Call for Papers

               Workshop on Agent Communication

         to be held preceding Autonomous Agents 2000
                       Barcelona, Spain
                         June 3, 2000

               http://wwwis.win.tue.nl/ac2000/


OBJECTIVES

This workshop builds on two successful predecessors:

1. The Agents-99 workshop on Specifying and Implementing Conver-
   sation Policies (http://www.boeing.com/special/agents99/), and
2. The IJCAI-99 workshop on Agent Communication Languages:  
   From Speech Acts to Conversations (http://wwwis.win.tue.nl/acl99/)

For this year, we are going to combine these workshops into a single one 
at Agents 2000.  We invite papers centered around the following issues 
in agent communication:

*  New approaches to the semantics of agent communication, focusing 
   on the link between the semantics of individual messages and the 
   compositional semantics of agent conversations; and

*  Recent work in the specification and implementation of agent con-
   versation policies, including the formal connections between poli-
   cies, ACL semantics, and agent tasks.

Over the past year or two, it has become increasingly clear that deployed 
agent systems tend to take a "conversation-centric" view of agent inter-
action, rather than a "semantics-centric" view.  That is, an agent's actual 
use of an ACL is almost always structured around identifying and sup-
porting a known set of conversational interactions with other agents, 
rather than dynamically planning the semantically coherent use of arbi-
trary ACL expressions.  This has prompted a renewed interest in agent 
conversation policies (CPs) and their relationship to the semantics of the 
ACL messages that compose them.  Therefore, in addition to the two 
core topics listed above, we also solicit papers which address related 
topics:

*  Formalisms for CPs, including how these formalisms are related to 
   the semantic theory, and the types of properties which can be proved 
   from the formalisms.

*  Implementation of CPs in agent systems, including negotiating and 
   downloading CPs dynamically.

*  Ontologies and axiomatizations of CPs and their relationship with 
   ACL semantic and pragmatic theory, as well as the policy-driven use 
   of ontologies in ACL content.

WORKSHOP FORMAT

The format of the workshop will be a combination of contributed pres-
entations and discussion among the participants.  There will be a small 
number of sessions, each focused on a specific topic selected among the 
ones listed above, each including a set of brief presentations and ample 
opportunities for discussion.

SUBMISSIONS

We encourage participants to submit a short paper (10 pages max), de-
scribing their work on one or more of the topics mentioned above.  All 
non-presenting participants will need to submit a one-page position 
statement which presents their view on agent conversation policies rela-
tive to the workshop topics.  We plan to post all accepted submissions 
and position statements on the workshop's web site by 4/21/00, so that 
participants may familiarize themselves with them in advance of the 
workshop.  Hard-copy submissions need to arrive by 3/17/00, and should 
be mailed to:

        Mark Greaves
        Mathematics and Computing Technology
        The Boeing Company
        P.O. Box 3707  MC 7L-43
        Seattle, WA  98124-2207
        USA

Email submissions (standard postscript or MS Word) are strongly pre-
ferred, and should be sent by 3/17/00 to:

        mark.t.greaves@boeing.com

All submissions must include the author's name(s), affiliation, complete 
mailing address, phone number, fax number and email address.  Please 
be aware that accepted papers will need to be in the ACM SIG proceed-
ings format, which can be found at:

        http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html

All accepted submissions and position statements will be published in the 
workshop proceedings.

IMPORTANT DATES

March 17, 2000  Papers due
March 31, 2000  Notification of acceptance
April 14, 2000  Final copies of papers due for workshop proceedings; 
                position statements due
June 3, 2000    Workshop

WORKSHOP LOCATION AND REGISTRATION

The workshop will be held in the same location as Agents 2000.  Consult 
the main Agents 2000 web page (http://www.iiia.csic.es/agents2000) for 
details.  All workshop participants are required to register for the Agents 
2000 conference.  Specific workshop registration will be handled through 
the Agents 2000 registration process.

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Jeff Bradshaw, The Boeing Company
Brahim Chaib-draa, Universite Laval
Frank Dignum, Eindhoven University of Technology
Mark Greaves, The Boeing Company

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

J. Allwood (University of Goteborg, Sweden) 
G. Arnold (Sun Microsystems, USA) 
M. Barbuceanu (University of Toronto, Canada) 
J. Bradshaw (Boeing, USA) 
M. Calisti (EPFL, Switzerland) 
B. Chaib-draa (Laval University, Canada) 
P. Cohen (Oregon Graduate Institute, USA) 
F. Dignum (Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands) 
T. Finin (University of Maryland, USA) 
M. Greaves (Boeing, USA) 
A. Haddadi (Daimler Benz, Germany) 
M. Klusch (DFKI, Germany) 
R. Kremer (University of Calgary, Canada) 
Y. Labrou (University of Maryland, USA) 
A. Mamdani (Imperial College, UK) 
J.-J. Meyer (Utrecht University, The Netherlands) 
M. Nodine (MCC Austin, USA) 
P. Noriega (INEGI, Mexico) 
D. Sadek (France Telecom, France) 
C. Sierra (AI Research Institute, Barcelona, Spain) 
M. Singh (North Carolina State University, USA) 
D. Steiner (Siemens AG, Germany) 
D. Traum (University of Maryland, USA) 
H. Weigand (Tilburg University, The Netherlands) 
M. Wooldridge (University of Liverpool, England)