STAIRS 2008

General Information

The STAIRS-08 is the fourth European Starting AI Researcher Symposium, an international meeting intended to AI researchers, from all countries, at the beginning of their career:  PhD students or people holding a PhD for less than one year.  STAIRS’08 will be held jointly with ECAI-08 in Patras, Greece, on July 21st to 25th.  STAIRS offers doctoral students and young post-doctoral AI fellows:

Paper Submission
Submissions of original work in all areas of Artificial Intelligence are welcome. Authors are asked to submit their full paper by

Wednesday, April 22, 2008 (closed)

Since the conference proceedings will be published and distributed by IOS Press, submissions must not exceed twelve pages and each paper must be in the IOS Press Proceedings format, which is available for word and latex at:

http://www.iospress.nl/authco/instruction_crc.html

Overlength or delayed submissions will be rejected without review. Papers should be submitted electronically through the STAIRS-08 submission web site: :

Only PDF files will be accepted. The submission for STAIRS 2008 is a one-step process (no requirement for submitting a summary in advance). Moreover, the name(s), affiliation(s), and contact details of the author(s), should appear in the first page of the submitted paper.

Multiple Submission Policy
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 acceptance the author(s) are strictly required to withdraw their paper from all but one event.

Review Process
All submissions will be subject to academic peer review by the STAIRS-08 Program Committee. Each paper will be assigned to at least two reviewers. Review criteria include originality of ideas, technical soundness, significance of results, and quality of presentation.
Papers should address significant research works undertaken by the authors. At least one of the authors must be a PhD student, or a person holding a PhD for less than one year. Preference will be given to papers whose authors are all in such condition.

Notification of acceptance or rejection of submitted papers will be emailed to the corresponding author by

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

For each accepted paper, at least one author, most preferably one of the beginner researchers involved in the work, is required to attend the conference to present the paper.

Conference Proceedings
The conference proceedings will be published and distributed by IOS Press. Camera-ready version of papers should conform to the STAIRS-08 formatting guidelines, for inclusion in the proceedings. Hard deadline for receiving camera-ready is
Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Best Paper Award
Among the accepted papers the STAIRS Program Committee will select a best paper for an award sponsored by ISTC-CNR, Rome, Italy.

Journal Special Issue
According to quality of submissions a subset of accepted papers will be selected and invited to submit a revised version to a special issue of AI Communications from STAIRS-08 which is scheduled to appear as the last issue of 2008.