AI Magazine Volume 26 Number 4 (2006)(2005) (© AAAI) 25th Anniversary Issue July 9; Biplav Srivastava and Jim Blythe, cochairs); Human Comprehen- The Workshop sible Machine Learning (held Saturday, July 9; Dan Oblinger, chair); Inference for Textual Question Answering (held Program at the Saturday, July 9; Sanda M. Harabagiu, chair); Integrating Planning into Scheduling (held Sunday, July 10; Mark Boddy, chair); Learning in Computer Twentieth National Vision (held Sunday, July 10; Bir Bhanu, chair); Link Analysis (held Sun- day, July 10; Dunja Mladenic, Natasha Conference on Milic-Frayling, and Marko Grobelink, cochairs); Mobile Robot Workshop (held Wednesday, July 13, Sheila Tejada and Paul E. Rybski, cochairs); Modular Artificial Intelligence Construction of Human-Like Intelli- gence (held Sunday, July 10; Kristinn R. Thorisson, chair); Multiagent Learning (held Sunday, July 10; Eduardo Alonso, Diego Molla Aliod, Eduardo Alonso, chair); Question Answering in Restrict- ed Domains (held Sunday, July 10, Srinivas Bangalore, Joseph E. Beck, Bir Bhanu, Diego Molla Aliod, chair); Spoken Lan- Jim Blythe, Mark Boddy, guage Understanding (held Saturday, Amedeo Cesta, Marko Grobelink, July 9; Gokhan Tur (chair). Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Sanda M. Harabagiu, Alain Lege, Deborah McGuinness, Contexts and Ontologies: Stacy Marsella, Natasha Milic-Frayling, Theory, Practice, and Dunja Mladenic, Dan Oblinger, Paul E. Rybski, Applications Pavel Shvaiko, Stephen Smith, Biplav Srivastava, Pavel Shvaiko, Deborah McGuinness, Sheila Tejada, Hannes Vilhjálmsson, Holger Wache, and Alain Leger During the last decade, there was a se- Kristinn R. Thórisson, Gokhan Tur, ries of successful workshops and con- Jose Luis Vicedo, and Holger Wache ferences on the development and ap- plication of contexts and ontologies. Early workshops focused mostly on identifying what contexts and ontolo- gies are and how they can be formal- ized and exploited. More recently, with the emergence of distributed sys- tems (such as P2P systems and the se- ■ The AAAI–05 workshops were held on he AAAI–05 workshops were held mantic web), the focus has shifted to- Saturday and Sunday, July 9–10, in Pitts- on Saturday and Sunday, July ward issues of practical applications, burgh, Pennsylvania. The thirteen work- 9–10, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylva- shops were Contexts and Ontologies: T such as semantic integration, coordi- nia. The cochairs of the AAAI-05 Work- Theory, Practice and Applications, Edu- nation, and meaning negotiation cational Data Mining, Exploring Plan- shop Program were Adele Howe, Col- among information sources, where ning and Scheduling for Web Services, orado State University and Peter Stone, both contexts and ontologies were ap- Grid and Autonomic Computing, Hu- The University of Texas at Austin. The plied as promising solutions. Howev- man Comprehensible Machine Learn- fourteen workshops were Contexts and er, few, if any, of these meetings ing, Inference for Textual Question An- Ontologies: Theory, Practice and Appli- focused on combining the themes of swering, Integrating Planning into cations (held Saturday, July 9; Pavel ontologies and contexts and dis- Scheduling, Learning in Computer Vi- Shvaiko and Deborah McGuinness, cussing them as complementary disci- sion, Link Analysis, Mobile Robot Work- cochairs); Educational Data Mining shop, Modular Construction of Human- plines. (held Sunday, July 10; Joseph E. Beck, like Intelligence, Multiagent Learning, This contexts and ontologies work- Question Answering in Restricted Do- chair); Exploring Planning and shop aimed to bring together people mains, and Spoken Language Under- Scheduling for Web Services, Grid and from the context and ontology com- standing. Autonomic Computing (held Saturday, munities and facilitate discussion 102 AI MAGAZINE Copyright © 2005, American Association for Artificial Intelligence. All rights reserved. 0738-4602-2005 / $2.00 25th Anniversary Issue about research and approaches to in- application perspectives. The founda- though computers enable collection of formation integration, thereby high- tions session covered some bridges be- keystroke level data, this level is prob- lighting different perspectives and tween contexts and ontologies in in- ably not the best one for classifying making the meeting of these commu- formation integration scenarios (such students or examining the data. One nities mutually beneficial. The work- as airfare and e-government). The lan- proposal was to encode special-case shop pushed the cross-fertilization and guage and reasoning session concen- detectors, such as an expert in the do- exchange of ideas (such as what are the trated on ambiguities of natural lan- main being able to realize that a par- commonalities and