www.ijcai-03.org
EIGHTEENTH INTERNATIONAL JOINT CONFERENCE ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
august 9 to 15, 2003
Call For Papers
IJCAI 2003 Workshop
DOING IT WITH STYLE:
Computational Approaches to Style Analysis and Synthesis
August 10, 2003
Acapulco, Mexico
 http://ir.iit.edu/~argamon/style2003/

NEW!
Workshop schedule (tentative)
Workshop notes

Workshop Overview

Style is an intuitive concept which may be roughly defined as the 'manner' in which something is done, as opposed to the 'content' of what actually is being accomplished. In recent years a growing number of researchers working in a variety of different areas have focused on explicitly addressing recognition and generation of style in their various disciplines, work that contrast with more traditional emphasis on 'performance' or 'content' or 'meaning'. Indeed, in some media such as music, visual art and to a lesser extent, film and even expressive speech, 'meaning' itself comprises mainly factors such as excitation and calmness or other emotional expressions that can be considered aspects of style instead of what is usually thought of as content.

Recent achievements in style research include systems for authorship attribution, organizing and retrieving documents based on their writing style, composing new music in a given composer's style, rendering animation in different motion styles, and 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. The precise methodology used may depend upon the use of stylistic variation in a domain. Often, style is used to place a work into a genre, i.e. a context of other works. In other cases, style can be used to connect affect to content, as in the generation of animation sequences. Such different uses of style in some medium can be analyzed and such analysis used to categorize or identify particular works as well as to enable automatic generation of works with particular styles.

The purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers working on a variety of style-related problems in order to explore the points common to different approaches to our differing problems, and to work towards finding common principles underlying computational issues of style analysis and synthesis. The primary question that we would like to address is: "What is style and how may it be usefully characterized?"

Beyond purely utilitarian considerations, are important issues specifically related to using computers as an adjunct to artists in various media (graphics, music, text, etc.), and here we may examine the expressive qualities expressed by different stylistic mechanisms. Here the fundamental questions are: How may stylistic features be formalized? How may they be extracted from a given performance or piece? How do such features correlate with the "feeling" being conveyed? How may style be incorporated or added to a performance or piece?

We seek submissions that address all aspects of style analysis and synthesis from a computational perspective, but are particularly interested to see work that addresses some of the following questions:

  • What is style, and how may it be formalized?
  • What kinds of features indicate style (as opposed to function or meaning)?
  • How is style related to short- and long-term temporal dependencies, such as found in music or text?
  • How do stylistic features correlate with affect of the observer/performer?
  • How may style be effectively combined with pre-existing content?
  • What sorts of formal modeling methods are useful in representing style?
  • How may one effectively learn a style of expression and then execute it?
  • How does perceived style depend on the observer's context?
  • How may presentation style affect comprehension?
  • What connections can be drawn from stylistic methods used for one domain to another?

    Workshop Format

    To promote a creative atmosphere, the workshop will include both formal paper presentations as well as exhibits of systems/music/artwork, with ample time for informal discussion and brainstorming. Attendance will be limited to 40 participants, based upon refereed submissions. Preference will be given to active participants, both paper presenters and exhibitors. According to IJCAI rules, all participants must also register for the main IJCAI conference.

    Submissions

    For paper presentations, submissions of 10-12 pages in length should be submitted by emailing a URL pointing to a Postscript, PDF, or HTML format version of the paper to the workshop chair at argamon@iit.edu. (If this presents a hardship, please email to arrange an alternate submission method.) Selected papers will be considered for inclusion in a special issue of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.

    Those wishing to present an exhibit should email a short (about 1 page) description of the proposed exhibit to the workshop chair. Those wishing to attend without making a presentation should email a short (less than one page) statement of interests.

    Important Dates

    Submission deadline:   March 10, 2003
    Accept/reject notices sent:   April 1, 2003
    Deadline for receipt of camera-ready copy:   May 23, 2003
    Workshop:   August 10, 2003

    Workshop Chair

    Shlomo Argamon
    Dept of Computer Science
    Illinois Institute of Technology
    Chicago, IL 60616
    Email: argamon@iit.edu
    Phone: (312) 567-5289

    Program Committee

  • Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, USA
  • Chris Bregler, New York University, USA
  • Roger Dannenberg, Carnegie Mellon, USA
  • Shlomo Dubnov, Ben Gurion U., Israel
  • Richard Forsyth, University of Luton, UK
  • William Freeman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
  • Aaron Hertzmann, U. of Washington, USA
  • Jussi Karlgren, Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Sweden
  • Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University, Israel
  • Robert Krawczyk, Illinois Institute of Technology, USA
  • Ehud Reiter, University of Aberdeen, UK