NeSy'20/21 @ IJCLR

The NeSy workshop series celebrates the integration of neural and symbolic thinking, technologies, theories and techniques of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

NeSy is the annual meeting of the Neural-Symbolic Learning and Reasoning Association.

Neural networks and statistical Machine Learning have obtained industrial relevance in a number of areas from retail to healthcare, achieving state-of-the-art performance at language modelling, speech recognition, graph analytics, image, video and sensor data analysis. Symbolic AI, on the other hand, is challenged by such unstructured data, but is recognised as being in principle transparent, in that reasoned facts from knowledge-bases can be inspected to interpret how decisions follow from input. Neural and symbolic methods also contrast in the problems that they excel at: scene recognition from images appears to be a problem still outside the capabilities of symbolic systems, for example, while neural networks are not yet sufficient for industrial-strength complex planning scenarios and deductive reasoning tasks.

Neurosymbolic AI aims to build rich computational models and systems by combining neural and symbolic learning and reasoning paradigms. This combination hopes to form synergies among their strengths while overcoming their complementary weaknesses.

The NeSy workshop series is the premier venue for the presentation and discussion of the theory and practice of neural-symbolic computing systems. Since 2005, NeSy has provided an atmosphere for the free exchange of ideas bringing together the community of scientists and practitioners that straddle the line between deep learning and symbolic AI.

Call For Journal Track Submissions - ML journal

Deadlines: May 2020, Sep 2020, Dec 2020, Mar 2021, May 2021

Submission details here

NeSy invites theoretical and applied paper submissions to the IJCLR journal track combining deep learning and symbolic AI. We further invite paper submissions detailing experimental and in-the-wild systems, and papers on topics where neural-symbolic computing has a strong use case. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Knowledge representation and reasoning using deep neural networks

• Symbolic knowledge extraction from neural and statistical learning systems

• Explainable AI models, systems and techniques that integrate connectionist and symbolic paradigms

• Neural-symbolic cognitive models

• Biologically-inspired neural-symbolic integration

• Continual learning, integration of logic and probabilities with neural networks

• Neural-symbolic methods for structured learning, including transfer, meta, multi-task and relational learning

• Novel connectionist systems able to perform traditionally symbolic AI tasks (e.g. logical deduction)

• Novel symbolic systems able to perform traditionally connectionist tasks (e.g. unstructured data analysis)

• Applications of neural-symbolic and hybrid systems, including simulation, finance, robotics, semantic web, software engineering, systems engineering, bioinformatics and visual intelligence.

Authors of accepted papers will be invited to present their work at the NeSy'20/21 Workshop.

Call for Workshop Paper Submissions

In addition to the journal track, NeSy invites submissions of the latest and ongoing research work for presentation at the workshop. Research papers in any of the above areas of neural-symbolic computing are welcome as well as submissions targeting one of the workshop special sessions:

• Semantic Web and Deep Learning

• NeSy and Continual Learning

• NeSy for Explainable AI

• Industry experience and application track

Publication

All accepted papers will be published by CEUR and are expected to be presented at the workshop. Revised and extended versions of the best papers will be invited for submission to the NeSy journal track. A selection of the accepted papers will be chosen for poster presentation.

Submission

Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit original papers that have not been submitted for review or published elsewhere. Submitted papers must be written in English, should be formatted using single column and 11pt font, and should not exceed 8 pages in the case of research and experience papers, or 4 pages in the case of position papers (including figures, bibliography and appendices). All submitted papers will be judged based on their relevance, originality, significance, technical quality and organisation.

The paper submission site on EasyChair will appear at the IJCLR'20/21 website. All questions about submissions to NeSy'20/21 should be addressed to a.garcez [at] city [dot] ac [dot] uk

Important Dates

• Deadline for paper submission: 30 June 2021

• Notification of paper acceptance: August 2021

• Camera-ready paper due: September 2021

• NeSy Workshop dates: 25-27 October 2021

Invited Speakers:

Gary Marcus, RobustAI

Guy Van den Broeck, UCLA

Zachary Lipton, CMU

and more TBC.

Registration to NeSy'20/21 will open at the IJCLR 2020/21 website.

PROVISIONAL WORKSHOP SCHEDULE

Day 1

Welcome

IJCLR Keynote 1 - Gary Marcus, RobustAI, CA, USA

Tutorial 1: NeSy and the Semantic Web - Pascal Hitzler, Aaron Eberhart, Monireh Ebrahimi, Kansas State University, Federico Bianchi, Bocconi University, Milan

IJCLR Keynote 2 TBC

Tutorial 2: NeSy meets Continual Learning. Danny Silver, Acadia University, Rahaf Aljundi, KU Leuven, Bing Liu, UIC

Tutorial 3: NeSy for XAI - Artur d'Avila Garcez, Benedikt Wagner, Adam White, City, University of London

Reception

Day 2

IJCLR Keynote 3 TBC

Session on Deep Learning and Semantic Web - Dagmar Groman, University of Vienna, Luis Espinosa Anke, Cardiff University , Thierry Declerck, DFKI

IJCLR Keynote 4 TBC

Session on NeSy and Continual Learning - Natalia Díaz Rodríguez, ENSTA ParisTech, Danny Silver, Acadia University

Joint Poster Session

Conference dinner

Day 3

IJCLR Keynote 5 TBC

Session on NeSy for XAI - Freddy Lecue, Thales Montreal, Veronika Thost, MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab

IJCLR Keynote 6 TBC

Industry/application track (Marcio Moreno, IBM Research, Michael Spranger, Sony CSL, Alex Jaimes, Dataminr, Dan Philps, Rothko Investment, Dragos Margineantu, Boeing R&D)

Joint Poster Session

IJCLR Discussion Panel: Future of AI (Moderator: Stephen Muggleton, Imperial College London)

Closing

Presentation

The workshop will include specialised tutorials and extra time for audience discussion, allowing the group to obtain a better understanding of the issues, challenges and ideas being presented. Authors of accepted papers may be assigned either an oral or poster presentation slot in the final workshop programme. Accepted workshop track papers will be published by CEUR. Accepted journal track papers will be published by Springer. Registration is open to anybody willing to participate.