It is our great pleasure to announce an open call for a Machine Learning Journal (MLJ) special issue on Learning and Reasoning. Accepted papers will be presented at IJCLR 2020 and published at the MLJ Special Issue on Learning & Reasoning.

The special topic of Learning and Reasoning is motivated by the increased attention for this topic in the artificial intelligence and machine learning communities. Integrating learning and reasoning constitutes one of the key open questions in the field. Integrated approaches to learning and reasoning potentially address many of the shortcomings of contemporary AI approaches, including the black-box nature and the brittleness of deep learning, and the difficulty to adapt knowledge representation models in the light of new data.

Several subfields are actively pursuing research on Learning and Reasoning, including:

• Neuro-symbolic computation (NeSy), which is concerned with the integration of neural networks with logical reasoning abilities;
• Statistical relational AI (StarAI), which has focussed on combining probabilistic graphical models with first order logic and statistical learning;
• Inductive Logic Programming (ILP), which studies machine learning within a logic programming context.
• Inductive Programming (IP), which studies the induction and synthesis of programs from examples of their input / output behaviour.

We solicit submissions on all aspects of Learning and Reasoning, on all topics where machine learning is combined with machine reasoning or knowledge representation.

Authors are invited to submit novel, high-quality work that has neither appeared in, nor is under consideration for publication by other journals or conferences.

The editorial team will be aiming for a turn-around time of 10-12 weeks for most submissions.

The journal track has two cut-off dates: Feb. 15 2020 and April 15 2020 April 20 2020 (extended).

All papers will be reviewed following standard reviewing procedures for Machine Learning. Papers must be prepared in accordance to the Journal guidelines: http://www.springer.com/10994. A full range of general questions about submissions to Springer journals can be found here: https://www.springer.com/gp/authors-editors/journal-author. Manuscripts must be submitted to: http://MACH.edmgr.com. An article is submitted to this special issue by choosing “S.I. LR 2020” as the article type.

The Learning & Reasoning special issue replaces the MLJ special issue on Inductive Logic Programming (S.I.: ILP 2020).
Papers planned to be submitted to S.I. ILP 2020, should therefore be submitted to the S.I. LR 2020.

Articles should preferably be no longer than 20 pages. Submissions exceeding this length will not be given priority during reviews and will be under review for a longer period but will still be considered for the special track.

The Special Issue Guest Editors:

Nikos Katzouris, National Center for Scientific Research “Demokritos”, Greece
Alexander Artikis, University of Piraeus, Greece
Luc De Raedt, KU Leuven, Belgium
Artur d’Avila Garcez, City University of London, UK
Ute Schmid, University of Bamberg, Germany
Sebastijan Dumančić, KU Leuven, Belgium
Jay Pujara, University of Southern California, USA