differences in the guage, encoding natural language into ticular characteristic must necessarily methods, which of the methods from a logical language, and the trade-off be exhibited, while a novice must per- the ontology community can be suc- between expressivity of logical lan- form several tests to confirm its exis- cessfully adopted in the context com- guages and reasoning. The informa- tence. Preprocessing log files with such munity, and vice versa, and what work- tion retrieval session focused on the is- detectors enables researchers to better ing definitions of terms enhance sues of semantic annotation, rele- classify students and understand how research progress). For example, one vance, and scoping of information de- they are learning. An alternate ap- perspective was that ontology can be pending on the application context. proach was to provide a generic tool viewed as an explicit encoding of a do- The ontology matching session intro- for browsing and summarizing stu- main model that may be shared and duced a few new approaches to the se- dent interactions with computer tu- reused. Another perspective is that a mantic heterogeneity problem using tors. This tool allows researchers to se- context can be viewed as an explicit the match operation. lect the level of detail they want to see encoding of a domain model that is ex- The poster and discussion and and avoids the problem of being un- pected to be local and may contain one wrap-up sessions generated many able to “see the forest for the trees.” party’s subjective view of the domain. fruitful discussions on the workshop Using students’ performance data Some technical themes discussed in themes. In particular, participants (how they solve problems) to con- the workshop include (1) approaches agreed that the main themes of con- struct a model of the domain produces to the semantic heterogeneity prob- vergence among contexts and ontolo- a very different result than asking do- lem using combinations of multiple gies are information interoperability main experts to construct such mod- contexts and ontologies; (2) technical and reuse. They also agreed that the els. This work focused on examining problems related to integration of con- workshop was productive and demon- student performance data, finding texts and ontologies from theoretical, strated a robust interest in a contexts questions with correlated perfor- practical, and application perspec- and ontologies workshop next year. mance, and then extracting factors tives. The workshop papers were pub- that describe the domain. Construct- The workshop consisted of two in- lished as an AAAI technical report and ing domain models in this way seems vited talks, four technical sessions, two posted in AAAI’s digital library. to result in many fewer factors to de- poster sessions, and a discussion and scribe a domain compared to expert beliefs. While hand-crafted domain wrap-up session. We received 30 sub- Educational Data Mining models are a useful theoretical descrip- missions: 11 were selected for techni- tion, students do not seem to perform cal sessions and 16 were selected for Joseph E. Beck or recognize differences at such a sub- poster sessions. The field of educational data mining tle level. In the first invited talk, Fausto focuses on improving our knowledge Although this workshop was the Giunchiglia from the University of of learning and teaching by extracting first one at AAAI, the quality of papers Trento, discussed how ontologies can patterns from the data collected as was strong, and we look forward to be contextualized, thereby yielding part of the educational process. Com- having a second such workshop at contextual ontologies, which have the puters, especially computer tutors, en- AAAI 2006 in Boston. advantages of both ontologies and con- able data collection over long periods The workshop papers were pub- texts. In the second invited talk, Chris of time, for many students, and at a lished as an AAAI technical report and Welty of IBM discussed why ontologies fine time scale. These advantages pro- posted in AAAI’s digital library. need contexts and why contexts need vide a novel source of data for under- ontologies. He also considered some standing how students learn. Al- outbriefing from the Advanced Re- though there have been similar Exploring Planning and search and Development Activity (AR- workshops, those workshops were lim- Scheduling for DA) Interoperable Knowledge Repre- ited to specialized conferences. There- sentation for Intelligence Support fore, one goal of this workshop was to Web Services, Grid, and (IKRIS) program on contexts and what bring together a broader group of AI Autonomic Computing may be useful to include concerning researchers. them in knowledge representation lan- Two big ideas cut across several Biplav