Call for Papers

The 12th International Conference on Scalable Uncertainty Management (SUM) will be held in Milano, Italy on October 3-5, 2018. The conference will bring together researchers who are working with imperfect information in fields such as artificial intelligence, databases, data mining, information retrieval, and risk analysis with the aim of fostering collaboration and cross-fertilization of ideas from different communities.

An originality of SUM is giving a large space to tutorials about a wide range of topics related to uncertainty management. Each tutorial provides a 45-minute survey of one of the research areas in the scope of the conference.

Topics of interest

We solicit papers on the management of large amounts of complex kinds of uncertain, incomplete, or inconsistent information. We are particularly interested in papers that focus on bridging gaps, for instance between different communities, between numerical and symbolic approaches, or between theory and practice. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

  • Imperfect information in databases
    • Methods for modeling, indexing, and querying uncertain databases
    • Top-k queries, skyline query processing, and ranking
    • Approximate, fuzzy query processing
    • Uncertainty in data integration and exchange
    • Uncertainty and imprecision in geographic information systems
    • Probabilistic databases and possibilistic databases?
    • Data provenance and trust
    • Data summarization
    • Very large datasets
  • Imperfect information in information retrieval and semantic web applications
    • Approximate schema and ontology matching
    • Uncertainty in description logics and logic programming
    • Learning to rank, personalization, and user preferences
    • Probabilistic language models
    • Combining vector-space models with symbolic representations
    • Inductive reasoning for the semantic web
  • Imperfect information in artificial intelligence
    • Statistical relational learning, graphical models, probabilistic inference
    • Argumentation, defeasible reasoning, belief revision
    • Weighted logics for managing uncertainty
    • Reasoning with imprecise probability, Dempster-Shafer theory, possibility theory
    • Approximate reasoning, similarity-based reasoning, analogical reasoning
    • Planning under uncertainty, reasoning about actions, spatial and temporal reasoning
    • Incomplete preference specifications
    • Learning from data
  • Risk analysis
    • Aleatory vs. epistemic uncertainty
    • Uncertainty elicitation methods
    • Uncertainty propagation methods
    • Decision analysis methods
    • Tools for synthesizing results

Submission guidelines

SUM 2018 solicits papers in the following three categories:

  • Long papers: technical papers reporting original research or survey papers
  • Short papers: papers reporting promising work-in-progress, system descriptions, position papers on controversial issues, or survey papers providing a synthesis of some current research trends
  • Extended abstracts of recently published work in a relevant journal or top-tier conference

Accepted long and short papers will be published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series. Authors of an accepted long or short paper will be expected to sign copyright release forms, and one author is expected to give a presentation at the conference. Authors of accepted abstracts will be expected to present their work during the conference, but the extended abstracts will not be published in the LNCS/LNAI proceedings (they will be made available in a separate booklet).

Regular research papers should be at most 14 pages (including references, figures, and tables). Short papers should be between 4 and 7 pages. Extended abstracts should be at most 2 pages and should reference the originally published work.

Submissions must be formatted according to Springer’s guidelines for LNCS authors, which can be found at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html. Each paper is to be submitted electronically as a single PDF file through EasyChair. Papers not respecting the formatting instructions or page limits may be rejected without review.

Except for extended abstracts, submissions must be unpublished and must not be under submission elsewhere. All submitted papers will be reviewed by the Program Committee on the basis of technical quality, relevance, significance, and clarity.

Important dates

  • Submissions: April 30, 2018 (Title and Abstract)
  • Submissions: May 6, 2018 (Full Paper)
  • Notification: June 11, 2018
  • Camera-ready copies: June 30, 2018 July 8, 2018
  • Conference: October 3-5, 2018