A Special Session on Spatial and Temporal Reasoning will be held during the 4th Indian International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IICAI-09). The session invites papers in all areas of spatial and temporal representation and reasoning.

The field of qualitative spatial representation and reasoning has evolved as a sub-division in its own right within the broader field of Artificial Intelligence -- recent years have witnessed remarkable advances in some of the long-standing problems of the field. For instance, new results about tractability for spatial calculi, explicit construction of models, characterization of important subclasses of relations, as well as in the development of new areas such as the emergence of integrated spatio-temporal calculi and the importing of non-monotonic techniques for dealing with various aspects intrinsic to dynamic spatial systems. Inextricably lined to space is time, i.e., spatial configurations change over time. Spatial change may also be perceived as being spatio-temporal and a lot of recent work is being devoted to providing useful and well-grounded models to be used as high level qualitative description of spatio-temporal change. Furthermore, reasoning about space also typically involves reasoning about changing spatial configurations, and in more realistic scenarios, integrated reasoning about space, actions and change. Recent work supporting this paradigm has also explicitly addressed the potential interactions between the spatial reasoning domain and the field of reasoning about actions and change.

Driven by cognitive approaches that characterize the processing of spatial information within qualitative spatial reasoning, there has been considerable influx of people from other areas within AI such as computer vision, robotics etc, working on qualitative representation and reasoning about spatial change, spatio-temporal interactions, and the formal modelling of dynamic spatial systems in general. Qualitative conceptualizations of space and tools/techniques for efficiently reasoning with them being well-established, there is now a clear felt need within the community to utilise the tools and formalisms that have been constructed in the recent years in novel application scenarios and, gauging by the content of upcoming events, even a focus on evaluation standards and benchmarking problems for qualitative formalisms.


Session Chairs
Mehul Bhatt (primary contact)
SFB/TR 8 Spatial Cognition
Universität Bremen
P.O. Box 330 440, 28334 Bremen, GERMANY
bhatt@informatik.uni-bremen.de

Shyamanta M Hazarika
Department of Computer Sc & Engineering
School of Engineering, Tezpur University
Tezpur - 784028, Assam, INDIA
smh@tezu.ernet.in

Stefan Wölfl
Department of Computer Science
Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg
Georges-Köhler-Allee
Geb. 052, Room 00-043
79110 Freiburg, GERMANY
woelfl@informatik.uni-freiburg.de

Program Committee
Amitabha Mukerjee (IITK, India)
Anthony Cohn (University of Leeds, United Kingdom)
Björn Gottfried (University of Bremen, Germany)
Brandon Bennett (University of Leeds, United Kingdom)
Christian Freksa (University of Bremen, Germany)
Diedrich Wolter (University of Bremen, Germany)
Hans Guesgen (Massey University, New Zealand)
Nico Van de Weghe (Ghent University, Belgium)