STAIRS 2010 is the fifth European Starting AI Researcher Symposium. STAIRS is an international meeting intended to support AI researchers, from all countries, at the beginning of their career: PhD students or people holding a PhD for less than one year. STAIRS 2010 will be co-located with ECAI 2010, the European Conference on AI, in Lisbon, Portugal, over 16-20 August 2010.

STAIRS offers doctoral students and young post-doctoral AI fellows:

• a first experience on submitting and presenting a paper in an international forum with a broad scope and a peer review process
• an opportunity to gather knowledge and exchange ideas related to their research problems and approaches together with information on European research careers and mobility.

Co-location with both ECAI and PAIS aims at creating a unique and valuable opportunity for young researchers to gain experience at presenting their work in a supportive scientific environment, and obtain constructive feedback on the technical content of the work as well as how to present the work and other related topics.

Topics of Interest

Papers are welcome on all aspects of contemporary AI, including, but not restricted to:

• Agents & Multiagent Systems
• Case-Based Reasoning
• Cognitive Modeling & Interaction
• Constraints & Search
• Knowledge Representation & Reasoning
• Machine Learning
• Model-Based Reasoning
• Natural Language Processing
• Perception & Sensing
• Planning & Scheduling
• Robotics
• Uncertainty in AI
• Applications of AI

An extensive list of subtopics is available at the conference website.

Important Dates

Paper Formatting & Submission Information

Papers must not exceed SIX (6) pages in camera-ready format. Over-length submissions will be rejected without review. Papers for STAIRS should be submitted using the ECAI formatting style; details of the style are available at:

ecai2010.appia.pt/images/documents/ecai2010-style.zip

This file unpacks to a directory "ecai2010", and contains LaTeX and other style files. The file "ecai2010.tex" is an example paper in LaTeX format using the appropriate styles, and can be used as a template for submissions.

Each accepted paper will be allocated SIX (6) pages in the proceedings.

Multiple submissions with ECAI and PAIS is allowed if this is clearly indicated on a front page preceding the paper itself. In borderline cases single submissions will be preferred over multiple submissions. In case of multiple acceptances the author(s) are strictly required to withdraw their paper from all but one of the events.

The proceedings of STAIRS, together with those of its associated events, ECAI and PAIS, will be published and distributed by IOS Press as a book and as a CD-ROM. The authors will be responsible for producing camera-ready copies of papers, conforming to the ECAI 2010 formatting guidelines for inclusion in the proceedings. At least one author of each accepted paper or poster is required to attend the conference to present the contribution.

Submission and review of papers for STAIRS 2010 will be managed via the EasyChair system:

www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=stairs2010

All submissions will be subject to LIGHT TOUCH review, with the goal of providing constructive feedback to authors.

Depending on the quality of submissions, a subset of accepted papers will be invited to submit a revised version to a journal special issue.