Sarkar Lab

Annual Formal Epistemology Workshops

We are in the process of organizing our fifth annual formal epistemology workshop (the first, second, third, and fourth workshops were all great successes). The purpose of these workshops is to bring together individuals, both faculty and graduate students, using mathematical methods in epistemology in small focused meetings.

Topics treated will include but are not limited to: Ampliative inference (including inductive logic); Game theory and decision theory; Formal learning theory; Formal theories of coherence: Foundations of probability and statistics; Formal approaches to paradoxes of belief and/or action; Belief revision; Causal discovery.

Besides papers with respondents, each workshop will typically include short introductory tutorials (three or four topically related presentations) on formal methods. These tutorials will be oriented particularly to graduate students.

The fifth workshop is scheduled for May 14–18, 2008 and will be held at UW–Madison. We are now accepting submissions for FEW 2008. Please send submissions by email to Peter Vranas. Submissions are due — in the form of full papers — by Friday, February 15 2008; notifications of acceptance either as definite presenters or as alternates will be sent out by Friday, March 14, 2008.

Those interested in participating, either by presenting papers, responding, or providing tutorials, or in helping with organization, should contact one of the local organizers listed below.

We can contribute $500 in travel funds for every graduate student who presents or comments on a paper.

Peter Vranas
Malcolm Forster
UW–Madison

Call for Papers: Eleventh Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge

Call for Papers

Eleventh Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge (TARK XI)

June 25-27, 2007, Brussels, Belgium

http://www.tark.be

Sponsors: University of Namur, CORE - University of Louvain, CEREC - Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis, and National Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS)

About the Conference

The mission of the TARK conferences is to bring together researchers from a wide variety of fields, including Artificial Intelligence, Cryptography, Distributed Computing, Economics and Game Theory, Linguistics, Philosophy, and Psychology, in order to further our understanding of interdisciplinary issues involving reasoning about rationality and knowledge. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, semantic models for knowledge, belief, and uncertainty, bounded rationality and resource-bounded reasoning, commonsense epistemic reasoning, epistemic logic, knowledge and action, applications of reasoning about knowledge and other mental states, belief revision, and foundations of multi-agent systems.

Submissions are now invited to TARK XI. Strong preference will be given to papers whose topic is of interest to an interdisciplinary audience, and papers should be accessible to such an audience. Papers should 1) contain enough information to enable the program committee to identify the main contribution of the work; 2) explain the significance of the work—its novelty and its practical or theoretical implications; and 3) include comparisons with and references to relevant literature. For submission, click on the Submission tab at http://www.tark.be.

Abstracts should be no longer than ten double-spaced pages (4,000 words). Optional technical details such as proofs may be included in an appendix. An email address of the contact author should be included. Papers arriving late or departing significantly from these guidelines risk immediate rejection. One author of each accepted paper will be expected to present the paper at the conference. Economists should be aware that special arrangements have been made with certain economics journals (in particular, with International Journal of Game Theory, Games and Economic Behavior, Journal of Economic Theory, Econometrica, Theory and Decision, and Mathematical Social Sciences) so that publication of an extended abstract in TARK will not prejudice publication of a full journal version.

Registration fees

Early registration (before 30th April 2007): 260 EUR (100 EUR for students). Late registration (from 1st May 2007): 350 EUR (150 EUR for students). The Registration fee includes: a reception at the Roy d’Espagne (http://www.roydespagne.be/index.html), three lunches, a gala dinner at the Hotel Metropole (http://www.metropolehotel.com/EN/home.cfm?Lang=EN), morning and afternoon coffee breaks, one copy of the proceedings.
Accomodations: see http://www.tark.be.

Key Dates

Submission of Abstracts: January 30, 2007 Notification of Authors: March 28, 2007, Camera ready copy of accepted papers: April 30, 2007 Conference: June 25-27, 2007

Program Committee:

Sergei Artemov, CUNY
Vincent Conitzer, Duke University
Lance Fortnow, University of Chicago
Aviad Heifetz, The Open University, Israel
Franz Huber, California Institute of Technology
Adam Kalai, Georgia Institute of Technology
Ron Lavi, Technion
Jerome Lang, Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (IRIT)
Martin Meier, Instituto de Analisis Economico
Dov Samet (chair), Tel Aviv University
Burkhard Schipper, University of California, Davis
Robert Stalnaker, MIT Marc Pauly, Stanford Muhamet Yildiz, MIT

