============================================================ 6th International Conference on Belief Functions (BELIEF 2021)

Dates: October 15th-19th, 2021 Location: Shanghai, China

Submission deadline: April 15th, 2021 Notification: May 31st, 2021 Final version: June 30th, 2021

Further information: https://www.lgi2a.univ-artois.fr/events/belief2021/

The theory of belief functions, also referred to as evidence theory or Dempster-Shafer theory, was first introduced by Arthur P. Dempster in the context of statistical inference, and was later developed by Glenn Shafer as a general framework for modelling epistemic uncertainty. These early contributions have been the starting points of many important developments, including the Transferable Belief Model and the Theory of Hints. The theory of belief functions is now well established as a general framework for reasoning with uncertainty, and has well understood connections to other frameworks such as probability, possibility and imprecise probability theories.

The BELIEF conferences (sponsored by the Belief Functions and Applications Society https://www.bfasociety.org/) are dedicated to the confrontation of ideas, the reporting of recent achievements and the presentation of the wide range of applications of this theory. The first edition of this conference series was held in Brest, France, in 2010, the second edition in Compiègne, France, in 2012, the third edition in Oxford, UK, in 2014, the fourth edition in Prague, Czech Republic, in 2016, and the fifth edition in Compiègne, France, in 2018. The Sixth International Conference on Belief Functions (BELIEF 2021) will be located in Shanghai, China, on October 15-19, 2021, together with the 2021 International Conference on Cognitive analytics, Granular computing, and Three-way decisions (CCGT). It will be held totally or partially online depending on the evolution of the COVID-19 situation.

Submission and Proceedings

The proceedings of the BELIEF 2021 conference will be published by Springer-Verlag in a volume of the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNCS/LNAI) series and indexed by: ISI Web of Science; EI Engineering Index; ACM Digital Library; dblp; Google Scholar; IO-Port; MathSciNet; Scopus; Zentralblatt MATH. Previous BELIEF proceedings can be found on SpringerLink.

Authors should consult Springer’s authors’ guidelines and use their proceedings templates, either for LaTeX or for Word, for the preparation of their papers. Springer encourages authors to include their ORCIDs in their papers. In addition, the corresponding author of each paper, acting on behalf of all of the authors of that paper, must complete and sign a Consent-to-Publish form. The corresponding author signing the copyright form should match the corresponding author marked on the paper. Once the files have been sent to Springer, changes relating to the authorship of the papers cannot be made.

IJAR Special issue

Authors of selected papers from the BELIEF 2021 conference will be invited to submit extended versions of their papers for possible inclusion in a special issue of the International Journal of Approximate Reasoning.

Invited speakers

We are very happy to announce that the following speakers have agreed to give an invited talk at the conference:

• Prof. Zengjing Chen (Shandong University, China)
• Prof. Deqiang Han (Xi'an Jiaotong University, China)
• Prof. Van-Nam Huynh (Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Japan)
• Associate Prof. Chunlai Zhou (Renmin University, China)

Tutorials

The program of this edition of the BELIEF conference will include tutorials from experts on belief functions and their applications. More to be announced soon.

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BELIEF-CCGT Conference co-chairs

Thierry Denoeux (Université de Technologie de Compiègne, France), Duoqian Miao (Tongji University, Shanghai, China), Yiyu Yao (University of Regina, Canada).

BELIEF 2021 Program Committee co-chairs

Zhunga Liu (liuzhunga(a)nwpu.edu.cn, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xian, China), Frédéric Pichon (frederic.pichon(a)univ-artois.fr, Université d'Artois, France).

BELIEF 2021 Steering committee

Eric Lefevre (Université d'Artois, France), Zhunga Liu (Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xian, China), David Mercier (Université d'Artois, France), Frédéric Pichon (Université d'Artois, France), Zhihua Wei (Tongji University, Shanghai, China), Xiaodong Yue (Shanghai University, China)

BELIEF 2021 Organisation chair Xiaodong Yue, Shanghai University, China

The organisers would be grateful if you could inform potentially interested participants of this conference.