We invite submissions to the AAAI Fall Symposium on Advances in Cognitive Systems, which will take place in Arlington, Virginia on November 4, 5, and 6, 2011. The new meeting will bring together researchers with interests in human-level intelligence, complex cognition, integrated intelligent systems, cognitive architectures, and related topics. This event harks a return to the initial goals of artificial intelligence and cognitive science, which aimed to explain intelligence in computational terms and reproduce the entire range of human cognitive abilities in computational artifacts.

Because many researchers remain committed to this original vision, there is need for a meeting that provides a place to present recent results and pose new challenges for the field. However, because this community retains many ties to mainstream artificial intelligence and cognitive science, annual events will be colocated with existing activities associated with the AI and Cognitive Science communities. The initial meeting will serve as one of the 2011 AAAI Fall Symposia.

The symposium will offer a venue to report work on any topic related to the representation or organization of complex mental structures, their use in multi-step cognition, or their acquisition from experience or instruction. Some functional capabilities that arise in this context include:

• Conceptual Inference and Reasoning
• Memory Storage and Retrieval
• Language Processing
• Social Cognition and Interaction
• High-level Execution and Control
• Problem Solving and Heuristic Search
• Metacognition
• Structural Learning and Knowledge Capture

Some research communities already address such issues, including those dealing with cognitive architectures, cognitive robotics, commonsense reasoning, qualitative modeling, and many others. We especially welcome submissions from those working in these and other areas who are interested in complex cognition, human-level intelligence, and related topics.

Because attendance at the meeting will be selective, researchers who would like to participate must submit a brief statement of interest at the symposium Web site, along with links to one or more papers they have written in the area of cognitive systems. The organizing committee will use this information to determine whether to invite applicants to participate in the meeting.

We also invite researchers to submit papers for presentation at the event. Submitted papers should follow the AAAI two-column format and should be no more than eight (8) pages in length. Any papers that diverge from this format or that exceed this length will be returned without review. In addition, each submission should state explicitly the problem or capability it addresses, describe its response to this problem, make claims about this approach, and provide evidence in support of these claims. Every paper should also discuss related efforts, examine limitations of the reported work, and outline plans for future research.

Accepted papers will appear in a AAAI technical report that will be available at the meeting. To improve overall quality of these publications, some submissions may be accepted on a conditional basis. To increase participation despite a limited number of speaker slots, we expect to accept some submissions for poster presentation at the meeting.

Because the symposium aims to encourage research toward a broader understanding of intelligence, its criteria for determining contributions will differ from those used in traditional circles. Progress may take many forms, including demonstrating new functionality, integrating different facets of intelligence, presenting a novel approach to an established problem, explaining complex cognition in humans, and formally analyzing a difficult new task. We also welcome submissions on new problems or testbeds that challenge existing approaches.

Papers that report incremental variants of existing methods, minor improvements on performance metrics for established tasks, or mathematical analyses of component algorithms are not in themselves relevant to this meeting unless they aid progress toward cognitive systems with broad functionality.

Each submission will be assigned to multiple referees who will evaluate the paper for its contribution to understanding cognitive systems, clarity of claims about this contribution, convincing evidence in support of those claims, and cogent presentation of its ideas to readers. We encourage authors to examine the review form before drafting their manuscripts to ensure that their submissions address all of the dimensions on which reviewers will evaluate them.

Although we expect most submissions to be accepted or rejected outright, some papers may be accepted conditionally. In such cases, the authors will receive an itemized list of changes they must make in their final paper. Revised papers that satisfy these conditions will be included in the publication associated with the symposium.

The AAAI Fall Symposium on Advances in Cognitive Systems will run from Friday, November 4, through Sunday, November 6, 2011, in Arlington, Virginia, as part of the AAAI Fall Symposia.

The meeting aims to be as inclusive as possible while still fostering innovative research on the computational nature of intelligence. Authors who have questions about whether their research is appropriate for the meeting should contact the Program Chair, Pat Langley (langley@asu.edu), for additional information.

Important Dates

• May 20, 2011 deadline for statement of interest
• July 15, 2011 deadline for paper submission
• August 8, 2011 decisions about paper acceptance
• September 9, 2011 deadline for final papers
• November 4-6, 2011 symposium