After a four years hiatus the CONTEXT conference series came back to life and presented itself as professional and ambitious as ever. The Seventh International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context (CONTEXT) took place in Karlsruhe, Germany. It brought together researchers and practitioners from a wide range of disciplines. Thanks to Prof. Michael Beigl and his team — most notably Dr. Hedda Schmidtke — the conference turned out to be a great event. About 70 participants enjoyed the conference venue, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Most of the participants attended nearly every talk. This shows how well the conference was received and how interesting the sometimes not so easy to follow talks from different fields of one’s own research were. The conference dinner at the Centre for Art and Media (ZKM) was a highlight of the event.
Three invited talks marked the milestones of the main conference. On Wednesday morning, Jerry Hobbs reflected on „Discourse Interpretation in Context“. The second keynote was given by Ruth Kempson, King’s College, London, on „Ellipsis in Conversational Dialogue“. Even though the last invited talk was on the morning after the conference dinner, Paul Holleis had many listeners for his talk on „Explicit, Generic, and Social Context“.
From the three workshops before the main conference I attended the workshop on Modelling and Reasoning in Context (MRC). The one and a half days workshop was a lively event that I enjoyed very much. In between the eight presentations two panel discussions and an open discussion gave lots of opportunities to look at context from different angles.
The CONTEXT community decided to start a wiki to collect information about the topic of context and the people working on it. Stay tuned. More information coming up soon.
Dr. Thomas Roth-Berghofer 