstrating such features.
• Natural argumentation in multi-agent systems.
• Methods to better convey the structure of complex argument, including representation and summarisation.
• Natural argumentation and media: visual arguments, multi-modal arguments, spoken arguments.
• Evaluative arguments and their application in AI systems (such as decision-support and advice-giving).
• Non-monotonic, defeasible and uncertain argumentation.
• The computational use of models from informal logic and argumentation theory.
• Computer supported collaborative argumentation, for pedagogy, e-democracy and public debate.
• Tools for interacting with structures of argument.
• Applications of argumentation based systems.

The 5th Computational Creativity Symposium

Over the last few decades, computational creativity has attracted an increasing number of researchers from both arts and science backgrounds. Philosophers, cognitive psychologists, computer scientists and artists have all contributed to and enriched the literature.

Many argue a machine is creative if it simulates or replicates human creativity (e.g. evaluation of AI systems via a Turing-style test), while others have conceived of computational creativity as an inherently different discipline, where computer generated (art)work should not be judged on the same terms, i.e. as being necessarily producible by a human artist, or having similar attributes, etc.

This symposium aims at bringing together researchers to discuss recent technical and philosophical developments in the field, and the impact of this research on the future of our relationship with computers and the way we perceive them: at the individual level where we interact with the machines, the social level where we interact with each other via computers, or even with machines interacting with each other.

Topics of interest for this symposium include, but not limited to:

• Novel systems and theories in computational creativity, in any domain, e.g. drawing and painting, music, story telling, poetry, games, etc
• The evaluation of computational creative systems, processes and artifacts
• Theory of computational aesthetics
• Representational issues in creativity, including visual and perceptual representations
• Social aspects of computational creativity, and intellectual property issues
• Creative autonomy and constraint
• Computational appreciation of artifacts, including human artwork

Cybernetic Serendipity Reimagined

Following the successful AISB Member Workshop VII: Serendipity Symposium held at St Mary's University in June 2017, with keynotes by leading serendiptologists and nine contributed talks, we invite full papers, short papers, and demos for a Symposium on the theme of "Cybernetic Serendipity" -- broadly understood.

We take the 50th Anniversary of the famous Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition, curated by Jasia Reichardt at the London's Institute for Contemporary Arts, as our inspiration. The show introduced a broader audience for the first time to emerging work on the intersection of art and technology. “Cybernetic Serendipity” lends itself beautifully (perhaps even serendipitously) to a sensory and emotionally evocative exploration of “AI for the Digital Society”, the theme of this year’s AISB convention.

Serendipity has been studied extensively to theorise human discovery. However, there has been little consideration of serendipity in AI -- it simply wasn’t needed, because systems were designed to run in a perfectly predictable manner within highly constrained environments. In recent years, anticipation of AI systems with increasingly unpredictable behaviour leads us to reconsider the role of serendipity may play in a computational context. Serendipity has been addressed in a variety of adjacent fields such as recommender systems, machine ethics, information retrieval, information science, planning and computational creativity. With this symposium, we want to encourage a mutually beneficial exchange between these and other disciplines beyond computing.

Digital Behaviour Intervention for Cyber-Security

This symposium focuses on how digital technology can motivate and influence people to behave more cyber-securely. It brings together researchers, designers, developers and cyber-security experts interested in computers designed to change cyber-security attitudes and behaviours. The symposium covers a wide range of topics on persuasion, from behaviour intervention methods to persuasive argumentation and persuasive user interfaces. Digital behaviour interventions have a great practical potential. They have been applied in many domains, for instance to improve health and to move towards sustainable living. There has been much progress in the research community on digital behaviour interventions, as shown a.o. by the successful Persuasive conference series, a special issue of the UMUAI journal, and a successful series of workshops on Computational Models of Natural Argument (an area overlapping with persuasion). Recent developments within cyber security have emphasised the need for greater consideration and acknowledgement of human behaviour. The action or inaction of individual users has been demonstrated to have a severely negative impact on the security of organisations across all sectors of the economy. Hence, there has been a lot of interest in cyber-security behaviour, awareness and policy compliance. However, most of this work has not been routed within the behaviour change literature. There is currently an emergence of work that is beginning to combine these two strands of research, and this symposium will help to further build this community.

