Special issue: Selected and revised papers from the 17th International Conference of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence

Established in 1988, the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AIxIA) has the role of increasing the knowledge of Artificial Intelligence (AI), fostering its teaching, and promoting both theoretical and applied research in the field through seminars, targeted initiatives and sponsorship of events. It is a a member of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence EurAI (formerly known as ECCAI) and, during the last decades, it has witnessed and supported the entire evolution of AI up to the recent success that led AI techniques to be pervasively used in everyday technology and in high-profile application domains.

Since 1989, AIxIA organizes its International Conference where a lively community interested in Artificial Intelligence research, tasks, and applications meet and exchange ideas and results in fruitful discussions. Originally a bi-annual event, the International Conference of the AIxIA has become an annual one since 2014. This change corresponded to a significant revision of the conference format, that now includes, in addition to the main track and invited talks, several poster sessions, a number of workshops (some focused on research topics, others on applications), tutorials, and a Doctoral Consortium. Best paper, best student paper and best Doctoral Consortium paper awards are also assigned to authors of distinguished papers. The program is often complemented by an open event targeted to the general public concerning the impact of Artificial Intelligence on society.

The 17th International Conference of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AIxIA 2018) was held in Trento, Italy, from November 20 to November 23, 2018. The conference was attended by almost 200 delegates, and 41 papers were selected for presentation at the conference. Among these, the General and Programme Chairs identified a set of papers that received particularly good reviews, that were invited to submit a revised and extended version. After a further round review process, the following eight papers were selected for this special issue:

MOCA: An ORM MOdel for Computational Accountability, by Matteo Baldoni, Cristina Baroglio, Katherine Marie May, Roberto Micalizio and Stefano Tedeschi, proposing an information model for computational accountability, expressed in Object-Role Modeling, which describes what data have to be available to allow, in any situation of interest arising from a group of interacting parties, the investigation and identification of accountability;

Ontology-based Data Access - Beyond Relational Sources, by Elena Botoeva, Diego Calvanese, Benjamin Cogrel, Julien Corman and Guohui Xiao, presenting a generalisation of the well-known ontology-based data access (OBDA) framework to enable access to non-relational (also called NoSQL) databases, so as to allow for querying arbitrary data sources using SPARQL;

Counteracting the Filter Bubble in Recommender Systems: Novelty-aware Matrix Factorization, by Ludovik Coba, Panagiotis Symeonidis and Markus Zanker, presenting a matrix factorisation method that simultaneously recommends accurate and novel items;

Enabling Deep Learning for Large Scale Question Answering in Italian, by Danilo Croce, Alexandra Zelenanska and Roberto Basili, proposing the acquisition of a large scale dataset for an open-domain factoid question answering system in Italian by automatic translation and linguistic elicitation of an existing English dataset, i.e. the SQuAD question-answer pair corpus;

An ASP-based Framework for Operating Room Scheduling, by Carmine Dodaro, Giuseppe Galatà, Marco Maratea and Ivan Porro, presenting an off-line and on-line solution based on Answer Set Programming for solving the task of assigning patients to operating rooms;

Coherence Constraints in Facial Expression Recognition, by Lisa Graziani, Stefano Melacci and Marco Gori, investigating the use of various typpes of coherence constraints to improve the performance of a Convolutional Neural Network based architecture for facial expression recognition from images and videos;

Applying a Description Logic of Typicality as a Generative Tool for Concept Combination in Computational Creativity, by Gian Luca Pozzato and Antonio Lieto, proposes a usage of a nonmonotonic Description Logic of typicality called “typical compositional logic” to account for the generation and the exploration of novel creative concepts;

Top-down Attention Recurrent VLAD Encoding for Action Recognition in Videos, by Swathikiran Sudhakaran and Oswald Lanz, adressing the problem of action recognition from videos by proposing a deep recurrent neural architecture, with built-in spatial attention, that performs temporally aggregated Vector of Locally Aggregated Descriptors (VLAD) encodings.

We would like to thank all members of the AIxIA 2018 Programme Committee for their effort and invaluable contribution to the review process, that was fundamental for maintaining the high scientific level of the event, and the additional reviewers recruited for the special issue reviews. We also would like to thank the AIxIA Executive Board, and all the researchers of the Artificial Intelligence community who supported this event by submitting their work and actively participating in it. Last but not least, we are grateful to Fabrizio Riguzzi, Editor in Chief of Intelligenza Artificiale, for hosting this special issue.

