The Fourth International Workshop on AGENT THEORIES, ARCHITECTURES, AND LANGUAGES (ATAL) Providence, Rhode Island, USA July 24-26, 1997 http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/faculty/mpsingh/activities/atal/ Intelligent agents are one of the most important developments in computer science in the 1990s. 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-97 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-97 will be held over the three days immediately preceding the AAAI-97 conference, also being held in Providence. The ATAL-97 proceedings will be formally published as volume four 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? This year there will be a special track on methodologies for agent-based systems. The track will include both full paper presentations and a panel session. Questions of interest include: Are variations on object-oriented techniques appropriate for agent-based systems? Are variations on techniques for real-time and distributed systems appropriate? What will agent-oriented requirements and specification techniques look like? What tools are available for agent-oriented software engineering? 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. 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 Munindar Singh. Attendance will, of necessity, be limited. TIMETABLE Submissions due April 18, 1997 Notifications sent May 23, 1997 Prefinal versions due July 1, 1997 Workshop July 24-26, 1997 ORGANISING COMMITTEE Munindar P. Singh (GENERAL/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 Anand Rao (ASIA/PACIFIC-RIM 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 Michael Wooldridge (EUROPEAN CHAIR) Mitsubishi Electric Digital Library Group Email mjw@dlib.com 18th Floor, Centre Point, 103 New Oxford Str Tel (+44 171) 395 7234 London WC1A 1EB, U.K. Fax (+44 171) 395 7209 Nicholas R. Jennings Department of Electronic Engineering Email N.R.Jennings@qmw.ac.uk Queen Mary & Westfield College Tel (+44 1 71) 975 5349 Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, U.K. Fax (+44 1 81) 981 0259 Joerg P. Mueller Mitsubishi Electric Digital Library Group Email jpm@dlib.com 18th Floor, Centre Point, 103 New Oxford Str Tel (+44 171) 395 7240 London WC1A 1EB, 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 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 Kurt Konolige SRI, USA Sarit Kraus Bar-Ilan U, Israel Yves Lesperance York U, Canada James Lester NCSU, USA Charles Rich MERL, USA Jeff Rosenschein AgentSoft/Hebrew U, Israel Wei-Min Shen ISI, USA Carles Sierra CSIC, Spain Devika Subramanian Rice U, USA Kurt Sundermeyer Daimler-Benz, Germany Katia Sycara CMU, USA Milind Tambe ISI, USA Jan Treur Vrije U of Amsterdam, The Netherlands