CaCoA 2007: The 2nd International Workshop on Case Based Reasoning and Context-Awareness

CaCoA 2008

The 2008 CaCoA Workshop is colocated with the 9th European Conference on Case-Based Reasoning in Trier, Germany, September 1-4, 2008.

Workshop Summary

The 2nd CaCoA Workshop was held on August 15th, 2007 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Fifteen participants attended the workshop presentations and discussions. The workshop was organised by Lorcan Coyle and Sven Schwarz, and the workshop was chaired in Belfast by Lorcan. Jörg Cassens presented work on Explanations and Case-Based Reasoning in Ambient Intelligent Systems, Eoin Mac Aoidh presented work on Implicit Profiling for Contextual Reasoning About Users' Spatial Preferences, and Mirjam Minor presented a position paper on The Role of Context Models in Association with Flexible Design Processes. Over coffee and tea, the participants sat in the bar of the conference hotel and discussed a number of issues relating to the workshop themes, including definitions of context for CBR, context awareness versus context sensitivity, and challenges regarding the evaluation of context-aware CBR systems.

The workshop proceedings are available online and the workshop summary presentation is available here. A public mailing list has been set up to continue the conversations started at the CaCoA workshops. This list is public and anyone interested in hearing more or getting involved in future workshops on this subject should consider joining.

Workshop Topics

Context-sensitive processing has a key role in many modern intelligent IT applications, with context-awareness and context-reasoning being essential not only for mobile, pervasive, and ubiquitous computing, but also for a wide range of other areas such as recommender systems, collaborative software, web engineering, information sharing, health care workflow and patient control, adaptive games, autonomic systems, and e-Learning solutions.

Context awareness in case-based reasoning (CBR) systems has also become a topic of increased research. In CBR, context serves as a major source for reasoning, decision-making, and adaptation. Consequently, achieving desired behaviors from CBR systems in these areas will depend on the ability to represent and manipulate information about a rich range of contextual factors.

These factors may include not only physical characteristics of the task environment, but many other aspects such as the knowledge states (of both the application and user), and user beliefs and emotions. The representation and reasoning problem therein presents research challenges to which numerous methods and techniques derived from artificial intelligence and knowledge management (e.g., logical reasoning, object relationship models, ontologies, similarity measures, and intelligent retrieval mechanisms) are now being brought to bear. This workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners exploring issues and approaches for context-sensitive systems involving CBR to share their problems and techniques. It will examine mechanisms and techniques for structured storage of contextual information, effective ways to retrieve, reuse, and adapt it, as well as methods for enabling integration of context and application knowledge.

Workshop Motivation

Download the CaCoA 07 brochureWith the current popularity of mobile devices and ubiquitous computing, the development of IT applications that are sensitive to their environment has become a major research focus. Context-awareness is critical to this undertaking. Advances in modeling, retrieving, and processing context are important to provide methods to be integrated in modern knowledge management and decision making processes. In particular, storing, retrieving, adapting, and then re-using past behaviors, best-practices, or solutions are needed to build an adaptable, context-aware application. However, the modeling and handling of context is still a challenge, given the fuzziness of context information, and — especially in mobile scenarios — the rapidly changing environments and unstable information sources. This is thus an area of significant interest in AI.

CaCoA 2007 will bring together industry and academic researchers and scientists to study, understand, and explore the handling of context, with a particular focus on CBR. Besides contributed papers and invited talks, it will offer organized and open spaces for targeted discussions. An expected result is to form a common understanding on the topics of modeling, comparing, and adapting context. Additional discussions will include the use of context in recommender systems; the applications of CBR to pervasive computing, autonomic systems, and ubiquitous computing; and the use of sensed and real-world features in CBR systems. The outcomes of last year’s workshop clearly demonstrated that CBR technology and and its methodologies enable several facets of context-sensitivity and -awareness. Moreover, the success of last year’s workshop demonstrated that the CBR community is very much interested in furthering research into context-awareness.

CaCoA 2007 will build on the success of last year’s CBR and Context Awareness workshop (CaCoA06). CaCoA06 featured an invited talk, five paper presentations, and a substantial discussion session. Last year’s accepted submissions were published online with CEUR Workshop Proceedings. Attendance last year was 15 people. Our discussions revolved around outlining the intersections between CBR and Context Awareness, defining the necessary terminologies, and discussed how context-awareness should be better branded to the wider CBR community. Most of the participants agreed to continue working on these topics and return to ICCBR07 with updates of their work. Thanks to the positive feedback we received we expect to attract a larger audience this year.

Calls For Participation (CFPs)

The first call for participation for CaCoA 2007 has been released (also available in text and PDF formats). We invite paper submissions including descriptions of works in progress, research contributions, and position statements. Submissions should attempt to address one or more of the aforementioned questions regarding the use of context-awareness and case based reasoning. Submitted papers will be peer-reviewed by three members of the program committee. Submissions must be identified as either research or application papers and will be reviewed using criteria appropriate to their category. Review criteria for research papers will include scientific significance, originality, technical quality, and clarity. Review criteria for application papers will include practical or economic significance, potential to lead to more powerful technology, technical quality, and clarity.

Organization

Workshop Chairs

Program Committee

ICCBR 2007

ICCBR logoCaCoA 2007 is colocated with the Seventh International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning in Belfast, Northern Ireland, 13–16 August 2007.

The CaCoA Logo

The background cacoa image and the cacoa-themed imagery were created from Mariana Reyes' beautiful photo of Cacoa Beans

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