Preliminary Call for Papers ********************************************************************* Second International Workshop CIA-98 COOPERATIVE INFORMATION AGENTS - Learning, Mobility, and Electronic Commerce for Information Discovery in the Internet. July 3 - 8, 1998 Cite de Sciences - La Vilette, Paris (France) at the 3rd International Conference on Multiagent Systems ICMAS-98 ********************************************************************* http://www.informatik.tu-chemnitz.de/~klusch/cia98.html The workshop is held in cooperation with - German interest groups on DATABASE SYSTEMS and DAI (Distributed Artificial Intelligence) of the German Society for Computer Science GI, and is supported by - Center for Information Systems Integration and Evolution (CISIE), USA. SCOPE ===== The research and application area of cooperative information agents is of rapidly increasing importance. Information agents are computational software systems that have access to multiple, heterogeneous and geographically distributed information sources. The autonomous agents have to face up to the increasing complexity of modern information environments ranging from relatively simple in-house information systems, through large-scale multidatabase systems, to the visionary Infosphere in the Internet. One of the main tasks of the agents is an active search for relevant information in non-local domains on behalf of their users or other agents. This includes retrieving, analyzing, manipulating, and integrating information available from different information sources. The development of cooperative information agents requires expertise from several different research areas, especially AI, DAI, Databases, and CSCW. It is particularly important to investigate to what extent AI methods can be applied for information discovery by groups or teams of information agents in the Internet. This concerns, e.g., the use of efficient techniques from machine learning, evolutionary computing, and symbolic or numerical approaches for uncertain reasoning. Moreover, commercial aspects of information gathering in the Internet are becoming more and more relevant, e.g., agents are paid and have to pay for services. Thus, methods for rational, utility-based cooperation among the agents are needed. In addition, mobile information agents seems to be attractive for a flexible, and efficient information discovery in constrained environments. The interdisciplinary CIA workshop series covers the whole thematic range of cooperative information agents. Each workshop focus on a few selected themes being of particular relevance and actuality. The CIA-98 workshop will build on the success of CIA-97 ('DAI meets Databases'). TOPICS ====== Workshop topics include but are not limited to o Architectures of information agents. o Knowledge discovery and data mining in large-scale information systems. o Construction and use of ontologies for multiagent information gathering. o Learning, interaction and organization of multiagent systems for information discovery in changing environments. o Communication among autonomous information agents. o Mobile information agents in the Internet. o Advanced protocols for negotiation and electronic commerce. Information agents in electronic markets. o Collaborative information agents in distributed WWW applications. o Issues of programming cooperative information agents for the Internet. o Multiagent Systems and Geographical Databases. o Game-theoretic and other microeconomic principles for rational information agents. o Security aspects for information discovery in the Internet. IMPORTANT DATES =============== Deadline for Paper Submission February 6, 1998 Notification of Acceptance/Rejection March 20, 1998 Deadline for camera-ready version April 3, 1998 The workshop proceedings will be published by Springer Verlag as a volume in the series LECTURE NOTES IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (LNCS subseries). SUBMISSION ========== Each submission includes the full paper and in addition a separate title page with the title, authors (full address), a 300-400 word abstract, and a list of keywords. The length of submitted paper must be no more than 12 pages including all figures, tables, and bibliography. All papers must be written in English. For publication in the Springer LNCS series, please prepare a camera-ready version of your contribution together with the corresponding Springer style files "llncs" (for LaTeX) to be obtained by e-mail or by ftp as follows. - Mailserver: Send an e-mail message to svserv@vax.ntp.springer.de containing the line "get /tex/latex/llncs.zip" for the LaTeX style files. Sending "help" to the server prompts advice on how to interact with the mail server. The style files have to be unzipped and uu-decoded for use. - Ftp: The internet address is "trick.ntp.springer.de", the user id "ftp" or "anonymous". Please enter your e-mail address as password. The (above mentioned) files reside in "/pub/tex/latex/llncs". 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. With these settings, the interline distance should be arranged in such a way that some 42 to 45 lines occur on a full-text page. Papers not conforming to the above requirements may be rejected without review. Send three hard-copies or the postscript file (A4 SIZE) of your contribution to one of the (co-)chairs of the workshop (mail address below): klusch@informatik.tu-chemnitz.de weissg@informatik.tu-muenchen.de kersch@gmu.edu If you send hard-copies, please do not tack the pages of the paper together. REGISTRATION ============ Information about registration and the amount of registration fee will be stated in upcoming Call-for-Papers and at the workshop home page at http://www.informatik.tu-chemnitz.de/~klusch/cia98.html ............................... GENERAL CHAIR: Matthias Klusch (Technical University of Chemnitz, Germany) CO-CHAIRS: Larry Kerschberg (George Mason University, USA) Gerhard Weiss (Technical University of Munich, Germany) PROGRAM COMMITTEE: Gilbert Babin (Laval University, Canada) Wolfgang Benn (University of Chemnitz, Germany) Sonia Bergamaschi (University of Modena, Italy) Hans-Dieter Burkhard (Humboldt University Berlin, Germany) Brahim Chaib-draa (Laval University, Canada) Sharma Chakravarthy (University of Florida, USA) Keith Decker (University of Delaware, USA) Misbah Deen (University of Keele, UK) Yves Demazeau (Leibniz/IMAG/CNRS, France) Edmund Durfee (University of Michigan, USA) Frank Dignum (University of Eindhoven, Netherlands) Carl Hewitt (MIT AI Lab, USA) Toru Ishida (University of Kyoto, Japan) Leonid A. Kalinichenko (Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia) Takashi Kido (NTT Information Systems Labs, Japan) Ami Motro (ISSE Center GMU, USA) Erich Neuhold (GMD IPSI, Germany) Aris Ouksel (University of Illinois at Chicago, USA) Tuomas Sandholm (Washington University, USA) Sandip Sen (University of Tulsa, USA) Munindar P. Singh (North Carolina State University, USA) Michael Stillger (Humboldt University Berlin, Germany) Kurt Sundermeyer (Daimler-Benz Research, Germany) Katia Sycara (Carnegie Mellon University, USA) Robert Tolksdorf (Technical University of Berlin, Germany) Markus Tresch (ETH Zurich, Switzerland) Mike Wooldridge (Mitsubishi Digital Library Group, UK) For further informations please contact Matthias Klusch Gerhard Weiss Institute for Computer Science, Institute for Computer Science, Technical University of Chemnitz Technical University of Munich Strasse der Nationen 62, 80290 Munich, Germany 09107 Chemnitz, Germany Phone: +49-89-28922390 Phone: +49-371-5311511 Fax: +49-89-28928207 Fax: +49-371-5311530 weissg@informatik.tu-muenchen.de klusch@informatik.tu-chemnitz.de