Dear Representatives of ECCAI member societies,

as you know, ECCAI yearly offers travel grants for the ECAI and ACAI
events.  Each grant is worth 400 euro.

With the deadline for applications for ACAI-2007 travel grants now past,
 ECCAI has received relatively few applications.  As a result, we are
extending the application deadline to May 31, and making some extra
efforts to increase the visibility of the ECCAI travel grant program as
well as the ACAI school itself.

As we don't have member lists of the national societies, may we ask you
to forward (or have forwarded) the ACAI announcement included below to
your student members, and stress the fact that travel grants are still
available (and they can still apply for them until May 31)?

Thanking you in advance,

Best regards,

Hendrik Blockeel
for ECCAI and the ACAI-2007 organisation

======================================================

ACAI-2007: Logic for Artificial Intelligence

August 20-28th 2007, Leuven, Belgium

http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dtai/acai/

In collaboration with ECCAI, the European Coordinating Committee for
Artificial Intelligence, BNVKI-AIABN, the Belgian-Dutch Society for
Artificial Intelligence, and SIKS, the Dutch research school for
Information and Knowledge Systems, the University of Leuven is proud to
organize the ACAI-2007 Summer School on Artificial Intelligence.

ACAI, the Advanced Course on Artificial Intelligence, is ECCAI's
two-yearly summer school on artificial intelligence.  The 2007 edition
will be hosted by the Declarative Languages and Artificial Intelligence
research group of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.  The topic of the
school is Logic for Artificial Intelligence.

The school targets PhD students in the area of Informatics or Computer
Science with some background in computational logic, who want to broaden
their knowledge of the domain.  ACAI-2007 features courses by leading
scientists in this domain.  In addition, students will have an
opportunity to present their own research in a poster session.


Program

The summer school features eight courses, each treating a different
subject within the area of logic for artificial intelligence, and each
being taught by a lecturer with an outstanding international reputation.

* Marc Denecker (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven):
    "Knowledge representation and reasoning in ID-logic."
* Luc De Raedt (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven):
    "Probabilistic logic learning and statistical relational learning."
* Bernhard Nebel (Albert-Ludwigs-Universitaet Freiburg):
    "Action Planning: Recent Theoretical and Practical Advances"
* Marie-Christine Rousset (University of Grenoble):
    "Logic-based techniques for information integration."
* Fariba Sadri and Robert Kowalski (Imperial College, London):
    "Logic-based agents."
* Ulrike Sattler (University of Manchester):
    "Description logics."
* Heiner Stuckenschmidt (University of Mannheim):
    "Logic-based Knowledge Representation and Reasoning for the Semantic
Web."
* Pascal Van Hentenryck (Brown University):
    "Constraint Programming."


Student poster session:
Attending students will have the opportunity to present their own work
at the summer school during a poster session.  Students willing to take
part in this poster session are invited to submit a two page abstract,
which will be reviewed for relevance and interest to the summerschool's
target audience.


Social program:
An exciting social program is included in the summer school.  Full
details are not yet available, but it will include a welcome drink, a
party, and a daytrip to one of Flanders' nicest touristic locations.

Location:
Leuven hosts the oldest university of the Low Countries.  Its 15-th
century Town Hall and University Hall, its Great Beguinage (UNESCO World
Cultural Heritage), and many other buildings bear witness of the city's
splendid past.  Today, Leuven is a charming small city with a young and
lively atmosphere: during the academic year, 50% of its inhabitants are
students, and in summer dozens of events attract visitors from
everywhere.  In the old center, restaurants and pubs adorn the streets.

Reachability:
Leuven is very easily reachable: it is at 15 minutes by train from
Brussels Airport, which has direct flights to many airports all over
Europe.  It also has direct train connections to Brussels, Antwerp,
Ghent, Liege and Bruges, and excellent connections to Paris, London,
Amsterdam, and Cologne (all less than 2 to 3 hours away).


Financial aspects

Cost of participation:
Thanks to our sponsors, the registration cost for this two-week event is
expected to be around 350 euro, including the complete social program.
Accommodation will be available for 29 euro per night (single room with
shared facilities, including breakfast).  Student restaurants offer warm
dishes for 2.4 to 4.5 euro.  In addition to all this, some financial
support will be available in the form of grants.

Grants:
ECCAI offers a limited number of grants (400 euro each) to students who
are members of their national AI society; see http://www.eccai.org.
Students presenting a poster may have priority when allocating grants.
The SIKS doctoral school provides additional support to its members.

Sponsors:
Besides the financial sponsoring from SIKS and ECCAI, the organizers
gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the FWO-Vlaanderen,
through the scientific research networks "Declaratieve Methoden in de
Informatica" and "Machine learning for data mining and its applications".


Important dates:
Poster abstract Deadline:       May 15, 2007
Notification:                   May 22, 2007
Early registration Deadline:    May 31, 2007


Further information:
See the ACAI-07 Homepage: http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~dtai/acai/
or contact acai2007@cs.kuleuven.be.