Support for the 13th Ph.D. Summer School (Advanced Course on Artificial Intelligence - ACAI2009) in Northern Ireland, UK.

The School of Computing and Mathematics has won a bid to organize the 13th Ph.D. Summer School Advanced Course on Artificial Intelligence (ACAI2009) in Northern Ireland. This prestigious Summer School is organized biannually by the European Coordination Committee on Artificial Intelligence, each year in a different European country. This is the first time that ACAI is organized in the Britain or Ireland. ACAI'09 will focus on methods and tools available for the development of Intelligent Decision Support Systems. These systems can take decisions by themselves or by interacting and cooperating with humans. As such they have a wide range of important applications in areas like healthcare, finance, emergency response, etc. The Summer School will include courses delivered by distinguished academics and industrial representatives with extensive experience in the development and application of such systems. The courses are designed to be interactive and will consist of a mixture of lectures and hands-on practice.

Beneficiaries - UK researchers including PhD students and advanced MSc students Benefits/Impact It provides an opportunity for UK researchers to interact with some of the world leaders in IDSS research. As ACAI'09 will be hosted in the UK, we expect it to attract a larger number of UK researchers, PhD students in particular, than are typically able to attend other summer schools and major international conferences, say in the USA. We hope that this will result in more international collaborations in future years, which will help advance IDSS research in the UK. 2) It provides an opportunity for UK researchers to participate in an assessment of the state of IDSS research and an assessment of their role in shaping the future of IDSS research. This is significant if IDSS research in the UK is to stay at the forefront of this field of study. 3) It provides a unique training opportunity for PhD students. There is a large number of PhD students currently studying in fields related to IDSS in the UK, and we believe that they can benefit from interacting with experts in their PhD subject areas early in their studies. ACAI'09 will enable them to do so in an affordable way (The organising committee of ACAI'09 will endeavour to make the associated PhD forum as affordable as possible by seeking sponsorships for ACAI'09 ). 4) ACAI'09 can also indirectly benefit IDSS related industry in the UK. Today's IDSS research is diverse, and there is a strong feeling within the international IDSS community that one size does not fit all and new IDSS tools are needed. The range of topics covered by the invited speakers at ACAI'09 represents some of the emerging areas where novel products may be developed, and can therefore help inform the industry, through participants and their industrial collaborators, of opportunities for new product development in future years. We are also interested in reinforcing the link between academy an industry therefore we are keen on providing a space for companies using IDSS to participate of this event. SAP, an international company with a branch in Belfast, already signed up to provide a talk on how they use IDSS in their company. We will be contacting other companies using IDSS who wish to share their experience and interact with the participants of ACAI'09.