STAIRS – Ecai 2020

STAIRS2020 Call for papers

Click here to view the CFP from a text file.

The 9th European Starting AI Researchers’ Symposium (STAIRS) is an international meeting intended to support Starting Researchers (those who have not been awarded a doctoral degree but also researchers with not more than three years of experience after getting their PhD). STAIRS is collocated with the ECAI2020 tutorials and workshops and has an independent program committee. In this edition, it will include two invited talks, as well as oral and poster sessions.

STAIRS is meant to provide Starting Researchers with the chance to discuss and explore their research interests as well as European career objectives and options. Thereby it offers a unique and valuable opportunity for young researchers to gain experience in presenting their work in a supportive scientific environment while obtaining constructive feedback on the technical content of their work, presentational aspects, and other related issues. Specifically, STAIRS objectives are:

to provide a setting for mutual feedback on participants’ current research,
to provide guidance on future research directions,
to develop a supportive community of scholars and a spirit of collaborative research,
to support a new generation of researchers with information and advice on academic, research, industrial, and non-traditional career paths, and
to contribute to the conference goals through interaction with other researchers and participation in ECAI/PAIS/STAIRS conference events.

STAIRS2020 is organized under the umbrella of the ECAI 2020 – Mentoring and Communication for Starting AI Researchers (MC4SR) program, which also comprises other training activities, such as the Doctoral Consortium, the Research to Market (R2M), the Elevator Pitch for Early Stage Researchers (EP4ESR), the Lunch with an EurAI Fellow and the Job Fair.

STAIRS will take place on Saturday 29th August afternoon and Sunday 30th August morning. Saturday morning and Sunday afternoon are availability slots for encouraging participation in the other MC4SR events (or tutorials/workshops).

Topics of Interest

We invite Starting Researchers to submit their scientific contributions in accordance with the given paper submission guidelines. Papers are welcome on all aspects of contemporary AI, including, but not restricted to:

Applications of AI
Autonomous Agents & Multi-agent Systems
Case-Based Reasoning
Cognitive Modelling & Cognitive Architectures
Computational Creativity
Constraints, Satisfiability, and Search
Information Retrieval & Natural Language Processing
Knowledge Representation, Reasoning, and Logic
Machine Learning & Data Mining
Model-Based Reasoning
Natural Language Processing
Planning and Scheduling,
Robotics, Perception, Vision and Sensing
Social Intelligence and Socio-Cognitive Systems
Uncertainty in AI
Web and Knowledge-based Information Systems
Multidisciplinary Topics

Important Dates

(all deadlines 23:59 UTC-12)

21 February 2020: Paper submission
~~8 April~~ 8 May 2020: Notification of acceptance/rejection
~~23 April~~ 29 May, 2020: Camera Ready Copy Due
~~28 April~~ 30 June 2020: Early Registration Deadline
29-30 August 2020: STAIRS

Submission

The page limit for STAIRS papers is 7 pages, plus one (1) additional page for references only. The reference list may start earlier than page 8, but only references are allowed on this additional eighth page. Papers should follow STAIRS 2020 Format.

STAIRS2020 Proceedings shall be submitted to CEUR-WS.org for online publication (indexed by DBLP, Scopus, Google Scholar). Significantly improved versions of STAIRS2020 papers could be published somewhere else.

All papers must be submitted via the Easychair system:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=stairs2020

All submissions will be subject to gentle reviewing, with the goal of providing constructive feedback to authors.

The authors of accepted papers will be responsible for producing camera-ready copies of papers, conforming to the STAIRS 2020 formatting guidelines for inclusion in the proceedings. At least one student author of each accepted manuscript is required to attend STAIRS to present the contribution.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The first author must be a Starting Researcher (defined as those who have not been awarded a doctoral degree but also includes researchers with not more than three years of experience after getting their PhD). Papers not satisfying this criterion will be rejected without review.