[DMANET] ACAI 2018 Summer School on Statistical Relational Artificial Intelligence

The Advanced Course on AI (ACAI) is a specialized course in Artificial Intelligence sponsored by EurAI. The 2018 edition will be in Ferrara, Italy on August 27th - 31st 2018, save the date!
The theme of the 2018 ACAI School is Statistical Relational Artificial Intelligence (StarAI).
StarAI is an emerging area that combines logical (or relational) AI and probabilistic (or statistical) AI.

Relational AI deals very effectively with complex domains involving many and even a varying number of entities connected by complex relationships, while statistical AI manages well the uncertainty that derives from incomplete and noisy descriptions of the domains. Both fields achieved significant successes over the last thirty years but evolved largely independently until about fifteen years ago, when the potential originating from their combination started to emerge. Statistical Relational Learning (SRL) was proposed for exploiting relational descriptions in statistical machine learning methods from the field of graphical models. Meanwhile, the scope of SRL was significantly advanced in StarAI to cover all forms of reasoning and models of AI. StarAI is nowadays an ample area encompassing many and diverse approaches.

The school includes courses on foundations of relational and statistical AI together with advanced courses on the new StarAI approaches and applications. The talks will provide theoretical background, practical examples and real applications where StarAI can play a role. Hands-on classes will be also organized where the main StarAI techniques will be applied to 'small' examples.

The list of confirmed lectures is:

Luc De Raedt: Probabilistic Programming
Paolo Frasconi: Kernels and deep networks for structured data
Sebastian Riedel: Differentiable Program Interpreters
Artur d'Avila Garcez: Neural-symbolic learning
Marco Lippi: Applications of Statistical Relational Artificial Intelligence
Sriraam Natarajan: Human-in-the-loop Statistical Relational Learning
Mathias Niepert and Alberto García Durán: Multi-Modal Neural Link Prediction
Kristian Kersting: Lifted Statistical Machine Learning
Fabrizio Riguzzi: Probabilistic Inductive Logic Programming
Vibhav Gogate: TBA
David Poole: TBA

Up to date information can be found at the event website
http://acai2018.unife.it/.
The registration fees will be published shortly.

ACAI 2018 is part of the Relational Artificial Intelligence Days 2018 (RAID 2018, http://raid2018.unife.it/ ), which will be held in Ferrara, Italy, on August 27th 2018 - September 4th 2018. RAID includes, besides ACAI 2018, also:
- PLP 2018: 5th Workshop on Probabilistic Logic Programming, September 1st 2018, http://stoics.org.uk/plp/plp2018/ ;
- ILP 2018: 28th International Conference on Inductive Logic Programming, September 2nd - 4th 2018, http://ilp2018.unife.it/ .

Probabilistic Logic Programming (PLP) addresses the need to reason about relational domains under uncertainty arising in a variety of application domains. PLP is part of a wider current interest in probabilistic programming. PLP 2018 aims to bring together researchers in all aspects of probabilistic logic programming, including theoretical work, system implementations and applications.

The ILP conference series, started in 1991, is the premier international forum for learning from structured or semi-structured relational data. Originally focusing on the induction of logic programs, over the years it has significantly expanded and it welcomes contributions to all aspects of learning in logic, multi-relational data mining, statistical relational learning, graph and tree mining, learning in other (non-propositional) logic-based knowledge representation frameworks, exploring intersections to statistical learning and other probabilistic approaches.

RAID 2018 offers a very good opportunity to get up to date with the latest trends in logical and relational AI. We really hope to meet you in Ferrara!

Organizers
Kristian Kersting, TU Darmstadt, Germany
Marco Lippi, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy
Sriraam Natarajan, University of Texas at Dallas, USA
Fabrizio Riguzzi, University of Ferrara, Italy
Elena Bellodi, University of Ferrara, Italy
Tom Schrijvers, KU Leuven, Belgium
Riccardo Zese, University of Ferrara, Italy