[agents] CFP: Joint MATES and WI PhD Mentoring track (German Conference on Multiagent System Technologies 2017 and IEEE/WIC/ACM Conference on Web Intelligence 2017)

[Alexander Pokahr]

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           Please forward this CFP to anyone who might be interested.
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                Call for papers for the Joint PhD Mentoring track

   IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence 2017 (WI'17)
    15th German Conference on Multiagent System Technologies (MATES'17)
                    August 23-26, 2017, Leipzig, Germany

                            Conference Websites:
                       http://webintelligence2017.com/
                        http://mates2017.uni-trier.de

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WI SPONSORS
=========================
   Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
   IEEE Computer Society
   Web Intelligence Consortium (WIC)

IMPORTANT DATES
=========================
   Submission of PhD Mentoring Papers:              May  14, 2017
   Notification of PhD Mentoring Papers acceptance: Jun. 02, 2017
   Camera-Ready Papers:                             Jun. 18, 2017
   Main conference:                                 Aug. 23-26, 2017

AIMS AND SCOPE
=========================
The WI/MATES PhD mentoring (doctoral consortium) is meant to support PhD 
students working in the area of web intelligence and/or multi-agent 
system technologies. It offers a platform to researchers in all stages 
of their PhD studies to present and discuss their ideas in a 
professional academic environment. The program provides an opportunity 
to PhD students to interact with their peers as well as with experienced 
researchers in the field, and to receive valuable feedback on their work 
and advice for their future careers. In particular, each student will be 
assigned an experienced researcher in the relevant field who will be 
available for personal interactions during the day of the WI/MATES PhD 
mentoring track. More information is to be found on the WI or MATES 
homepages.

The main goals of the PhD mentoring session are
- to give PhD researchers an opportunity to get feedback and suggestion 
on their work from experienced researchers and their peers.
- to interact with other PhD researchers and to get an overview of the 
field of multi-agent systems.
- to get advice for their (academic) career.
- to provide networking opportunities.

SPECIAL PANEL DISCUSSION
=========================
In addition to individual mentoring this year's PhD mentoring will offer 
for all participants a plenary session. All participants will have the 
possibility to discuss with well-recognized researchers a current topic 
fundamental to virtually all fields of computer science, but also 
currently for a large number of other disciplines:

                -- REPRODUCABILITY: A PROBLEM FOR AI RESEARCH? --

While at the first hand reproducibility does not seem to be an big issue 
in IT; as computers are deterministic machines, reproducing results from 
a calculation seems to be an rather easy issue. However, anyone who 
tried to re-implement an algorithm from a paper knows some of the 
difficulties. Often descriptions are abstract, and relevant parts have 
been omitted. Or our research is based on data sources. Often it is not 
clear, if the data really represents the total population, or is biased 
to one sub-group. Thus, even if, methods are well known, and can be 
re-implemented, using the same data set might be dangerous, as a 
conclusion might be induced by some bias in the available data. These 
and other question we will put at our panel, and discuss if with them, 
how proper research can look like in our fields.

TOPICS of WEB INTELLIGENCE
=========================

Track-1: Collective Intelligence
Track-2: Data Science
Track-3: Human-Centric Computing
Track-4: Knowledge Management
Track-5: Network Science

For more detailed information see:
    http://webintelligence2017.com/participants/submissions/

TOPICS of MATES
=========================

MATES 2017 covers all areas of intelligent agents and multiagent system 
technologies.

For more detailed information see:
    http://mates2017.uni-trier.de/


PhD-Paper Submission:
=========================
Submissions to the PhD mentoring session (PhD short papers) should 
provide information on the following aspects of the PhD work:
- Motivation
- State of the Art
- Methodical approach
- Preliminary results/findings (optional
- Affiliation and contact details of the PhD supervisor

PhD papers can be up to 6 pages long, written in English and formatted 
according to the Springer LNCS style (see below). The selection process 
takes into account the quality of the submitted PhD short paper which 
will be peer-reviewed by members of the MATES PhD mentoring program 
committee.

The PhD short papers must be submitted electronically via e-mail to
   PhDChair at webintelligence2017.com

Presentation and Publication:
=============================
All accepted PhD short papers will be assigned a slot for oral 
presentation during the WI/MATES PhD mentoring session. In addition, a 
selected set of these accepted papers describing original, unpublished 
work mature enough for publication will be included in the WI resp. 
MATES proceedings.


Doctoral Consortium chairs:
===========================
   Alexander Pokahr (Universität Hamburg, DE)
   René Schumann    (HES-SO Valais Wallis, CH)