About the Bridge

The AAAI-23 Constraint Programming and Machine Learning Bridge is part of the AAAI-23 Bridge Program.

“AAAI has incubated numerous AI sub-disciplines and conferences and has nurtured for decades the cohesion of AI. New communities often emerge when two or more disciplines come together in order to explore new opportunities and perspectives; today both are plentiful. The purpose of the AAAI Bridges Program is to tap into this new source of innovation by cultivating sustained collaboration between two or more communities, directed towards a common goal.”

Bringing together CP (Constraint Programming) and ML (Machine Learning) is an important aspect of the larger goal of integrating Reasoning and Learning. Participants are not expected to have prior experience in both fields, but to have familiarity with each at least at the level of an introductory AI course. The Bridge is designed to provide attendees with a better, broader sense of where we are and where we should be going, and an opportunity to brainstorm, discuss, debate and find collaborators.

The focus will be on bringing together the traditional AI fields of constraint-based reasoning and machine learning, but participants from related fields of reasoning, optimization and learning, e.g. SAT, operations research, data mining, will be welcome.

It is hoped that this one-day Bridge event will help establish an ongoing community, leading to workshops, special issues, etc.

Contributions

Presentations

Given the condensed time frame, submissions need only be one or two page abstracts, outlining the proposed presentation, the minimum and maximum time it could occupy, and citing relevant experience/publications of the author(s). Proposals can be for presentations, or portions of presentations, that have been made elsewhere (e.g. tutorials or surveys), suitably updated and scaled for this Bridge event.

Presentations (aside from Tools) need to combine CP and ML in some fashion. All presentations should keep in mind that audience members are not expected to have expertise in both areas. Presentations should “reach across the aisle”, and welcome questions and discussion.

Submissions are sought for presentations addressing the following themes:

  • Where Are We Now?
    Mini-tutorials or mini-surveys. They could be broad or narrow in scope, restricted to a particular subtopic, covering recent work from a particular conference or workshop series, or even introducing or surveying a body of the presenters’ work.
  • Where Do We Go From Here?
    Position papers, grand challenges, proposals, roadmaps, questions, needs, objectives, opportunities, obstacles, testbeds, applications, metrics. Proposals for discussion topics, panels or debates. Introductions to ongoing research projects.
  • Pitches
    Presentations by those seeking collaborators or mentors for current or proposed work.
  • Tools
    Mini-surveys of available CP or ML tools, or min-tutorials on individual tools. Examples of the use of CP tools for ML or vice versa. Also welcome are proposals for “hands on” sessions where participants can be guided through a real-time introduction to a tool they access on their laptops.
  • Community Building
    Proposals for special issues, conference tracks, workshops, competitions, tools, libraries, benchmark problems, websites, tutorials, surveys, talks, funding proposals, collaborations, blogs, groups, videos, community outreach, social media, instructional material, syllabi, ontologies, books, apps, testbeds, bibliographies, etc.

Posters

Posters are welcome describing previously published, new, ongoing or proposed work linking CP and ML.

Submission Instructions

Submissions should be PDFs (of the abstracts or the posters). They should contain the affiliations and contact information of the authors.

Submission site: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=cpml2023