Call for Papers/Participation
Description
The traditions of Case-Based Reasoning are rich in the art of story telling, and many of the story environments in modern fancy are wrought in the worlds of computer games. Increasing attention is currently being given to developing support for the creation and exercise of complex gaming and simulation environments in order to support both entertainment and serious organizational goals. As gaming and simulation environments strive for increasing realism, they are converging with traditional organizational modeling approaches for training and scenario-based decision support.
The goal of this workshop is to encourage the study, development, integration, and evaluation of CBR approaches on tasks from complex games. These challenging performance tasks are characterized by huge search spaces, uncertainty, opportunities for coordination/teaming, and (frequently) multi-agent adversarial conditions. They are also often amenable to knowledge-intensive case-based (and other) learning approaches. We want to encourage dialog among researchers with a variety of backgrounds and a common interest in case-based approaches. This workshop will yield an understanding of state-of-the-art approaches for performing well in complex gaming environments, and research issues that require additional attention.
Complex games make good domain environments for studying many aspects of Case-Based Reasoning research, and appropriate simulators can serve as excellent platforms for addressing challenging problems. These environments can be used to focus research and development for a variety of CBR focus areas. They can also enable comparative (and competitive) assessment within focus areas. We have particular interest in games with large search spaces (e.g., real-time and turn-based strategy games, role-playing games), which are challenging for current CBR approaches.
Topics relevant to this workshop include, but are not limited to:
- Case-based learning techniques for game playing
- Creativity and dynamic story / gameplay generation and control
- Meta-level reasoning and representations for player decision support
- Reasoning in dynamic physical worlds
- Interface standards for developing AI/gaming systems
- Tools for integrating CBR techniques and gaming simulators
- Case-based explanation in simulation environments
- CBR approaches for training simulators
- CBR integrated with simulators for educational applications
- Adversary and adversarial strategy recognition and modeling
- Case-based planning techniques for large-scale environments
- Interactive tools for situation assessment
- Distributed / multi-agent game AI coordination and collaboration
- Social reasoning among virtual gaming agents
- Representations for planning and decision making
- Natural language generation/interpretation in games
- Simulating character emotions
- Evaluation techniques on complex gaming tasks
- Lessons learned in CBR/gaming investigations
- Surveys on state-of-the-art CBR/gaming approaches
Challenge Problems
Conducting research in gaming and simulation environments is often difficult, because integrating systems with gaming simulators can be a time-intensive process. Therefore, we will define and implement a small number of Challenge Problems in gaming simulators integrated with TIELT, a freely available test bed that researchers can use to access these simulators (along with some integrated AI systems). Participants are welcome to address these problems in their submissions, or to use TIELT as needed to otherwise support their research goals. (Depending on the level of participation, we may group contributions that involve these Challenge Problems and/or conduct a short poster session involving them.)
Participation
This workshop will be held on 24 August 2005 as part of the ICCBR 2005 workshop series in Chicago. This workshop is open to all interested conference participants, but may be limited by available room facilities.
We plan to include an invited speaker to summarize recent work in this area, and will also invite papers from a small but diverse set of contributors to this area. The Organizing Committee will select a subset of the submitted papers for oral presentation. In addition, we will arrange a panel that addresses popular interests among the participants. Finally, time will be reserved for presenting the Challenge Problem results and a demonstration session.
Submission Process
We invite submissions (max 10 pages), in the same format as ICCBR'05 papers, related to the topic of this workshop. Accepted submissions will be given a time slot for oral presentation or given space in a poster session. We encourage TIELT-related submissions, even if they are limited to a description of planned work. We ask participants who do not plan to submit a paper to instead submit a one-page description of their interests (using the format mentioned above). Submissions should be emailed to the two co-chairs:
- david dot aha at nrl dot navy dot mil
- davils at uncc dot edu
Important Dates
April 15, 2005 - Announcement of Challenge Problem(s) details
May 11, 2005 - Deadline for workshop paper submission
May 15, 2005 - Code for Challenge Problem(s) made available
June 10, 2005 - Notification of acceptance for workshop papers
July 1, 2005 - Camera ready copy due
August 10, 2005 - Final Challenge Problem results due
August 24, 2005 - Workshop held at ICCBR-05
Organizing Committee
David W. Aha, Naval Research Laboratory (USA) (Co-Chair)
David C. Wilson, University of North Carolina at Charlotte (USA) (Co-Chair)
Paolo Avesani, IRST (Italy)
Isabelle Bichindaritz, University of Washington at Tacoma (USA)
Pádraig Cunningham, Trinity College (Ireland)
Dan Fu, Stottler-Henke Associates, Inc. (USA)
Peter Funk, Mälardalen University (Sweden)
Thomas Gabel, University of Osnabrueck (Germany)
Ashok Goel, Georgia Institute of Technology (USA)
Pedro González Calero, Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain)
John Hastings, University of Nebraska at Kearney (USA)
Sushil Louis, University of Nevada, Reno (USA)
Santi Ontańón Villar, Spanish Council for Scientific Research (Spain)
Timo Steffens, University of Osnabrueck (Germany)
Ruck Thawonmas, Ritsumeikan University (Japan)
Ian Watson, University of Auckland (New Zealand)