From: argamon@sunlight.cs.biu.ac.il   
      
   AAAI 2004 Fall Symposium Series   
      
   STYLE AND MEANING IN LANGUAGE, ART, MUSIC, AND DESIGN   
   October 21-24 in Washington, D.C   
      
   In recent years a growing number of researchers working in artificial   
   intelligence, cognitive science, computer graphics, computer music,   
   and multimedia have begun to explicitly address issues of 'style' or   
   connotative semantics in their work.  While it is still difficult to   
   precisely characterize these concepts satisfactorily (we know it when   
   we see it), common denominators of much of this work are: an emphasis   
   on manner rather than topic, a focus on affective aspects of   
   expression and understanding, and a search for 'dense' representations   
   of meaning in which elements simultaneously symbolize multiple layers   
   of meaning at once.   
      
   Recent areas of research in this vein have included forensic   
   authorship attribution, information retrieval based on document genre   
   or affect, composition of new music in a given composer's style,   
   rendering animation in different motion styles, analyzing   
   architectural styles for function and affect, and much more. Work in   
   all media shares the problem of formalizing a notion of style, and   
   developing a modeling language that supports the representation of   
   differing styles.  However, due to the widely varying technical   
   requirements of work in different media, little communication has   
   traditionally existed between different 'style researchers'.  The goal   
   of this symposium is to bring such individuals together, to seek out   
   common languages and frameworks for discussion, as well as to   
   establish a shared set of stylistic tasks, which can be used as a   
   testbed for extending and generalizing stylistic work.   
      
   THE CHALLENGE   
   While much work remains in developing shared formalisms for research   
   on style and connotation, we outlined a set of questions, which are   
   more-or-less common to work in all various media.  These "challenge   
   questions" will serve as foci for the symposium, but should not limit   
   presentation/discussion of other relevant work:   
      
   o Is there a general theory for style, which cuts across all kinds of   
   human intellectual behavior? What is the relation between style and   
   other content (e.g. informational) in the work you will be reporting   
   at the symposium?   
      
   o Is there a general theoretical structure for the context that   
   informs style and connotation that can be applied usefully in   
   disparate media? Are there lessons in work you will be reporting at   
   the symposium that are generalizable across media and genre?   
      
   o In operational terms, what are useful models and effective   
   algorithms of the process of learning and producing style, and how can   
   such models inform our understanding of stylistic features in the   
   resulting work?  In the work you will be reporting at the symposium -   
   can the models and algorithms be used for both understanding style and   
   generating style?   
      
   o Is style at the forefront of people's understanding the medium and   
   discourse in the community you have worked with? How is style   
   explicitly discussed or implicitly understood? How are stylistic   
   distinctions learnt and transmitted to others within the community of   
   recipients? In the work you are presenting, how is style understood by   
   the intended audience?   
      
   o How can we usefully model the social context of a work, as a   
   resource for understanding its style, its meaning, and its effect?   
   Does the work you report take the context and effect of style outside   
   the medium itself into account?   
      
   o What are the processes affecting stylistic diffusion among members   
   of a discourse community?  What properties of the social context may   
   affect the transmission or evolution of distinctive styles?  How is   
   the work you are presenting affected by understanding the social   
   networks in which style is embedded?   
      
   SUBMISSION GUIDELINES   
      
   We encourage submissions from researchers working in all   
   media. Particularly, in addition to academic researchers, we are   
   interested in presentations or demonstrations by practitioners and   
   artists using computational methods in their own   
   work.   
      
   Potential participants are invited to submit research papers, posters   
   abstracts, demonstration, performance, or exhibition proposals, and   
   panel discussion proposals on computational aspects of style modeling   
   and related areas, before May 3, 2004. Papers should not exceed 8   
   pages in length and should be submitted by email to   
   style2004@music.ucsd.edu.   
      
   ORGANIZING COMMITTEE   
   Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, USA (co-chair)   
   Shlomo Dubnov, Univestiry of California San Diego, USA (co-chair)   
   Julie Jupp, The University of Sydney, Australia (co-chair)   
      
   Roger Dannenberg, Carnegie Mellon, USA   
   Graeme Hirst, University of Toronto, Canada   
   Jussi Karlgren, Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Sweden   
   Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University, Israel   
   Rivka Oxman, Technion, Israel   
   Mine Ozkar, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA   
   James Shanahan, Clairvoyance Corporation, USA   
      
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