Program Chair:

Dov Samet,
Faculty of Management
Tel Aviv University
Tel Aviv
phone: +972 3 640 6999
email: dovs at tauex.tau.ac.il

Local Organizers:

Vincent Vannetelbosch
CORE University of Louvain
Voie du Roman Pays 34
B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve
Belgium
Tel: 0032 10 47 41 42
Fax: 0032 10 47 43 01
email: vannetelbosch at core.ucl.ac.be

Pierre-Yves Schobbens
Institut d’Informatique
University of Namur
Rue Grandgagnage, 21
B-5000
Namur, Belgium
Tel: 0032 81 72 49 90
Fax: 0032 81 72 49 67
email: [email protected]

Ana Mauleon
CEREC
Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis
Boulevard du Jardin Botanique 43
B-1000 Brussels
Tel: 0032 2 211 79 35
email: mauleon at fusl.ac.be

Conference Chair:

Joseph Y. Halpern
Computer Science Department
Cornell University
Itacha, NY 14853
phone: +1 607 255 9562
fax: +1 607 255 4428
e-mail: [email protected]

--
Franz Huber
www.hss.caltech.edu/~franz

Second Texas Decision Theory Workshop, FEW 2007

This is a reminder that the Second Texas Decision Theory Workshop will be held at the University of Texas from 5 -7 October. Submissions, particularly from graduate students, are encouraged. The deadline for submissions is 15 August 2006.

There will be tutorials on modeling risk and on imprecise probabilities by Jim Dyer (University of Texas), Carl Wagner (University of Tennesee), and Sahotra Sarkar (University of Texas), as well as a variety of papers on other topics in decision theory.

Looking to the future, the 2007 Formal Epistemology Workshop will be hosted by Carnegie-Mellon University at Pittsburgh  from 31 May -3 June. We will be announcing submission deadlines later.

Second Texas Decision Theory Workshop

The Second Texas Decision Theory Workshop will be held at the University of Texas from 5 -7 October. There will be tutorials on imprecise probabilities and risk by Jim Dyer (University of Texas), Sahotra Sarkar (University of Texas), and Carl Wagner (University of Tennesee), as well as a variety of papers on other topics in decision theory. Submissions, particularly from graduate students, are encouraged. The deadline for submissions is 15 August 2005.

The Workshop is sponsored by the Department of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. These Workshops are an outgrowth of the Austin-Berkeley-CMU Formal Epistemology Workshops (FEW) which rotates between the University of Texas at Austin, the University of California at Berkeley, and Carnegie-Mellon University. For more information, contact Sahotra Sarkar [[email protected]].

FEW 2006

The 2006 Formal Epistemology Workshop (UC--Berkeley) is finally over, and it  was excellent, drawing over seventy participants during its four days. The next one will be held at Pittsburgh (and hosted by Carnegie-Mellon University) probably from 6 -10 June.

Decision Theory Workshop, University of Texas at Austin

Here's the schedule for our workshop later in the month:

Workshop on Decision Theory

Department of Philosophy
The University of Texas
April 28, 2006
All talks will be held in WAGGENER 316

Session 1: 9:30 – 11:00

Katie Steele
The University of Queensland
“Distinguishing Indeterminate Belief from Risk-averse Preferences”

Session 2: 11:00 – 12:30

Jim Dyer
The University of Texas
“Risk-Value Theory”

Lunch 12:30 – 1:30

Session 3: 1:30 – 3:00

Joel Predd
Princeton University
“Scalable Algorithms for Aggregating Disparate Forecasts of Subjective
Probability”

Session 4: 3:00 – 4:30

Mark Colyvan
The University of Queensland
“Idealizations in Normative Models”

Break 4:30 – 5:00

Session 5: 5:00 – 6:30

Carl Wagner
The University of Tennessee
“The Smith-Walley Interpretation of Subjective Probability”

Session 6: 6:30 – 8:00

Jim Hawthorne
The University of Oklahoma
"Thoughts on Comparative Confidence and Degrees of Belief"

FEW 2006

The schedule for FEW 2006 is finally up. I'll be tracking updates on this blog. Incidentally, Wikipedia finally has an entry on formal epistemology which mentions our workshop.