SARA '07: The Seventh International Symposium on
           Abstraction, Reformulation and Approximation

                Whistler, Canada, July 18-21, 2007
 (organised in cooperation with AAAI and co-located with AAAI'07)

          http://www.cs.st-and.ac.uk/~ianm/SARA2007.html

It has been recognised since the inception of Artificial Intelligence
that abstractions, problem reformulations and approximations (AR&A)
are central to human common-sense reasoning and problem solving and to
the ability of systems to reason effectively in complex domains. AR&A
techniques have been used in a variety of problem-solving settings,
including (but not limited to):

  * Automatic programming.
  * Automated reasoning.
  * Cognitive modelling.
  * Constraint programming.
  * Design.
  * Diagnosis.
  * Machine learning.
  * Model-based reasoning.
  * Planning.
  * Scheduling.
  * Search.
  * Theorem proving.
  * Tutoring.

The primary use of AR&A techniques in such settings has been to
overcome computational intractability by decreasing the combinatorial
costs associated with searching large spaces. In addition, AR&A
techniques are also useful for knowledge acquisition and explanation
generation in complex domains.

The aim of the symposium is to provide a forum for intensive
interaction among researchers in all areas of Artificial Intelligence
with an interest in the different aspects of AR&A techniques. The
diverse backgrounds of participants of previous symposia has led to a
rich and lively exchange of ideas, allowed the comparison of goals,
techniques and paradigms, and helped identify important research
issues and engineering hurdles. We expect that the upcoming symposium
will include an equally diverse group of participants.

Important Dates (provisional)
=============================

Submission:           March 11th
Notification:         April 18th
Final Versions:       May 18th

Please see the website for details and submission procedures.

Organisation
============

Conference Chairs:      Ian Miguel, University of St Andrews, UK.
                      Wheeler Ruml, Palo Alto Research Center, USA.
Publicity Chair:        Karen Petrie, University of Oxford, UK.
Sponsorship Chair:      Peter Nightingale, University of St Andrews,
                      UK.

Programme Committee:

J. Christopher Beck     University of Toronto, Canada.
Berthe Choueiry         University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA.
Stefan Edelkamp         Universitat Dortmund, Germany.
Ariel Felner            Ben-Gurion University, Israel.
Alan Frisch             University of York, UK.
Hector Geffner          Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain.
Mike Genesereth         Stanford University, USA.
Fausto Giunchiglia      University of Trento, Italy.
Brahim Hnich            Izmir University, Turkey.
Daniel Kayser           Universite Paris-Nord, France.
Sven Koenig             University of Southern California, USA.
Michael Lowry           NASA, USA.
Peter Revesz            University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA.
Marie-Christine Rousset University of Grenoble, France.
Lorenza Saitta          Universita del Piemonte Orientale, Italy.
Bart Selman             Cornell University, USA.
Barbara Smith           Cork Constraint Computation Centre, Ireland.
Miroslav Velev          Carnegie Melon University, USA.
Toby Walsh              University of New South Wales, Australia.
Weixiong Zhang          Washington University, USA.
Rong Zhou               Palo Alto Research Center, USA.
Robert Zimmer           Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK.
Jean-Daniel Zucker      Universite Paris 6, France.