(DBWORLD) ATAL-98: Third Call for Papers AGENT THEORIES, ARCHITECTURES, AND LANGUAGES

Joerg Mueller (jpm@zuno.com)
Fri, 19 Dec 1997 10:00:19 +0000

[ we apologize for multiple postings ]

The Fifth International Workshop on
AGENT THEORIES, ARCHITECTURES, AND LANGUAGES (ATAL-98)

Thursday 2 July - Wednesday 8 July, 1998
Cite des Sciences - La Villette, Paris, France
(One of the AGENTS WORLD series of events)

Few other technologies have had as profound an effect on the
development of computer science in the 1990s as Intelligent Agents.
Today, agent technology is being used in a large range of important
industrial application areas, from human-computer interaction through
information management to industrial process control. The ATAL
workshop series, now five years old, is the pre-eminent international
forum for research in the agent-level, micro aspects of agent
technology. ATAL-98 will address issues such as theories of rational
agency, software architectures for intelligent agents, methodologies
and programming languages for realising agents, and software tools for
applying and evaluating agent systems. Papers that consider
macro-level, societal issues of agent-based systems are welcome if
they explicitly relate to the workshop themes. ATAL-98 will be held in
conjunction with the `Agents World' event: a coordinated collection of
agent-related conferences and workshops to be held in Paris. The
ATAL-98 proceedings will be formally published as volume five of the
`Intelligent Agents' series from Springer-Verlag.

WORKSHOP THEMES

Themes of interest to ATAL-98 include, but are by no means restricted
to the following:

* Agent theories: What approaches (e.g., game theory, temporal/modal
logic) are appropriate for agent theory? How do these approaches
relate to one another?

* Agent architectures: What architectures are appropriate for
autonomous agents? How can such architectures be given a formal
semantics? How can different agent architectures be evaluated and
compared? What methodologies can be used to build agent-based
applications?
How close are these methodologies to existing formal specification
languages or object-oriented analysis and design methods?

* Agent languages: What programming paradigms are most suitable for
agents? How do agent-oriented languages differ from object-oriented
and logic programming languages? What are efficient implementation
mechanisms for these languages? What design tools and methodologies
are appropriate for the development of agent-based systems?

* Development techniques: What software engineering techniques are
most appropriate for developing agent-based systems? Can
object-oriented techniques be adapted? What specification,
refinement, and verification techniques are appropriate?

In addition, ATAL-98 will include two special paper tracks, and
submissions are particularly welcome on these:

* THE FUTURE OF THE BELIEF-DESIRE-INTENTION (BDI) MODEL

BDI theories have been around for more than a decade; different
logics, operational models, architectures, and applications have
been developed. However, there are a number of issues regarding
the
practical usefulness of BDI models - the gap between sophisticated
BDI Logics and their links to practical systems. More recently, a
number of attempts have been made at bridging this gap and on
extending
the BDI model to incorporate other aspects of rational agency.
Possible topics in this theme area include: BDI models for
multi-agent (team-oriented) systems; BDI models for adaptive
agents;
BDI models of perception, action, and communication;
BDI models and real-time behavior; comparison of different BDI
logics and architectures.

* AGENT LANGUAGES AND THEIR RELATIONSHIP TO OTHER PROGRAMMING
PARADIGMS

Many agent languages have been developed, a good deal of them
presented at earlier ATAL workshops. However, the influence that
these languages have had on the lives of professional programmer
today is negligible. The everyday reality for most programmers
is Java, ActiveX, C++, relational and object-oriented databases,
and CORBA. So what is the relationship between today's agent
languages and distributed object-oriented systems? What value
can agent-oriented languages add on top of these? How we
integrate `agent support' into existing programming paradigms,
making added value available to a large base of software
developers? What value can agent communication and coordination
languages add to CORBA? What is the potential of mobile agents?
What is the impact of mobility on the level of theories and
architectures of agents?

