***************************************************** for call for papers see below ***************************************************** ****************************************************** First Call for PARTICIPATION Fourth International Workshop CIA-2000 on COOPERATIVE INFORMATION AGENTS July 7 - 9, 2000 Boston Park Plaza Hotel, Boston, USA http://www.dfki.de/~klusch/cia2000.html ****************************************************** This workshop is sponsored in part by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, USA. Swiss Life, Switzerland. IFMAS International Foundation of Multiagent Systems. INVITED TALKS ------------- This year's CIA workshop again offers its participants an exclusive sequence of 8 invited talks of excellent, worldwide known experts in the field. The talks are devoted to the potential future of information agents as considered from different perspectives. * Jeff Kephart (IBM Thomas Watson Research Center, USA) Collaborating Rational Agents for Next-Generation E-Commerce. * Rosalind W. Picard (MIT Media Arts and Sciences, USA) Affective Computing for Future Agents. * Elisabeth Andre (DFKI Intelligent User Interfaces Lab, Germany) Life-Like Synthetic Characters in the Internet: The Future Landscape. * Todd Papaioannu (Loughborough University, MSI, UK) Mobile Information Agents for Cyberspace - State of the Art and Visions. * Richard J. Doyle (NASA JPL, USA) Inspiration for Future Autonomous Space Systems. * Jan Treur (Free University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands) Design of Collaborative Information Agents. * Paul Davidsson (University of Karlskrona/Ronneby, SOCS, Sweden) Emergent Societies of Information Agents in Future Cyberspace. * Frank Dignum (Technical University of Eindhoven, The Netherlands) Advanced Communication of Collaborating Information Agents. PROGRAM & PROCEEDINGS --------------------- In addition to the invited talks CIA-2000 offers you 14 regular high-quality talks which will report on recent progress in the area of intelligent information agents. Updated information on the preliminary program can be found at: http://www.dfki.de/~klusch/cia2000prog.html The CIA workshop proceedings are published in the Springer LNAI series (LNAI vol. 1202, 1435, 1652). Proceedings of CIA-2000 workshop will be available at the workshop. REGISTRATION ------------ The 4th intl CIA-2000 workshop is a federated event of and hosted by the 4th intl conference on Multiagent Systems ICMAS-2000. CIA-2000 registration fee amounts to - Early (Received By May 1, 2000): 250 USD - Late (Received After May 1, 2000): 300 USD - On-Site: 350 USD Subtract $25 if you are also registering for ICMAS-2000 conference. Registration fee entitles individual participant to complete access to to CIA-2000 Workshop on Cooperative Information Agents, and associated proceedings and events. For registration please fill in and send, fax or email registration form to be obtained at the workshop's web page: http://www.dfki.de/~klusch/cia2000register.html or at ICMAS-2000 web page: http://icmas.lania.mx/ to ICMAS-2000,c/o Professor Michael N. Huhns Electrical Eng. and Computer Science Dept. University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208 USA Fax: +1-803-777-8045 email: huhns@sc.edu LOCATION & ACCOMODATION ----------------------- Since CIA-2000 workshop is a federated event of ICMAS-2000 conference. Both, CIA-2000 and ICMAS-2000, share the same conference site which is the Boston Park Plaza Hotel in Boston, USA: http://www.bostonparkplaza.com/ The ICMAS-2000 organizers have arranged special room rates with the Boston Park Plaza Hotel. These rates (excluding applicable taxes) per night are $160 (single), $180 (double), $375+ (suite). Additional persons are $20 per night. Rollaway beds are in addition subject to a $25 fee per stay. For less expensive hotels in the Boston city area you may check, for example, the Boston City Guide (including hotels): http://www.worldexecutive.com/cityguides/boston/maps.html or the Boston Hotel Guide: http://boston.hotelguide.net/ Please note: Rooms in Boston are already scarce in coming July, as it is a very busy time. It is highly recommended to make your room reservations as early as possible! CONTACT ------- Matthias Klusch German AI Research Center (DFKI GmbH) Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3, 66123 Saarbrücken, Germany Tel.: +49-681-302-5297 Fax: +49-681-302-2235 EMail: klusch@dfki.de ************************************************************ ************************************************************ EXTENDED DEADLINE: Feb 07, 2000 SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS ********************************************* Fourth International Workshop CIA-2000 on COOPERATIVE INFORMATION AGENTS July 7 - 9, 2000 Boston, USA ********************************************* http://www.dfki.de/~klusch/cia2000.html This workshop is co-sponsored by - NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, USA. - Swiss Life AG, Switzerland. - IFMAS International Foundation for Multiagent Systems. It is co-located with the ICMAS-2000 conference. IMPORTANT DATES =============== Deadline for Paper Submission: JANUARY 24, 2000 Notification of Acceptance/Rejection: March 10, 2000 Deadline for Camera-Ready Paper: March 27, 2000 WORKSHOP THEME ============== Information agent technology is one of the major key technologies for the Internet and worldwide Web. It emerged as a response to the challenges of the cyberspace from both, the technological and human user perspective. An information agent is a computational software entity that has access to one or multiple, heterogeneous and distributed information sources, pro-actively searches for and maintains relevant information on behalf of users or other agents preferably just-in-time. In other words, it is managing and overcoming the difficulties associated with information overload. Although low-level infrastructure has been developed to support interoperability between heterogeneous databases and application programs, this is not sufficient when dealing with higher-level object organizations such as vertical business object frameworks and workflows. Existing multi-database or federated database systems do not even support any kind of pro-active information discovery. One key challenge of advanced information systems is to balance the autonomy of databases and legacy systems with the potential payoff of leveraging them by the use of information agents to perform collaborative work. Development of information agents requires expertise from