AAAI 2020 Fall Symposium Series and Spring Symposium Colocation

Call for Proposals

Sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
Washington, DC, November 11–-14, 2020

• Proposals Due: April 30
• Notifications to organizers: May 21
• Organizers submit and post CFPs: May 31
• Papers due to organizers: July 23
• Organizers send notifications to authors: August 13
• FSS final papers due to organizers: September 17 (recommended)
• Registration deadline: September 17

Spring Symposium Colocation

This year, due to the COVID-19 outbreak, several symposia from the Spring Series will be held during the Fall Symposium Series. As a result, each series will be slightly abbreviated to (2) days each, rather than the usual (2.5) days each. The fall event will be structured as follows:

• November 11-12: Spring Symposium Presentations
• November 13-14: Fall Symposium Presentations

It is hoped that this will provide a further opportunity for networking and a shared opening reception.

AAAI invites proposals for the 2020 Fall Symposium Series, to be held Friday – Saturday, November 13-14 at the Westin Arlington Gateway in Arlington, Virginia adjacent to Washington, DC. The Fall Symposium Series provides the AI community with a unique venue in which researchers from different areas of AI can accomplish the following:

• Present speculative work and work in progress
• Hold focused discussions over several days
• Build new communities for emerging disciplines
• Build ties between existing disciplines

The series brings together a set of two-day symposia at a common site, providing a unique and intimate forum for colleagues in a given discipline. The series also provides an important gathering point for the AI community as a whole. The series is designed to minimize the administrative burden on the organizing committees of the individual symposia. AAAI manages registration and local arrangements, and provides organizational support during the submission and review phase, as well as publicity within the AAAI community.

The series runs twice yearly (spring and fall). Approximately eight symposium topics will be selected for the 2020 Fall Symposium Series portion of the program. Accepted proposals will be distributed as widely as possible over the subfields of AI, and balanced between theoretical and applied topics. Symposia bridging theory and practice and those combining AI and related fields are particularly solicited.

Proposals for symposia should be between two and five pages in length, and should contain the following:

A title for the symposium.

A description of the symposium, identifying specific areas of interest.

A preliminary schedule outlining the general symposium format and any known keynote speakers or other events. The symposia are intended to encourage presentation of speculative work and work in progress, as well as completed work. Therefore, ample time should be scheduled for discussion. Novel programming, including the use of target problems, open-format panels, working groups, or breakout sessions, is encouraged.

The names and (physical and electronic) addresses of the organizing committee, preferably three or more people at different sites, all of whom have agreed to serve on the committee.

A list of potential participants who have been contacted and who have expressed interest in participating. A common way of gathering potential participants is to send email messages to email lists related to the topic(s) of the symposium. Note that potential participants need not commit to participating, only state that they are interested.

Ideally, the entire organizing committee should collaborate in producing the proposal. If possible, a draft proposal should be sent out to a few of the potential participants and their comments solicited.

Proposals will be reviewed by the Symposium Series Standing Committee (Chair: Christopher Geib, SIFT; Cochair: Ron Petrick, Heriot-Watt University; and Claire Monteleoni, George Washington University).

The criteria for acceptance of proposals include the following:

Perceived interest to the AAAI community. Although AAAI encourages symposia that cross disciplinary boundaries, a symposium must be of interest to some community within the AAAI membership. Symposia that are of interest to a broad range of AAAI members are, of course, also encouraged.

Expected size. Although the series supports a range of symposium sizes (roughly 25-75), the target size is around 40 participants.

Lack of established venues on the topic. The AAAI Symposium Series is intended to nurture emerging communities and topics, so topics that already have yearly conferences or workshops are inappropriate.

Qualifications of the organizing committee. The organizing committee should have (1) a good technical knowledge of the topic, (2) good organizational skills, and (3) connections to the various communities from which they intend to draw participants. Committees for cross-disciplinary symposia should adequately represent the disciplines to be covered by the symposium.

Symposium proposals should be submitted as soon as possible, but no later than April 30, 2020. Proposals that are submitted significantly before this deadline can be in draft form. Comments on how to improve and complete the proposal will be returned to the submitter in time for revisions to be made before the deadline. Notifications of acceptance or rejection will be sent to submitters around May 21, 2020.

The submitters of accepted proposals will become the chairs of the symposium, unless alternative arrangements are made. Symposium organizing committees are responsible for the following:

• Writing short calls for participation and registration, which AAAI will distribute to its membership
• Additional publicity of the symposium, especially to potential audiences from outside the AAAI community
• Reviewing requests to participate in the symposium and determining symposium participants
• Collecting submissions for distribution to symposium participants (and possible publication)
• Scheduling the activities of the symposium
• Preparing a short review of the symposium, to be printed in AI Magazine.

Please submit your symposium proposals to the EasyChair submission site (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=fss20) by the deadline (no email or postal submissions). Inquiries concerning symposia may be directed to the symposium cochairs:

Christopher Geib (SIFT)
Ron Petrick (Heriot-Watt University)
FSS-20 Cochairs
fss20chairs@aaai.org

General inquiries regarding the symposium series should be directed to AAAI by emailing fss20@aaai.org.