Papers that cross theme boundaries are of particular interest. An
example would be a paper that demonstrated how a particular agent
architecture embodied some theory of agency, or what benefits a
particular agent language can bring in a specific application domain.

SUBMISSION DETAILS

Those wishing to participate in the workshop should submit an original
research paper of up to 5000 words (approximately 13 pages maximum) to
the chair for their region. Electronic submission in PostScript is
strongly encouraged, but four single-sided hard copies will also
suffice. The first page should include the full name and contact
details (including email, full postal address, and telephone number if
possible) of at least one author. Formatting instructions are
available from the workshop WWW site (see above). The preproceedings
will be distributed at the workshop; the formal proceedings will be
published shortly afterwards.

Those wishing to attend without presenting a paper should send a brief
summary of their interests in agents to the organising committee chair
Anand Rao (anand@aaii.oz.au). Attendance will, of necessity, be
limited.

IMPORTANT DATES

Deadline for submissions Friday 6th February 1998
Notifications sent Friday 27th March 1998
Prefinal versions due Monday 1st June 1998
Workshop Thursday 2 July - Wednesday 8 July
1998
Second reviews sent end September 1998
Camera ready version due end October 1998
`Inteligent Agents V' published end January 1999

ORGANISING COMMITTEE

Anand Rao (GENERAL/AUSTRALASIA
CHAIR)
Australian AI Institute Email anand@aaii.oz.au
Level 6, 171 La Trobe Street Tel (+61 3) 663 7922
Melbourne, Victoria 3000, Australia Fax (+61 3) 663 7937

Munindar P. Singh (AMERICAS CHAIR)
Department of Computer Science Email singh@ncsu.edu
North Carolina State University Tel (+1 919) 515.5677
Raleigh, NC 27695-8206, USA Fax (+1 919) 515.7896

Joerg P. Mueller (EUROPEAN CHAIR)
Zuno Ltd. Email jpm@zuno.com
International House Tel (+44 181) 832 1510
London W5 5DB, U.K. Fax (+44 171) 395 7209

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Ron Arkin Georgia Tech, USA
Pete Bonasso USA
Hans-Dieter Burkhard Humboldt U, Germany
Cristiano Castelfranchi IP-CNR/U Siena, Italy
John-Jules Ch. Meyer U Utrecht, The Netherlands
Keith Decker U Delaware, USA
Frank Dignum Eindhoven U of Technology, The
Netherlands
Ed Durfee U Michigan, USA
Jacques Ferber LAFORIA, France
Jim Firby U Chicago, USA
Klaus Fischer DFKI, Germany
Michael Fisher Manchester Metropolitan U, UK
Stan Franklin Memphis U, USA
Fausto Giunchiglia IRST, Italy
Piotr Gmytrasiewicz U Texas at Arlington, USA
Afsaneh Haddadi Daimler-Benz, USA
Henry Hexmoor SUNY Buffalo, USA
Mark d'Inverno U. of Westminster, UK
Nick Jennings QMW, UK
David Kinny AAII, Australia
Kurt Konolige SRI, USA
Sarit Kraus Bar-Ilan U, Israel
Yves Lesperance York U, Canada
James Lester NCSU, USA
John-Jules Ch. Meyer U Utrecht, The Netherlands
Jeff Rosenschein AgentSoft/Hebrew U, Israel
Onn Shehory CMU, USA
Wei-Min Shen ISI, USA
Carles Sierra CSIC, Spain
Kurt Sundermeyer Daimler-Benz, Germany
Katia Sycara CMU, USA
Milind Tambe ISI, USA
Jan Treur Vrije U of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Mike Wooldridge QMW, UK

----------------------------------------------------
Dr. Joerg Mueller Fax. ++44 181 579 6443
ZUNO Ltd http://www.zuno.com/people/jpm
Email: jpm@zuno.com Mobile: --> /dev/null
Tel ++44 181 832 1510

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