ATAL-2000

The Seventh International Workshop on

Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL-2000)

Boston, USA - July 7-9, 2000

Held in conjunction with ICMAS-2000

News

Call for participation/schedule

Introduction

As we turn to a new millennium, intelligent agents are one of the most important recent developments in computer science. Agents are of interest in many important application areas, ranging from human-computer interaction to industrial process control. The ATAL workshop series aims to bring together researchers interested in the agent-level, micro aspects of agent technology. Specifically, ATAL-2000 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 only if they explicitly relate to the workshop themes.

ATAL-2000 will be held in conjunction with the ICMAS'2000 conference and a set of other agent-related workshops and tutorials. The ATAL-2000 proceedings will be formally published as volume seven of the Intelligent Agents series from Springer-Verlag.

Workshop Themes

As the title suggests, the workshop has three main themes:

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?

In addition, ATAL-2000 will include two special paper tracks, and submissions are particularly welcome on these:

Autonomy - theory, dimensions, and regulation: In 1947 Alan Turing, challenging Lady Lovelace's famous truism, said that our intention in building computers had been that of treating them like slaves, of giving them tasks that are so completely specified that the user may know at each instant what is being done. Until now he says, machines have been used only in this way; but must this remain the case forever?. Agents are, in fact, beyond Lady Lovelace's limits, and this comes precisely from their "autonomy": in learning, in directly accessing information from the world, in planning and problem solving, in taking initiatives, in having their own goals, etc. Autonomy is a foundational notion for agents, but what exactly is it? How do we characterise it? Are there different dimensions of autonomy and measures of degrees of autonomy? Can we distinguish between autonomy with respect to the user, with respect to other agents, or with respect to a "role" in an organisation? How is autonomy related to initiative and responsibility? How can we control, intervene on, and adjust agents' autonomy during their collective activity in order to obtain the desired services or global result? What is the tradeoff between autonomy, trust, and lack of control?
Agent development tools: This track seeks to examine the state of the art (or lack thereof) in tools for developing agents and agent systems. In this context, "tools" include complete agent programming environments, testbeds, environment simulators, component libraries, and specification tools. Relevant issues to examine include: How do existing development tools compare and differ? How does a tool suggest/support/enforce a particular design methodology, theory of agency, architecture, or agent language? Can agent development tools go beyond collections or libraries of pre-built functionality? Why, as more and more development tools become available, do most systems seem to be developed without any specialised tools (something more than "Not Invented Here")? Is there any evidence that agent development tools actually increase programmer productivity and/or the quality of the resulting systems? As we move towards the era of more "fielded" systems and prototypes, what is the continuing role of testbeds and simulators? What are the differences in development tools oriented toward the research community versus the agent application community, and are we already seeing a significant lag between theory and practice? Are there obvious development tools, that are unique to agent-based system development, that have yet to be built? Survey papers and case studies that focus on how a development tool directly contributed to an application are also appropriate.

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 Yves Lespérance. If you wish your paper to be considered for one of the special tracks then mark this clearly on the front page. 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) of at least one author. Formatting instructions are available from the workshop WWW site. 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 one of the co-chairs. Attendance will, of necessity, be limited.

Timetable

Submissions due	March 27, 2000
Notifications sent	April 28, 2000
Prefinal versions due	May 30, 2000
Workshop	July 7-9, 2000

Timetable

Cristiano Castelfranchi	(CO-CHAIR)
Division of AI, Cognitive Modeling,	Email: castel@ip.rm.cnr.it
& Interaction, Institute of Psychology	Tel: (+39)-6-86090-518
National Research Council
Viale Marx 15, I-00137 Rome, Italy

Yves Lespérance	(CO-CHAIR)
Department of Computer Science	Email: lesperan@cs.yorku.ca
York University	Tel: (+1 416) 736-5053
Room 126, Chemistry and Comp. Sc. Bldg.
4700 Keele St.,
Toronto, ON, Canada M3J 1P3.

Program Committee

Ron Arkin	Georgia Institute of Technology, USA.
Chitta Baral	Arizona State U, USA.
Suzanne Barber	U of Texas at Austin, USA.
Michael Beetz	U of Bonn, Germany.
Stefan Bussmann	Daimler-Chrysler, Germany.
Lawrence Cavedon	RMIT, Australia.
Paolo Ciancarini	U of Bologna, Italy.
Phil Cohen	Oregon Graduate Inst, USA.
Rosaria Conte	IP-CNR, Italy.
Giuseppe De Giacomo	U of Rome, Italy.
Keith Decker	U of Delaware, USA.
Frank Dignum	Eindhoven U, Netherlands.
Alexis Drogoul	U of Paris VI, France.
Jacques Ferber	U of Montpellier II, France.
Klaus Fischer	DFKI, Germany.
Michael Fisher	Manchester Metropolitan Univ, UK.
Stan Franklin	U of Memphis, USA.
Fausto Giunchiglia	U of Trento, Italy.
Piotr Gmytrasiewicz	U of Texas at Arlington, USA.
Keith Golden	NASA Ames Res. Ctr., USA.
Barbara Grosz	Harvard U, USA.
Afsaneh Haddadi	Daimler-Chrysler, Germany.
Henry Hexmoor	U of North Dakota, USA.
Wiebe van der Hoek	Utrecht U, Netherlands.
Marc Huber	Intelligent Reasoning Systems, USA.
Mark d'Inverno	U of Westminster, UK.
Nick Jennings	University of Southampton, UK.
David Kinny	U of Melbourne, Australia.
Sarit Kraus	Bar-Ilan U, Israel.
Michael Luck	U of Warwick, UK.
John-Jules Meyer	Utrecht U, Netherlands.
Joerg Mueller	Siemens, Germany.
Anand Rao	Mitchell Madison Group, UK.
Murray Shanahan	Imperial College, UK.
Onn Shehory	IBM Haifa Res. Labs, Israel.
Carles Sierra	CSIC, Spain.
Munindar Singh	North Carolina State U, USA.
Liz Sonenberg	U of Melbourne, Australia.
Katia Sycara	Carnegie Mellon U, USA.
Milind Tambe	USC-ISI, USA.
Jan Treur	Free Univ. Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Tom Wagner	U of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA.
Wayne Wobcke	British Telecom Labs, UK.
Mike Wooldridge	University of Liverpool, UK.
Eric Yu	U of Toronto, Canada.