Proceedings of the Eighth Symposium On Abstraction Reformulation and Approximation

Edited by Vadim Bulitko and J. Christopher Beck
Lake Arrowhead, California USA, September 7–10, 2009.

Computer technology is leading to sweeping changes in how we can reason about groups in diverse cultures. Examples include computer systems to aid researchers in gathering data about different cultural groups, learning the intensity of opinions that those groups have on various topics, building or extracting models of behavior of those groups, and continuously refining those behaviors through shared, multiperson, learning experiences. These developments are inherently cross-disciplinary. They blend the behavioral and social sciences — fields such as political science, psychology, journalism, anthropology, and sociology — with technological fields such as computer science, computational linguistics, game theory, and operations research. Currently, many of these research communities are largely unconnected. There is a need to bring them together to help forge a common understanding of principles, techniques, and application areas. That is the purpose of this conference and the subject of this proceeedings.