From: huhns@mcc.com (Michael N. Huhns)
Subject: CFP for 12th Workshop on DAI
Reply-To: huhns@mcc.com
Organization: MCC, Austin, TX
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1992 13:25:37 GMT


                        Call for Participation

  12th International Workshop on Distributed Artificial Intelligence

                          Hidden Valley Resort
                      Hidden Valley, Pennsylvania

                            May 18-20, 1993

Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) is concerned with the study of
knowledge and action as embodied in multiagent intelligent systems that
include both humans and computers. More specifically, it is concerned
with using computational models to understand coordination in both
cooperative and competitive situations.  Coordination is necessary to
enable efficient resource use, synchronization of agent actions, and
informed balancing of decision tradeoffs in achieving agents' goals.


The objective of the 12th International Workshop on DAI is to bring
together researchers and practitioners interested in the broader issues
of coordinating intelligent agents. Diverse perspectives and approaches
are of interest including models of coordination, cooperative
distributed problem solving, integration of heterogeneous systems,
knowledge representation at social and organizational levels,
distributed search and constraint satisfaction, cognitive modeling of
multiagent interactions, coordination support tools.

Participation at the Workshop will be by invitation only and will be
limited to approximately 40 people.  To participate, please submit a
technical paper describing original research or significant applications
in DAI to the Workshop chair. Preference will be given to work that
addresses one or more of the five DAI themes listed below.  We
specifically discourage the submission of papers in areas such as
fine-grained parallelism, hardware or language-level concurrency, and
connectionism, because we feel that work in these areas is more
appropriate for other workshops.  A small number of "interested
observers" may also be invited to attend.  If you would like to be
considered for attendance on this basis, please submit a written request
justifying your participation.

To encourage participants to relate their work to ongoing themes in DAI
beforehand, papers are solicited for (but not strictly limited to) the
following themes:

1.  Coordination/Collaboration Knowledge: The identification, encoding,
and use of generic knowledge for coordination and collaboration.  This
theme focuses on general knowledge about resolving conflicts,
compromising, and cooperating.

2.  Coordination as Search: When viewing coordination as a search
process, decisions are needed regarding algorithms for conducting the
search, heuristics for controlling the search, and protocols for
exchanging and updating portions of the search space.  This theme
broadly includes approaches such as distributed constraint satisfaction
search, search for compatible distributed plans, search in cooperative
problem-solving and design, negotiation search, and search for
appropriate organizational designs.

3.  Intelligent Agents in Enterprises and Applications: Embedding DAI
systems in computer networks used by people to solve problems allows the
automation of both cooperative problem-solving activities (such as
distributed interpretation or diagnosis) and coordination activities
(such as information filtering or resource allocation).  This theme
includes issues in identifying suitable applications of DAI technology
and in developing DAI agents that interact effectively with people and
each other.

4.  Modeling through Communication and Observation in Adversarial and
Cooperative Systems: Building and maintaining models of other agents'
beliefs, abilities, goals, and plans is crucial for intelligent
interaction.  Topics in this theme include acquiring modeling
information (through communication and plan recognition) and using
models to make decisions about communication (deciding whether to tell
the truth, eliciting more information), and about other actions.

5. Societies and Organizations of Agents: Viewing the society rather
than the agent as the building block on which to base collaborative
behavior.  Topics in this theme include emergent system behavior, swarm
intelligence, organizational schemes, issues in organizational design
and redesign, and self-adapting organizations.

These themes are not mutually exclusive, and we welcome papers that
integrate insights from more than one of them.

As DAI matures, it is appearing more and more in real-world
applications.  This welcome development raises the need for engineering
principles that will help match particular techniques with kinds of
problems.  We welcome both theoretical and applied papers, and encourage
each to contribute to the development of these principles.
Specifically, theoretical papers should explain how their principles and
methods can be mapped to applications, while applied papers should
explain why they use the techniques that they do and why other
approaches are less appropriate for the problem at hand.

LOCATION:

DAI'93 will be held at the Hidden Valley Resort, Hidden Valley,
Pennsylvania.  Hidden Valley Resort is 60 miles from Pittsburgh. The
participants can arrive by rental car or by shuttle van (price depends
on number of participants on a particular ride).  The resort offers a
variety of activities including, indoor/outdoor pools, whirlpool, sauna,
lake fishing and boating, hiking and bike trails, tennis, basketball,
volleyball and golf.  We'll continue the DAI tradition of a
participatory workshop by active practitioners in a setting that offers
seclusion, natural beauty, and recreational intermissions.

SUBMISSION DETAILS:

Papers for review should be a maximum length of 15 pages, in a legible
format (font size 11 or 12 pt).  Please submit 4 copies to Katia P.
Sycara (address below) and indicate on the title page the theme(s) for
which the paper is most relevant.  Also, please include an electronic
mail address for the appropriate contact person along with the
submission.

DATES:

Deadline for paper submissions (4 copies, 15 page max): February 1, 1993

Notification of acceptance:                             March 20, 1993

Final papers due (for distribution at the Workshop):    April 20, 1993

We expect that revised versions of the best papers from the Workshop
will be considered for inclusion in an appropriate journal or in a
published collection.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE:

Katia P. Sycara (chair)
The Robotics Institute
School of Computer Science
5000 Forbes Av.
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA. 15213
Tel: (412) 268-8825
FAX: (412) 621-5477
e-mail: katia@cs.cmu.edu

Susan Conry, Clarkson University            <conry@sun.soe.clarkson.edu>
Edmund Durfee, University of Michigan      <durfee@caen.engin.umich.edu>
Les Gasser, University of Southern California     <gasser@morue.usc.edu>
Frank v. Martial, DETECON GmbH                          <martial@gmd.de>
Van Dyke Parunak, Industrial Technology Institute          <van@iti.org>
Jeff Rosenschein, Hebrew University                 <jeff@cs.huji.ac.il>
Evangelos Simoudis, Lockheed AI   <simoudis@titan.rdd.lmsc.lockheed.com> 
Marty Tenenbaum, Enterprise Integration Technologies  <marty@eitech.com>

ADVISORY COMMITTEE:

Mark Fox, University of Toronto, Canada
Jacques Ferber, LAFORIA, France
Michael Huhns, MCC, USA
Carl Hewitt, MIT, USA
Toru Ishida, NTT, Japan
Victor R. Lesser, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA
Eric Werner, INRIA, France
-- 
Cheers,
Michael N. Huhns
Newsgroups: comp.ai