DRAFT ECSTER Newsletter, April, 1996

Issued by the European Colloquium on Spatial and Temporal Reasoning, (ECSTER).
Editor: Erik Sandewall, Linköping University, Sweden. Date of issue: 5.5.1996

[revision], [commands], [published version].

ECSTER congratulates Murray Shanahan

Murray Shanahan, of Queen Mary and Westfield College, London, has been selected for the best paper award at ECAI-96 for his paper "Robotics and the Common Sense Informatic Situation". ECSTER congratulates its member to this recognition!

Linköping University creates E-press

The Board of Regents of Linköping University decided on the 17 of April to create Linköping University Electronic Press as a special entity. The mission of Linköping E-Press is to make scientific publications available on the Internet in a reliable way. The goal is that a reference to an electronic publication in the E-Press shall be considered as fully acceptable in the place of a reference to a paper-based publication. This means that the E-Press must guarantee the integrity of its publications in two ways. There must be an integrity over time: publications will be kept on-line for an extended period of time (25 years has been mentioned), and will also be archived in the University Library. Furthermore, for each article there must be safeguards for its integrity against change: no one, and least of all the author shall be able to modify an article after it has been published.

Linköping E-Press will of course publish Ph.D. dissertations, master's theses, and departmental technical reports from its own departments. It will also accept to publish proceedings from workshops and small conferences where university faculty have been involved as program chair or in other comparable positions. Additional types of publications may be considered.

For ECSTER, the creation of Linköping E-Press will hopefully provide a reliable basis for our repositories of technical reports and technical notes. We expect the details to be worked out during the next few months.

ECSTER bibliographic reference structure growing

Additional material is continuously being added to the bibliographic reference structure (BRS), which was described in the previous issue of the newsletter. The policy for the BRS can be found in the policy statement for the BRS.

Notice in particular that the lists of actions&change contributions for AAAI-96 and TIME-96 that follow below are linked into the BRS: clicking at a topic indication leads to a llist of contributions for that topic; clicking at the first author leads to his or her BRS card, containing other publications by the same author, which in turn are clickable in the same way. Notice, however, that this database is still far from complete: you will not [yet] obtain a complete list of references for a given topic or a given author in this way.

Forthcoming events

The ECAI-96 program has not yet been published, and therefore we do not include any list of STR papers at ECAI. The corresponding list for AAAI-96 follows below.

National US Conf on Artificial Intelligence, 1996

The following is probably the set of those papers at the conference which address some aspect(s) of Reasoning about Actions and Change.

Baral, Chitta, and Alfredo Gabaldon: Formalizing Narratives Using Nested Circumscription. Topics: [filtering]. Code: [Baral96B].

Brajnik, Giorgio, and Daniel J. Clancy: Temporal Constraints on Trajectories in Qualitative Simulation. Topics: [qual-physics]. Code: [Brajnik96A].

De Giacomo, Giuseppe, and Xiao Jun Chen: Reasoning about Nondeterministic and Concurrent Actions: A Process Algebra Approach. Topics: [process-alg], [concurrency], [nondeterminism]. Code: [Giacomo96A].

Fusaoka, Akira: Situation Calculus on a Dense Flow of Time. Topics: [continuous], [sit-calculus]. Code: [Fusaoka96A].

Geffner, Hector: Temporal Reasoning with Incomplete Information: A Unifying Model. Code: [Geffner96A].

Herrmann, Christoph S., and Michael Thielscher: Reasoning about Continuous Processes. Topics: [continuous]. Code: [Herrmann96A].

Kartha, Neelakantan: On the range of applicability of Baker's approach to the frame problem. Topics: [Baker-minim], [assessment]. Code: [Kartha96B].

Lin, Fangzhen: Embracing Causality in Specifying the Indeterminate Effects of Actions. Topics: [ramification], [nondeterminism]. Code: [Lin96B].

Shanahan, Murray: Noise and the Common Sense Informatic Situation for a Mobile Robot. Topics: [cogrobotics]. Code: [Shanahan96C].

International Workshop on Temporal Representation and Reasoning, 1996

To be held 19.5, 1996 in Key West, FL, USA.

The following is probably the set of those papers at the conference which address some aspect(s) of Reasoning about Actions and Change.

Mohktari, A., and Daniel Kayser: Time in Causal Theory. Topics: [causation], [time]. Code: [Mohktari96A].

Trudel, A., and D. Gagne: A Topological Transition Based Logic for the Qualitative Motion of Objects. Topics: [motion]. Code: [Trudel96A].

Vila, Lluís, and Eddie Schwalb: A Theory of Time and Temporal Incidence based on Instants and Periods. Topics: [time]. Code: [Vila96A].

Yi, Choong-Ho: Reasoning about Concurrent Actions within Features and Fluents. Topics: [explicit-time], [concurrency]. Code: [Yi96B].

Recent works

Under this heading we publish quotations of manuscripts and technical reports which have appeared during the current month and the two previous months. (Slightly older reports as well as journal and conference articles go under the next heading below). The list is by no means proposed to be exhaustive, of course. For the time being, we'll just include links to all reports that are sent to us, provided that (1) they are electronically accessible, and (2) they are reasonably relevant for actions and change. As the number of contributions increases, they classification into topics will be introduced here as well.

Make sure you didn't overlook...

This heading will contain references to papers that were published in 1995 and which you may have missed - but which may be quite significant for your interests.