[agents] CFP: VNN19 (AAAI Spring Symposium on verification of neural networks)

[Alessio Lomuscio]

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                        Call For Papers
AAAI Spring Symposium on Verification of Neural Networks (VNN19)
https://sites.google.com/view/vnn19
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The 2019 AAAI Spring Symposium on Verification of Neural Networks 
(VNN19) aims to bring together researchers interested in methods and 
tools providing guarantees about the behaviours of neural networks and 
systems built from them.

Methods based on machine learning are increasingly being deployed for a 
wide range of problems, including recommender systems, machine vision, 
autonomous driving, and beyond. While machine learning has made 
significant contributions to such applications, concerns remain about 
the lack of methods and tools to provide formal guarantees about the 
behaviours of the resulting systems.  In particular, for data-driven 
methods to be usable in safety-critical applications, including 
autonomous systems, robotics, cybersecurity, and cyber-physical systems, 
it is essential that the behaviours generated by neural networks are 
well-understood and can be predicted at design time. In the case of 
systems that are learning at run-time it is desirable that any change to 
the underlying system respects a given safety-envelope for the system. 
While the literature on verification of traditionally designed systems 
is wide and successful, there has been a lack of results and efforts in 
this area until recently. The symposium intends to bring together 
researchers working on a range of techniques for the verification of 
neural networks, ranging from formal methods to optimisation and testing.

The key objectives include: presentation of recent work in the area; 
discussion of key difficulties; collecting community benchmarks; and 
fostering collaboration.  One challenge for this research this area is 
that results are being published in several research communities, 
including formal verification, security and privacy, systems, and AI. 
One of the objectives of having a AAAI symposium is to help bridge these 
interdisciplinary divides to form a cross-cutting community interested 
in the verification and validation of systems based on machine learning.

The symposium workshop will include invited speakers, contributed 
papers, demonstrations, breakaway sessions, and panel sessions.


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Topics of interest
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* Formal specifications for neural networks and systems based on them;

* SAT-based and SMT-based methods for the verification of machine 
learning systems;

* Mixed-integer Linear Programming methods for the verification of 
neural networks;

* Testing approaches to neural networks;

* Optimisation-based methods for the verification of neural networks;

* Statistical approaches to the verification of neural networks.


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Key Dates
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2 November 2018: Submission deadline.
3 December 2018: Acceptance notification.
14 December 2018: Registration begins.
15 February 2019: Final version of papers due.
1 March 2019: Registration deadline.
25-27 March 2019: Symposium.

For submission information and more details, see 
https://sites.google.com/view/vnn19