This conference will bring together researchers interested in modeling and building autonomous agents. Agents are computational systems that inhabit dynamic, unpredictable environments. They interpret sensor data that reflect events in the environment and execute motor commands that produce effects in the environment. Agents can take many different physical forms, depending in part on the nature of their environments.
Agents inhabiting the physical world typically are robots.
Agents that perform primarily computational functions, but interact with the physical world may be called expert assistants. Similarly, agents can play many different roles in their environments, as illustrated in the following selected examples. Some robots may work in inhospitable physical environments, interacting primarily with other robots and physical objects. Others may work among and assist people in everyday environments, such as offices. Softbots may act as personal assistants running on the workstations of individual users or act as public information brokers running on a network.