different research disciplines such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), advanced databases and knowledge base systems, distributed information systems, information retrieval, and Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Like in the previous CIA workshops, all hot topics in the research area of intelligent and collaborating information agents are covered by the CIA-2000 workshop. TOPICS ====== Topics are but not limited to: * SYSTEMS and Applications of Information Agents - Architectures, prototypes and fielded systems of collaborating information agents for information discovery and management in the Internet and Web. - Issues of Programming Collaborative Information Agents for the Internet. * ADAPTATION and Learning Applied to Information Agents - Advanced methods for single and multiagent system learning. - Performance, relationship and application of multiagent learning for collaborating information agents. - Self-emerging collaboration among information agents. - Computation and action under limited resources. - Methods for automated uncertain reasoning for knowledge based information agents. - Distributed, adaptive Information Retrieval * MOBILE Information Agents and Issues of Security in the Internet - Applications of cooperating mobile information agents in wearable computers, hand-held and/or satellite-based control devices (WAP-compliant Web handies, communicators, etc.). - Architectures, environments and languages for mobile and secure performance of information agents and servers. * RATIONAL Information Agents and Electronic Commerce - Virtual Agent-Based Marketplaces, Coalition Formation, Auctions. - Electronic Commerce with incomplete and uncertain informations. - Economic Models of cooperative problem solving among rational information agents in open information environments. - Standards for privacy of communication, security, and jurisdiction for agent-mediated deals. * Advanced Database, Information System and Knowledge-Base Technology - Application of techniques for Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery in open, distributed and dynamically changing environments. - Management of uncertain and incomplete knowledge for information gathering on the Internet or large corporate Intranets. * Construction and Reuse of Ontologies for Multiagent Information Gathering * Human-Agent Interaction and Intelligent User Interfaces for Information Agents - Synthetic agents, believable avatars, and 3-D multimedia-based representation of user information spaces in the Internet. - Models and implementation of advanced interfaces for conversation and dialogue among information Agents and Users. - Dynamic inspection of information agents' work by the user. PROCEEDINGS =========== The workshop proceedings including all accepted papers will be published by Springer as a volume in the LNAI series (Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence). The proceedings of the CIA-97, CIA-98, CIA-99 workshops appeared as LNAI Vol. 1202, 1435 and 1652 respectively. PREPARATION & SUBMISSION OF PAPERS ================================== The length of each paper should not exceed 12 pages. All papers must be written in English. Submissions will be refereed for quality, correctness, originality and relevance. Papers accepted or under review by other conferences, workshops or journals are not acceptable. Papers not conforming to the above requirements may be rejected without review. For preparation of camera-ready papers to be submitted please follow the instructions for authors available at the Springer LNCS Web page: http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html For those not using the Springer LNCS style files: The paper must be formatted in A4 size using 10 point Times. (If Times is not available, please use one of the similar typefaces widely used in phototypesetting.) Printing area should be 12.2 x 19.3 cm, and the interline distance should be arranged in such a way that some 42 to 45 lines occur on a full-text page. Each submission includes the full paper (title, authors, abstract, text), and in addition a separate title page with the title, a 300-400 word abstract, a list of keywords, authors (names, addresses, email addresses, telephone and fax numbers). You may submit your paper by Electronic Mail or Postal Mail. + Submission by E-Mail: Please send your contribution in postscript format (preferably in A4) printable, as compressed file to: klusch@dfki.de + Submission by Postal Mail: Please send 4 hard-copies of your contribution to the following address. (please do not tack the pages together.) Dr. Matthias Klusch DFKI GmbH Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3 66123 Saarbruecken Germany ORGANIZATION ============ General Chair: Matthias Klusch (DFKI GmbH, Germany) Co-Chairs: Larry Kerschberg (George Mason University, USA) Mike Papazoglou (University of Tilburg, The Netherlands) Onn Shehory (IBM Research, Israel) Programme Committee: Sonia Bergamaschi (University of Modena, Italy) Cristiano Castelfranchi (NRC Rome, Italy) Paul Davidsson (University of Karlskrona/Ronneby, Sweden) Frank Dignum (TU Eindhoven, The Netherlands) Tim Finin (University of Maryland, USA) Klaus Fischer (DFKI GmbH, Germany) Chihab Hanachi (University of Toulouse, France) Mike Huhns (University of South Carolina, USA) Vipul Kashyap (Telcordia Technologies Inc., USA) Jeffrey Kephart (IBM Research, USA) David Kinny (University of Melbourne, Australia) Yasuhiko Kitamura (Osaka University, Japan) Sarit Kraus (Bar-Ilan University, Israel) Zakaria Maamar (National Defence Department DREV, Canada) Sascha Ossowski (Rey Juan Carlos University, ESCET, Spain) Aris Ouksel (University of Illinois at Chicago, USA) Paolo Petta (AAII Vienna, Austria) Ulrich Reimer (Swiss Life AG, Switzerland) Jeff Rosenschein (Hebrew University Jerusalem, Israel) Sandip Sen (University of Tulsa, USA) Carles Sierra (IIIA CSIC Barcelona, Spain) Katia Sycara (Carnegie Mellon University, USA) Jan Treur (Free University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands) Christian Tschudin (Uppsala University, Sweden) Jose Vidal (University of South Carolina, USA) Gerhard Weiss (TU Munich, Germany) Mike Wooldridge (University of Liverpool, UK) Jian Yang (CSIRO, Australia) --------------- CONTACT For more information about the workshop please contact: Matthias Klusch DFKI German AI Research Center Ltd. Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3 66123 Saarbruecken, Germany Phone: +49-681-302-5297 Fax: +49-681-302-2235 EMail: klusch@dfki.de URL: http://www.dfki.de/~klusch