KI 2019: Advances in Artificial Intelligence -- 42nd German Conference on AI, Kassel, Germany, September 23-26, 2019, Proceedings

This volume contains the papers presented at the 42nd German Conference on Artificial Intelligence (KI 2019), held during September 23–26, 2019, in Kassel, Germany.
The German conference on Artificial Intelligence (abbreviated KI for “Künstliche Intelligenz”) has developed from a series of inofficial meetings and workshops, organized by the German “Gesellschaft für Informatik” (association for computer science, GI), into an annual conference series dedicated to research on theory and applications of intelligent system technology. While KI is primarily attended by researchers from Germany and neighboring countries, it warmly welcomes international participation.
The KI 2019 conference took place in Kassel, Germany, September 23–26, 2019, and it was held in conjunction with the 49th Annual Conference of the German Computer Science Association (INFORMATIK 2019). Information about the event can be found at www.ki2019.de and informatik2019.de, respectively.
KI 2019 had a special focus theme on “AI methods for Argumentation” and we especially invited contributions that use methods from all areas of AI to understand, formalize, or generate argument structures in natural language. The special focus theme was organized in cooperation with the DFG funded priority program “RATIO: Robust Argumentation Machines”. Besides this special focus theme, the conference invited original research papers and shorter technical communications on all topics of AI. Further, we asked for the submission of extended abstracts summarizing papers that had recently been presented at major AI conferences.
KI 2019 received 82 submissions, with authors from 25 countries. Submissions were – except for some special cases – reviewed by three Program Committee members. The Program Committee, comprised of 51 experts from 9 countries, decided to accept 29 papers. Out of these, 16 submissions were accepted as full papers, 10 as short papers and 3 as extended abstracts. The program also included three invited talks:
– Jürgen Altmann (University of Dortmund): Autonomous Weapon Systems – Dangers and Need for an International Prohibition
– Michael Beetz (University of Bremen): Digital Twin Knowledge Bases – Knowledge Representation and Reasoning for Robotic Agent
– Antony Hunter (University College London): Towards Computational Persuasion for Behaviour Change Applications
Two of these presentations are summarized in papers contained in this volume.
Overall, it was a pleasure to organize KI 2019 and we are grateful to our co-organizers, Alexander Steen (Workshops and Tutorials Chair) and Kristina Yordanova (Doctoral Consortium Chair), who provided valuable additional support in organizing the event.
We thank the Program Committee members and all additional reviewers for the effort and time they invested in the reviewing process. Further, we thank the Organizing Committee of INFORMATIK 2019 who took care of finances and local organization and allowed us to focus on the scientific aspects of the conference. Our appreciation also goes to the developers of EasyChair, which provides great functionalities that helped to organize the reviewing process and to create this volume.
Last but not least, we would like to thank SAP SE for generously sponsoring travel grants for students to attend KI 2019.
July 2019 Christoph Benzmüller Heiner Stuckenschmidt