Friday, December 13, 2019

Location: West 109 + 110, Area West Level 1

Live Video Stream: link

About

Machine learning (ML) has seen a tremendous amount of recent success and has been applied in a variety of applications. However, it comes with several drawbacks, such as the need for large amounts of training data and the lack of explainability and verifiability of the results. In many domains, there is structured knowledge (e.g., from electronic health records, laws, clinical guidelines, or common sense knowledge) which can be leveraged for reasoning in an informed way (i.e., including the information encoded in the knowledge representation itself) in order to obtain high quality answers. Symbolic approaches for knowledge representation and reasoning (KR) are less prominent today - mainly due to their lack of scalability - but their strength lies in the verifiable and interpretable reasoning that can be accomplished. This workshop aims at the intersection of these two sub-fields of AI, and hopes to shine a light on the synergies that exist between KR and ML.

To reach a broader audience and increase the public awareness of the importance of the topic, we propose to hold the second KR2ML workshop at NeurIPS 2019. Our goal is to advance the general discussion of the topic by highlighting contributions that propose innovative approaches integrating KR and ML (i.e., in contrast to approaches that just augment previous work in “established” areas of interaction, such as knowledge graph embeddings). Moreover, we will have a call for key challenges, which will be presented and discussed in a special session at the workshop, and later released as a special report for the field to consider. Our tentative list of invited speakers/panel covers renown experts from both academia and industry who have made important contributions to the integration of KR and ML across a spectrum of approaches to combining the fields. The program will be rounded off by a poster session, which will provide the time and space for preliminary ideas to be discussed.