AIxIA 2018 Programme Committee Members

Fabio Aiolli (University of Padova, Italy)

Davide Bacciu (University of Pisa, Italy)

Matteo Baldoni (University of Torino, Italy)

Stefania Bandini (University of Milan-Bicocca, Italy)

Nicola Basilico (University of Milan, Italy)

Federico Bergenti (University of Parma, Italy)

Tarek Richard Besold City, (University of London, UK)

Stefano Bistarelli (University of Perugia, Italy)

Andrea Burattin (Technical University of Denmark, Denmark)

Elena Cabrio (Université Côte d’Azur, CNRS, Inria, France)

Stefano Cagnoni (University of Parma, Italy)

Diego Calvanese (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy)

Luigia Carlucci Aiello (Sapienza University of Rome, Italy)

Amedeo Cesta (ISTC-CNR, Italy)

Federico Chesani (University of Bologna, Italy)

Francesco Corcoglioniti (University of Trento, Italy)

Gabriella Cortellessa (ISTC-CNR, Italy)

Stefania Costantini (University of L’quila, Italy)

Riccardo De Masellis (Stockholm University, Sweden)

Dario Della Monica (University of Naples Federico II, Italy)

Claudio Di Ciccio (Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria)

Tommaso Di Noia (Politecnico di Bari, Italy)

Michelangelo Diligenti (University of Siena, Italy)

Michele Donini (Amazon)

Agostino Dovier (Unversity of Udine, Italy)

Aldo Franco Dragoni (Polytechnic University of Marche, Italy)

Floriana Esposito (University of Bari, Italy)

Stefano Ferilli (University of Bari, Italy)

Alberto Finzi (University of Naples Federico II, Italy)

Salvatore Gaglio (University of Palermo, Italy)

Marco Gavanelli (University of Ferrara, Italy)

Massimiliano Giacomin (University of Brescia, Italy)

Claudio Giuliano (Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy)

Floriana Grasso (University of Liverpool, UK)

Nicola Guarino (ISTC-CNR, Italy)

Giuseppe Jurman (Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy)

Evelina Lamma (University of Ferrara, Italy)

Nicola Leone (University of Calabria, Italy)

Antonio Lieto (University of Turin, Italy),

Marco Lippi (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy)

Francesca Alessandra Lisi (University of Bari, Italy)

Fabrizio Maria Maggi (University of Tartu, Estonia)

Marco Maratea (University of Genoa, Italy)

Simone Marinai (University of Florence, Italy)

Andrea Marrella (Sapienza University of Rome, Italy)

Viviana Mascardi (University of Genoa, Italy)

Fulvio Mastrogiovanni (University of Genoa, Italy)

Alessandro Mazzei (University of Torino, Italy)

Stefano Melacci (University of Siena, Italy)

Paola Mello (University of Bologna, Italy)

Alessio Micheli (University of Pisa, Italy)

Alfredo Milani (University of Perugia, Italy)

Stefania Montani (University of Piemonte Orientale, Italy)

• Angelo Oddi (ISTC-CNR, Italy)

• Francesco Orsini (University of Florence, Italy)

• Matteo Palmonari (University of Milan Bicocca, Italy)

• Viviana Patti (University of Torino, Italy)

• Maria Teresa Pazienza (University of Rome, Tor Vergata, Italy)

• Ruggero G. Pensa (University of Torino, Italy)

• Roberto Pirrone (University of Palermo, Italy)

• Simone Paolo Ponzetto (University of Mannheim, Germany)

• Daniele Porello (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy)

• Gian Luca Pozzato (University of Torino, Italy)

• Francesco Ricca (University of Calabria, Italy)

• Fabrizio Riguzzi (University of Ferrara, Italy)

• Andrea Roli (University of Bologna, Italy)

• Silvia Rossi (University of Naples Federico II, Italy)

• Salvatore Ruggieri (University of Pisa, Italy)

• Fabio Sartori (University of Milan-Bicocca, Italy)

• Marco Schaerf (Sapienza University of Rome, Italy)

• Giovanni Semeraro (University of Bari, Italy)

• Luciano Serafini (Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy)

• Carlo Strapparava (Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy)

• Stefano Teso (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium)

• Daniele Theseider Duprée (University of Piemonte Orientale, Italy)

• Olga Uryupina (University of Trento, Italy)

• Eloisa Vargiu (Eurecat Technology Center, Spain)

• Marco Villani (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy)

• Serena Villata (CNRS, France)

• Giuseppe Vizzari (University of Milan-Bicocca, Italy)

AIxIA 2018 Additional Reviewers

Giovanni Amendola

Elena Bellodi

Federico Bianchi

Giuseppe Cota

Bernardo Cuteri

Alessandra De Paola

Nicola Falcionelli

Claudio Gallicchio

Luciano García-Bañuelos

Luca Di Gaspero

Theofrastos Mantadelis

Ivan Mercanti

Marco Montali

Marco Morana

Fedelucio Narducci

Giuseppe Rizzo

Luca Romeo

Paolo Sernani

Alessandro Suglia

Riccardo Zese

Trento, May 31st, 2019 Chiara Ghidini, Bernardo Magnini, and Andrea Passerini