SPP: FIRST CFP: 2005 AAAI Spring Symposium on Metacognition in Computation

[Mike Anderson]

First Call For Papers:
2005 AAAI Spring Symposium on Metacognition in Computation
March 21-23, 2005
Stanford University

http://www.cs.umd.edu/~anderson/metacog-proposal.html

The importance of metacognition in human thinking, learning, and problem
solving is well established. Humans use metacognitive monitoring and
control to choose goals, assess their own progress, and, if necessary,
adopt new strategies for achieving those goals, or even abandon a goal
entirely. Absent-minded Professor Doe, for instance, almost always forgets
his lunch. He has an adequate recovery plan for this: he simply goes to
the school cafeteria. However, as the school cafeteria is expensive, this
strategy is wasteful. Thus, Professor Doe employs metacognitive
reflection, realizes the frequency with which he forgets his lunch, and
adopts a special strategy to help him remember: he sticks a note on his
mirror where he will see it each morning. In a similar vein, students
preparing for--or taking--an exam will make judgments about the relative
difficulty of the material to be covered, and use this to choose study
strategies, or which questions to answer first. Not surprisingly, in these
cases, accuracy of metacognitive judgments correlates with academic
performance. Thus, understanding human metacognition has been an important
part of work on automated tutoring systems, and has led to the design of
methods for using computer assistants to help improve human metacognition.

However, there has also been growing interest in trying to create, and
investigate the potential benefits of, intelligent systems which are
themselves metacognitive. It is thought that systems that monitor
themselves, and proactively respond to problems, can perform better, for
longer, with less need for (expensive) human intervention. Thus has IBM
widely publicized their "autonomic computing" initiative, aimed at
developing computers which are (in their words) self-aware,
self-configuring, self-optimizing, self-healing, self-protecting, and
self-adapting. More ambitiously, it is hypothesized that metacognitive
awareness may be one of the keys to developing truly intelligent
artificial systems. DARPA's recent Cognitive Information Processing
Technology initiative, for instance, foregrounds reflection (along with
reaction and deliberation) as one of the three pillars required for
flexible, robust AI systems.

On the other side of the coin, it has also been established that
metacognition can actually interfere with performance. Metacognition is no
panacea, and therefore one of the issues which requires further inquiry is
the scope and limits of its usefulness. Furthermore many researchers still
argue over the most useful definition of metacognition. For instance, is
it useful to distinguish cognition about cognition from such things as
monitoring the outcomes of one's own actions in the world?

The symposium is intended to bring together researchers from computer
science, cognitive science, linguistics, psychology, philosophy, etc.,
interested in exploring, reporting on methods for, and evaluating the
worth of, implementing metacognition in AI systems. Possible topics
include:

*Reports on implemented metacognitive systems

*Computationally tractable models of human metacognition

*The relation of recent work on metacognition in computation to work on
such topics as reflection, control of reasoning, and allocation of
computational resources

*Methods for evaluating metacognitive systems

*Methods for implementing metacognition in heterogeneous systems

*Evaluation of different architectures for implementing metacognition

*Domains and/or problems for which metacognition is useful/essential

*Formal and/or knowledge-representation issues in metacognition

*The limits of metacognition (including cost/benefit analyses)


Submission Information

The symposium will combine presentations on such topics as those listed
above with organized discussions of central and foundational issues.
Potential participants should send research reports or position papers of
no more than 6 pages in typical AAAI format. Submissions should be in PDF
format, and mailed to Mike Anderson (anderson(at)cs.umd.edu).


Deadlines

October 8, 2004: Papers due to organizers.
November 8, 2004: Acceptance/rejection notifications sent.
January 31, 2005:  Camera-ready copy due.
February 11, 2005:  Registration deadline for invited participants.
March 21-23, 2005: Symposium held, Stanford University.


Organizing Committee

Mike Anderson, University of Maryland, College Park (co-chair)
(anderson(at)cs.umd.edu)

Tim Oates, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (co-chair)
(oates(at)csee.umbc.edu)

Michael Cox, Wright State University (mcox(at)cs.wright.edu)

John Dunlosky, University of North Carolina, Greensboro
(j_dunlos(at)uncg.edu)

Don Perlis, University of Maryland, College Park (perlis(at)cs.umd.edu)



-------------------------------------------------------------
Michael L. Anderson
Post-Doctoral Research Associate
Institute for Advanced Computer Studies
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
http://www.cs.umd.edu/~anderson