STAIRS

The 9th European Starting AI Researchers’ Symposium (STAIRS) is an international meeting intended to support Starting Researchers (those that have not been awarded a doctoral degree but also researchers with not more than three years of experience after getting their PhD). STAIRS is collocated with the ECAI2020 tutorials and workshops and has an independent program committee. In this edition, it will include two invited talks, as well as oral and poster sessions. 

It includes two main slots (afternoon of August 29 and morning of August 30) which comprise both invited talks and oral presentations of accepted papers. STAIRS participants are encouraged to attend the Doctoral Consortium (DC) and provide DC participants with their feedback and mentoring advice.

Sponsored by:

Invited Talk: What are you talking about? The Symbol Grounding problem, reloaded

Abstract: Current state of the art in knowledge engineering and semantic technologies, considered “symbolic AI” (symAI) techniques, is typically opposed to “sub-symbolic” (subAI) approaches, while a handful of hybridisation techniques is being investigated. However, we lack agreement on what a symbol is, and how to deal with it, atomically or compositionally. In particular, a lot of criticism on subAI solutions currently concentrates on the missing grounding of learnt subAI models. 

This talk discusses the ontology of symbols in different paradigms (with special consideration of NLP techniques), the varieties of grounding that are provided thereof, and how this helps hybridisation.

Speaker: Aldo Gangemi Director of the Institute for Cognitive Sciences and Technologies at National Research Council of Italy (CNR) 

The proceedings of the 9th European Starting AI Researchers’ Symposium (STAIRS) are published Open Access in CEUR Workshop Proceedings vol. 2655.Sebastian Rudolph, Goreti Marreiros (eds.), Proceedings of the 9th European Starting AI Researchers’ Symposium 2020, co-located with 24th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2020). Santiago Compostela, Spain, 29-30 August, 2020.

August 29

1:45 pm
3:15 pm
3:30 pm
5:00 pm

August 30

9:00 am
10:30 am
10:45 am
12:15 am