The Fifth International Workshop on AGENT THEORIES, ARCHITECTURES, AND LANGUAGES (ATAL) 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. 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 TENTATIVE PROGRAM COMMITTEE Ron Arkin Georgia Tech, 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 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 Nick Jennings QMW, UK Sarit Kraus Bar-Ilan U, Israel Yves Lesperance York U, Canada James Lester NCSU, USA Jeff Rosenschein AgentSoft/Hebrew U, Israel 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 AGENTS' WORLD ATAL' 98 is a key component of a comprehensive gathering of researchers interested in multi-agent systems in numerous settings. Coordinated with ATAL' 98 will be held seven other international events (one conference, five workshops and one competition): ICMAS'98 Multi-Agent Systems Conference focusing on Multi-Agent Systems CIA'98 Cooperative Information Agents Workshop focusing on Multi-Agent Systems and Databases IATA'98 Intelligent Agents for Telecommunications Applications Workshop focusing on Multi-Agent Systems & Telecommunications CRW'98 Collective Robotics Workshop focusing on Multi-Agent Systems and Robotics ACW'98 Agents in CommunityWare Workshop focusing on Multi-Agent Systems and Telematics MABS'98 Multi-Agent Systems and Agent-Based Simulation Focusing on MAS, Social Sciences & Artificial Life Paris'98 Featuring Robocup'98 and FIRA RWC'98 International Competition between Soccer Robots Teams The eight events of Agents' World will be held over 5 full days (July 3-8, 1998). A tutorial programme is offered the day before (July 2, 1998). More detailed information about Agent's World is available at: http://www-lipn.univ-paris13.fr/AgentsWorld