Call for Workshop Proposals

Deadline: June 15, 2021

We are soliciting proposals for half-day workshops at the third annual international conference on Automated Knowledge Base Construction (AKBC) to be held virtually in October 4-8 2021, with workshops on 7-8th (Thursday-Friday).

Knowledge gathering, representation, and reasoning are among the fundamental challenges of artificial intelligence. Large-scale repositories of knowledge about entities, relations, and their abstractions are known as “knowledge bases”. Most major technology companies now have substantial efforts in knowledge base construction, and related scholarly work spans many research areas, including machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, information integration, databases, search, data mining, knowledge representation, human computation, human-computer interfaces, and fairness. The AKBC conference serves as a research forum for all these areas, in both academia and industry.

In addition to the conference, AKBC 2021 will include workshops dedicated to vibrant sub-areas of knowledge base construction with tighter focus (e.g., scientific literature), or the intersection between knowledge base construction and other areas (e.g., trust, benchmarking, security).

In the past, we have had workshops on topics such as multimodality, structured and unstructured KBs, scientific texts, biases in KB. Full list of workshops from previous AKBC conferences can be found here: 2020 workshops, 2019 workshops. Many workshops were very successful, with 100+ audiences, great line-up of invited speakers, and engaging discussions. The organizers of the accepted workshop proposals will have the freedom to organize, run, and publicize their workshop as they wish, including reviewing submissions, planning the workshop schedule, inviting speakers and planning panel discussions.

There are also vibrant areas that involve either specialized knowledge base construction (e.g., scientific literature), or the intersection between knowledge base construction and other areas (e.g., trust, benchmarking, security). We are soliciting proposals for half-day workshops at AKBC 2020 that connect Automated Knowledge Base Construction with these and other areas of computer science.

Proposals for Workshops should be submitted using the submission link, providing:

  • The title of the workshop.
  • A half-page description of the workshop goals, themes, topics, and open questions.
  • The format of the workshop – anticipated proportion of keynote speakers, invited papers, papers or abstracts from an open call, panels, etc.
  • A list of likely attendees of the workshop, including keynote speakers, panel participants, paper submitters, etc.
  • Link to previous editions of the workshop, if any.
  • Optional:
    • A list of tentatively confirmed keynote speakers and their likely topics, and panelists and their technical perspectives.
    • Anticipated members for a program committee.

We provide a tentative timeline for the workshops below, to help with planning.

Tentative timeline:

  • Workshop proposal submission deadline: Jun 15, 2021
  • Notification of acceptance: Jun 22, 2021
  • Suggested date for sending out the workshop’s call for papers: Jun 27, 2021
  • Suggested date for sending notifications of workshop paper acceptance: Sep 10, 2021
  • Workshops: Oct 7, 2021