Common Sense and Intelligent User Interfaces 2009:
Story Understanding and Generation for Context-Aware Interface Design

February 8th, 2009, Sanibel Island, Florida
An IUI 2009 Workshop

Website: http://csc.media.mit.edu/iuiStories/
Send questions to csiui-pc@media.mit.edu
Organizers: Catherine Havasi, Henry Lieberman and Erik T. Mueller
Deadline: November 20th, 2008

"Knowlege is stories" - Roger Schank

While much work in AI has represented simple knowledge about everyday
life and activities at the word, sentence, and logical assertion
level, we see a growing need to understand it at a larger granularity,
that of stories. A story is a short, focused description of people and
events occurring over time, that has a "point" -- to inform, teach,
question, entertain, educate, illustrate or amuse.

Capturing common sense knowledge often involves uncovering the
implicit, unstated assumptions behind communication, often best
expressed through stories. Work in story representations dates back
to Schank-style scripts and other efforts in the 80s, but recent
developments have unleashed new potential in this area. The maturity
of common sense
knowledge bases such as Cyc, Open Mind and ThoughtTreasure;
statistical and corpora-based natural language understanding
techniques; the explosion of participatory knowledge collection over
the Web; progress in cognitive science; the popularity of Web-based
storytelling media such as blogs; and new common sense reasoning
techniques are all enablers of the new generation of work on common
sense stories.


Topics include, but are by no means limited to:

* Story understanding and natural language understanding
* Extraction of common sense knowledge from stories
* A cognitive modeling based understanding of stories
* Common sense knowledge bases to facilitate story understanding
and story generation
* Acquiring story knowledge from users or from the internet
* Representation and reasoning with story knowledge
* Blogs and nonlinear fiction and nonfiction media as a source of
stories or as a domain
* Interfaces to facilitate storytelling by users in text, audio,
pictures, and video media

SUBMISSIONS:

We are accepting both papers and demos to our workshop.

Please follow the same formatting guidelines as the main IUI
conference, which are detailed at their call for papers. Workshop
papers should be up to four pages in length and position paper should
be one page in length. Several of the workshop papers will be
selected to give a short talk at the workshop. Demo papers should be
two pages in length. Papers should be prepared for blind review.

Please keep in mind you will have to provide your own computer for the
demo session. Proceedings will be provided on CD and will be a
collection of accepted papers, demos and position papers.

Send your submissions in PDF form to csiui-pc@media.mit.edu.

Participation is open to all attendees of the IUI conference.