AAAI-08 Workshop on
What Went Wrong and Why: Lessons from AI Research and Applications

 

July 13th, 2008 - Chicago

 

The preliminary program of the workshop as well as the slides for the invited talks can be found here.

 

Bugs, glitches, and failures shape research and development by charting the boundaries of technology; they identify errors, reveal assumptions, and expose design flaws.  When a system works we focus on its input/output behavior, but when a problem occurs, we examine the mechanisms that generated behavior to account for the flaw and hypothesize corrections. This process produces insight and forces incremental refinement.  In a sense, failures are the mother of necessity, and therefore the grandmother of invention.

 

Unfortunately, bugs, glitches, and failures are rarely mentioned in academic discourse.  Their role in informing design and development is essentially lost. The first What Went Wrong and Why workshop during the 2006 AAAI spring symposium [1,2] started to address this gap by inviting AI researchers and system developers to discuss their most revealing bugs, and relate problems to lessons learned.  Revised versions of the articles and the invited talks will be published as a special issue of the AI-Magazine in Summer 2008 [3].

 

The first workshop clarified that WWWW experiences can be studied at three different levels of abstraction: the Strategic (AI research in general), Tactical (research area) and Execution (project or implementation) levels.  An additional category turned out to be the study of how, why and when failures occur in the first place.

 

The second workshop will continue our analysis of failures in research.  In addition to examining the links between failure and insight, we would like to determine if there is a hidden structure behind our tendency to make mistakes that can be utilized to provide guidance in research.

 

As such, we invited researchers to submit papers (≤ 8 pages in AAAI format) connecting problems they have encountered to lessons learned on the tactical or execution level[1]. We also welcomed papers on the study of failures themselves. We encouraged authors to elaborate on what they believe was the source cause of the failure, how the problem helped them arrive at a better solution, and to suggest a broader categorization of failures and how to utilize them.  

 

The preliminary program of the workshop as well as the slides for the invited talks can be found here.

 

Important Dates

* Submissions Due: April 7, 2008
* Notifications: April 21, 2008
* Final Papers Due: May 5, 2008
* Workshop: July 13 in Chicago at AAAI 2008

 

 

Chairs: Mehmet H. Göker and Daniel Shapiro

Mehmet H. Göker, PricewaterhouseCoopers, CAR, (mehmet.goker@us.pwc.com)

Daniel Shapiro, CSLI/Stanford University, & Applied Reactivity, Inc. (dgs@stanford.edu)

 

Program Committee

 

David Aha (Naval Research Laboratory)

Ralph Bergmann (Universität Trier, Lehrstuhl für Wirtschaftsinformatik II)

Carl Hewitt (MIT EECS - emeritus)

Jean-Gabriel Ganascia (University Pierre et Marie Curie, LIP6)

David Leake (Indiana University, Computer Science Department)

Doug Lenat (Cycorp Inc.)

Ramon Lopez de Mantaras (CSIC Artificial Intelligence Research Institute)

Edwina Rissland (University of Massachusetts Amherst, Department of Computer Science)

Ted Senator (SAIC)

 

References:

 

[1]        Shapiro, D., Göker, M. (eds.), 'What Went Wrong and Why: Lessons From AI Research and Applications', Papers from the AAAI Spring Symposium, March 27-29, 2006, Stanford, CA. Technical Report SS-06-08, AAAI Press, Menlo Park, 2006.

 

[2]        A. Abdecker, R. Alami, C Baral, T. Bickmore, E. Durfee, T. Fong, M. Göker, N. Green, M. Liberman, C. Lebiere, J. Martin, G. Mentzas, D. Musliner, N. Nicolov, I. Nourbakhsh, F. Salvetti, D. Shapiro, D. Schreckenghost, A. Sheth, L. Stojanovic, V. SunSpiral, R. Wray, "AAAI Spring Symposium Reports" , AI Magazine, VOl 27, Nr. 3, Fall 2006, pp. 107-112, American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Menlo Park, 2006

 

[3]        Shapiro, D. Göker, M. (eds.), 'Special Issue on What Went Wrong and Why", AI Magazine, Vol. 29, Number 2, Summer 2008 (to appear)