Workshops & Tutorials

Workshop chairs: Amanda Coles and Subbarao Kambhampati

Tutorial chairs: Andrew Coles and Sven Koenig

The workshops and tutorials are scheduled to take place on June 22nd and 23rd, 2014.

Deadlines

Workshop Proposal

Submission: ~~November 1, 2013~~. Notification: ~~November 19, 2013~~

Tutorial Proposal

Submission: ~~January 15, 2014~~. Notification: ~~February 1, 2014~~

Workshop Papers

Submission: see individual workshops. Notification: March 20, 2014

Call for Workshop and Tutorial Proposals

The Organising Committee for the 24th International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS 2014) invites proposals for its Workshop and Tutorial Programs. The workshops are intended to provide a forum to discuss research advances on a selected topic in an informal setting, and to promote dissemination and collaboration on new P&S challenges. Tutorials offer the attendees first-hand experience with state-of-the-art trends in research and applications by leading experts. The Workshop and Tutorial Programs will comprise several concurrent events held in the two days before the plenary sessions of the conference. Registration is free for ICAPS participants.

This year we are aiming for integration of the workshop and tutorial programs. We therefore particularly (but not exclusively) welcome workshops including an integrated related tutorial. We encourage the ICAPS community to consider how to creatively use this opportunity. Two possibilities are:

Workshops beginning with an introductory tutorial to serve as a bridge to those who may be less familiar with the topic(s) covered in the workshop.
A more specialized tutorial that might not normally be part of the ICAPS program but suitable for the more specialized audience of the workshop.

We envisage that a full-day workshop might contain a quarter-day tutorial. Note that there is also a later deadline for submission of proposals for tutorials that are not linked to workshops.

The preferred length for a workshop is one full day, but half-day (or more than one-day) workshops may be accepted if justified. The format of the workshop is open, and may include oral presentations, talks by invited speakers, a poster session, a demo session, and others activities. Workshop chairs are encouraged to take initiatives that foster interaction and debate within the community.

To minimise the workload on tutorial speakers and encourage more submissions we particularly solicit proposals for short high-quality tutorials of quarter-day duration (approx 90 minutes); or half-day tutorials. For half-day tutorials, we encourage the proposers to divide them into loosely coupled quarter-day tutorials such that one is not the prerequisite of the other.

Proposals in all areas related to AI planning and scheduling are welcome. We aim to maintain the eclectic program of workshops held at ICAPS in recent years, including workshops and tutorials that promote building bridges to other research communities working with similar technologies (e.g. verification, diagnosis, OR) or on related application problems (e.g. robotics or security).

Workshop Proposals

Workshop proposals should be no more than 3 pages (plus tutorial details if applicable) and should provide:

A description of the workshop topic.
A brief discussion of why the topic is of interest to ICAPS at this time, and why the topic is not adequately addressed by other meetings or conferences.
A description of the tutorial to be attached to the workshop, if relevant, including details of the speaker. See information below on tutorial proposals for what to include.
A brief description of the proposed workshop length (if other than one day) and format. Innovative formats, that aim to increase opportunities for discussion and interaction, are encouraged.
Names and full contact information for the organising committee, plus short descriptions of their relevant expertise. Strong proposals include organisers who bring differing perspectives to the workshop topic and who are actively connected to the communities of potential participants.
An estimate of the expected number of workshop speakers (including invited, presenters, panelists, etc) and the expected number of workshop attendees. Optionally, a list of proposed attendees that have indicated potential (non-binding) interest.

The organisers of accepted workshop proposals are responsible for:

Producing a Call for Participation (CfP), and contributing materials for setting up a web page for the workshop, by December 15th, 2014. The Web page and the CFP will be linked to the ICAPS 2014 Web site.
Additional publicity, such as distributing the CFP to relevant newsgroups and electronic mailing lists (through liaison with ICAPS 2014 publicity chairs), and especially to potential audiences outside the ICAPS community.
Organising the review process for submissions and issuing invitations to participate in the workshop. The notification date for for workshop papers will be March 20th, 2014; we have recommended a submission date of February 20th.
Formulating the detailed technical program for the workshop and making it available to be uploaded on the ICAPS 2014 Web site well in advance of the conference. A list of accepted papers for the workshop should be ready to be placed on the web site by April 20th, 2014.
Assembling a camera-ready copy for the workshop proceedings in close interaction with the Workshop Program Chairs. The workshop proceedings will be made available on the ICAPS 2014 web site. If provided sufficiently well in advance it maybe also be possible to place workshop proceedings on the electronic proceedings distributed to conference participants. The details will be announced at a later date.

Tutorial Proposals

Tutorial Submissions should include the title, summary, outline, and expected length (quarter or half-day) of the tutorial, as well as a short CV of the proposer(s), including a list of significant publications.

Submission Procedure

Workshop proposals should be submitted by email, in plain text or in PDF, to both the Workshop Chairs with subject ``Workshop Proposal for ICAPS-14'' no later than November 1st 2013. For workshops including a tutorial please also copy in the Tutorial Chairs. Workshop Organisers will be notified by email of the acceptance or rejection of their proposal by November 19th, 2013.

Tutorial proposals not linked to workshops should be submitted by email, in plain text or in PDF, to both the Tutorial Chairs with subject ``Tutorial Proposal for ICAPS-14'' no later than January 15th, 2014. Organisers of independent tutorials will be notified by email of the acceptance or rejection of their proposal by February 1st, 2014.

ICAPS 2014 Poster Presentation Opportunity

Any paper appearing in an ICAPS workshop (Sunday & Monday) will be welcome to have a poster in the poster session held on Tuesday afternoon during the main conference. This opportunity is intended to allow the great work that appears in workshops to have a better opportunity to reach the full ICAPS audience as the necessary parallel running of workshops can sometimes mean that not everyone can see all the work in which they are interested. This is not compulsory for all workshop papers, it is simply an additional opportunity. At this stage authors do not need to do anything specific, but following acceptance of workshop papers workshop organisers will ask authors whether they would like to present a poster.