Over the last 50 years artificial intelligence (AI) has received inputs from many disciplines. Mathematics and logic have traditionally been big contributors. Linguistics provided significant material for natural language processing. Biology provided several bottom up approaches. Philosophy set the underpinnings for representation. Psychology and cognitive science are currently being heavily mined for ways to understand human behaviour. Neurology led to artificial neural networks. Although this list is far from exhaustive, it shows clearly that progress in AI has consistently relied on influx of information from other disciplines. At a different level, the range of potential applications of AI has been steadily growing over the years, and now spans a very large set of disciplines.

The purpose of this school is to provide a forum where this dialogue across disciplines might take place. A forum where AI practitioners may become familiar with new ideas from other disciplines, and practitioners of other disciplines may get to know new techniques in AI. A school that guarantees a multi-directional flow across disciplines, with practitioners from all fields both presenting ideas from their fields and learning about ideas from other fields is the best atmosphere for all the disciplines to prosper together.