Emotion Modelling and Detection in Social Media and Online Interaction

The worldwide diffusion of social media has profoundly changed the way we communicate and access information. Social media is changing the way people interact with each other and share information, personal messages, and opinions about situations, objects and past experiences.

On one hand user-generated content comprise an invaluable wealth of data, ready to be mined for training predictive models. On the other hand, the pervasive use of online social media in computer-mediated communication, is opening new challenges for social sciences and human-computer studies as one of the biggest drawbacks of communication through social media is to appropriately convey and recognize sentiment through text. Furthermore, the sentiment analysis and emotion recognition in online user-generated contents presents its own specificities and challenges due to their characteristics, language use, and to the huge available volume of data.

The aims of this symposium include: presenting the state of the art in emotion modelling and tools for online interaction; fostering discussion around interdisciplinary research area at the intersection between cognitive sciences, computational linguistics, and social computing; enhancing the state of the art in affect recognition in social media; discuss challenges and opportunities of research ethical concerns and applications addressing the role of sentiment and emotions in computer-supported cooperative work and online interaction on social media, with a special focus on education, entertainment, health, e-government, games, hate speech monitoring.

Philosophy after AI: mind, language and action

The goal of this one-day symposium is to claim for a philosophical approach to the latest issues about the study of human mind developed in the field of Artificial Intelligence.
First, the mind-body problem can be read again involving the neuroscientific research (e.g. mirror neurons, researches on memory and the relationship between brain and action, the reductionist approach), including the provocative theory of the extended mind which enlivened the debate placing the mind-body-scaffolding problem.
The second question is about the philosophical category of subject: how to set out the boundaries of the self?
The third issue concerns the nature of learning and creativity and the current researches in the field of machine learning. Since learning and creativity have been connected to the acquisition of language and the linguistic change, they have been investigated by linguists and philosophers.
The fourth issue is the philosophical theme of teleology, which has been widely debated in cybernetics, crosses all the issues above mentioned. Functionalism, simulation, representationalism, mentalism, identity of explanatory principles are the philosophical milestones which follow the development of cognitive sciences and AI since the last century.
Finally, the main issue, in the shadow of H. Simon, concerns what does “artificial” mean.

We invite contributions on the following topics (but not exclusively):

• Philosophy, science and AI
• Mind-body problem and AI
• Truth, post-truth and AI
• Language and cognition
• The self and robotics
• Creativity, machine-learning and language
• Social media, devices and human sociality

The 2nd Symposium on Social Interactions in Complex Intelligent Systems (SICIS)

Federico Bergenti, University of Parma
Stefania Monica, University of Parma
Paolo Petta, Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence

A complex intelligent system is a large network of interacting agents  where  non‐trivial  global  patterns  and  behaviours  emerge,  normally  without a central control,  from the combination of simple behaviours  of individual  units. Social interactions in  complex intelligent  systems  give  rise  to  collective  properties  that  hold  at  the  macroscopic  level, whose  emergence  cannot  be  easily  inferred  from  the  analysis  of  the  behaviour  of  single  agents  at  the  microscopic  level.  The  study  of  complex  intelligent  systems  represents  a  novel  approach  to  investigate  how  social  interactions  among  agents  lead  to  emergent  behaviours which exhibit some sort of intelligence.

Methodologically,  social  interactions  concern  both  local  and  global  phenomena,  and  therefore  they  are  a  key  concept  to  understand  the  behaviour of a complex intelligent system. The models used  to study  interactions among agents describe  the effects  of interactions  from a  microscopic  point  of  view.  Therefore,  the  derivation  of  observable  behaviours from  such  interactions  may  be  addressed  using  various  approaches,  such  as  statistical  methods,  empirical  observations,  analytic approaches and simulative tools. 

Complex intelligent systems are used to describe processes in various  fields,  such  as  Artificial  Intelligence,  Computer  Science, Mathematics,  Biology,  Economics,  Physics,  Sociology,  and  Economy. Hence,  they  represent a promising multi‐disciplinary research field.

The  symposium  is  meant  to  offer  an  interdisciplinary  forum  on  all  aspects  related  to  social  interactions  in  complex  intelligent  systems.  The  aim  of  the  symposium is  to  stimulate  discussions  and  synergies  among  participants,  which  are  expected  to  have  diverse  and  complementary research backgrounds.