Call for Participation

The ninth Symposium on Abstraction, Reformulation and Approximation will be held on July 17-18, 2011 at the Parador de Cardona in Catalonia, Spain, 60 miles Northwest of Barcelona. The symposium will be co-located with the Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS), which will be held at the Parador de Cardona immediately before SARA. SARA 2011 will be followed by the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 11), which will be held in Barcelona.

Overview

The aim of the Symposium is to provide a forum for interaction among researchers in all areas of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science with an interest in Abstraction, Reformulation, or Approximation (ARA). Topics include (1) the theory of Abstraction, Reformulation, and Approximation, (2) methods for selecting which of several applicable ARA techniques is best for a given problem, (3) techniques for automatically constructing and selecting appropriate abstractions, reformulations, and approximations, (4) empirical and theoretical studies of the costs and benefits of ARA, and (5) applications of ARA to automated reasoning, automatic programming, cognitive modeling, constraint programming, constraint satisfaction, databases, design, diagnosis, general game playing, general problem solving, machine learning, planning, robotics, scheduling, search, simulation, theorem proving.

Program

The Symposium will consist of paper presentations, discussion sessions, and invited presentations. This year, our keynote speaker will be Stuart Russell from the University of California at Berkeley. A preliminary program for the symposium can be found here.

Registration

To register for the symposium, send an email message to the program chairs. You can also register on site, but the organizers would prefer an early email message in order to prepare the logistics for the symposium.

Accommodations

The Parador de Cardona is now accepting reservations for SARA 2011 participants. The reservationists prefer that guests communicate with them via email (at cardona@parador.es). Requests should include full name, credit card number, credit card expiration date, number of rooms, and number of guests and should include the phrase "SARA 2011" in the subject line. IMPORTANT: The reservations should be made, if at all possible, by the end of June. After that, the hotel will make any unreserved rooms available to the general public. The hotel phone number is +34 938 691 275, but again the hotel has expressed a preference for email reservations.

The rooms are €193.50 per day for those who stay at the hotel and €85 who attend only during the day. These fees include two coffee breaks, lunch and dinner, as well as breakfast for people staying at the hotel.

Transportation

It is easy to drive to the hotel from Barcelona. The hotel has a parking area that is available for free to all participants. There will be a bus from Barcelona to Cardona on the 16th with a return trip form Cardona to Barcelona on the 18th. Check back for details in early July.

Organization

Program Committee: