Call for Papers Third International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems ICMAS'98 http://www-leibniz.imag.fr/MAGMA/ICMAS98 2 July (Thurs) - 8 July (Wed), 1998 Cite des Sciences - La Villette, Paris, France Multi-agent systems are computational systems in which several agents interact. The concept of "agent" as a computational entity that can accomplish goals has spawned a plethora of activity in artificial intelligence and more widely in computer science. Much of the conceptual power of this exciting new paradigm arises from the flexibility and sophistication of the interactions and the organizations in which the agents participate. Agents can communicate, cooperate, coordinate, negotiate with one another, both in advancement of their own goals and for the good of the overall system in which they are situated. Multi-agent systems may involve computational agents that are homogeneous or heterogeneous, they may involve activity on the part of agents having common goals or distinct goals, and they may involve participation on the part of humans as well as artificial agents. ICMAS is the premiere international forum specifically devoted to the study of agent interaction and the development of multiagent systems. ICMAS participants typically come from the physical, computational, and social sciences, and are drawn together by their mutual interest in understanding the phenomena that arise when agents interact, in investigating the interplay between agents as individuals and as participants in collective settings, and in formulating languages, architectures, and mechanisms that are specifically applicable to multiagent systems. ICMAS'98 TOPICS --------------- Building on the traditions of ICMAS'95 (June 1995) in San Francisco and ICMAS'96 (December 1996) in Kyoto, ICMAS'98 is committed to maintaining global involvement and disciplinary breadth, where the topics of interest will include but are not limited to: Interaction capabilities, constraints, and prefererences : * Communication languages and protocols (semantics, pragmatics, etc.) * Organization and social structure (agent roles, social laws, etc.) * Cooperative problem solving (collective goals driving individual choices) * Decentralized systems (individual choices driving collective behavior) * Mechanism design (incentives for aligning individual and group goals) Reasoning about coordinated interactions * Conflict resolution and negotiation * Multi-agent planning * Coalition formation and organization self-design * Agent modeling and plan recognition * Multi-agent learning * Distributed search and constraint satisfaction * Foundations (multi-agent logics, game-theory, economics, philosophy, etc.) Engineering, deploying, and evaluating multiagent systems * Agent programming languages * Multi-agent programming frameworks * Agent models and architectures * Standards for multi-agent technology (interaction protocols, languages) * Development and engineering methodologies * Evaluation of multi-agent systems * Testbeds and development environments * User interfaces and personalizable agents Practical applications * Agents in electronic commerce * Cooperative information systems * Distributed resource allocation * Information agents on the internet * Multi-agent simulations of social and biological systems * Multiagent vision and robotics * Believable agents in multi-agent settings * Interacting personal digital assistants * ...and many others... Contributions to ICMAS are encouraged to span several of these areas, since investigations into aspects of multiagent systems should tie together ideas on what the nature of the interactions are, how computational agents should operate within this framework, how the results have been developed and evaluated, and the practical significance of the work. AGENTS' WORLD CONTEXT --------------------- ICMAS'98 is the cornerstone of a comprehensive gathering of researchers interested in multiagent systems in numerous settings. Coordinated with ICMAS'98 will be held seven international events (six workshops and one competition): ATAL'98 Agents Theories, Architectures, and Languages Workshop focusing on Theory and Practice of Intelligent Agents CIA'98 Cooperative Information Agents Workshop focusing on Multi-Agent Systems and Databases IATA'98 Intelligent Agents for Telecommunications Applications Workshop focusing on Multi-Agent Systems & Telecommunications CRW'98 Collective Robotics Workshop focusing on Multi-Agent Systems and Robotics ACW'98 Agents in CommunityWare Workshop focusing on Multi-Agent Systems and Telematics MABS'98 Multi-Agent Systems and Agent-Based Simulation Focusing on MAS, Social Sciences & Artificial Life Paris'98 Featuring Robocup'98 and FIRA RWC'98 International Competition between Soccer Robots Teams ICMAS'98 and the seven coordinated events together comprise the "Agents' World" event that will be held over 5 full days (July 3-4-6-7-8, 1998), with tutorials presented the day before (July 2, 1998). The ICMAS'98 conference and the coordinated events will consist of technical sessions presenting reviewed papers and plenary sessions bringing together different aspects of this highly interdisciplinary area. ICMAS'98 SUBMISSIONS -------------------- Authors should submit five (5) copies of papers and an email version of the abstract by November 21, 1997 to one of the programme co-chairs. Papers received after the deadline will be returned unopened. All papers will be reviewed by the program committee, and authors will be notified of acceptance by February 13, 1998. Each paper should clearly indicate the nature of its scientific contribution, and the problems, domains, or environments to which it is applicable. Paper Format: Submitted papers must be printed on 8 1/2" x 11" or A4 paper using 12 point type (10 characters per inch for typewriters). Each page must have no more than 38 lines and an average of 75 characters per line. (This corresponds to LaTex article style, 12 point.) Each paper should have a single title page which includes a 150-word abstract and up to two topic areas covered by the paper. (These will be used to focus reviewing and ultimately to structure the technical program.) The length of the paper must be at most 5000 words. Multiple submission: If a paper might also be submitted to one of the other Agents' World events, this fact should be clearly indicated on the paper. More generally, a paper that has been (or will be) submitted to other conferences may be submitted to ICMAS'98 as long as (1) it is not published or presented at other conferences, (2) the author clearly indicates on his paper the other places where it has been submitted, and (3) the author notifies the program co-chair if he submits his paper to other conferences during the ICMAS'98 review process. Previously published papers or papers that have been accepted for publication in conference proceedings, books, or journals should not be submitted to ICMAS. Papers that have been or will be presented at small workshops/symposia whose proceedings are available only to attendees may be submitted. ICMAS'98 CHAIRS --------------- General Chair: Organizing Chair: Yves Demazeau Alexis Drogoul Laboratoire LEIBNIZ-IMAG Laboratoire LIP6 Universites de Grenoble et CNRS Universite de Paris 6 et CNRS 46 avenue Felix Viallet 4 place Jussieu F-38031 Grenoble cx F-75252 Paris Cedex 05 France France Yves.Demazeau@imag.fr Alexis.Drogoul@lip6.fr Programme Co-chairs: Europe/Africa: Americas: Asia/Pacific Rim: Nick Jennings Ed Durfee Mike Georgeff EE Department EE & CS Department Australian AI Institute Queen Mary & W. College University of Michigan 171 La Trobe Street Mile End Road 1101 Beal Avenue Melbourne, Victoria 3000 London E1 4NS Ann Arbor, MI 48109 Australia UK USA georgeff@aaii.oz.au N.R.Jennings@qmw.ac.uk durfee@umich.edu deb@aaii.oz.au Publicity Chair: Publication Chair: Finance Chair: Mike Wooldridge Piotr Gmytrasiewicz Mike Huhns EE Department CS and E Department E & CE Department Queen Mary & W. College University of Texas University of South Mile End Road at Arlington Carolina London E1 4NS Arlington, TX 76019 Columbia, SC 29208 UK USA USA M.J.Wooldridge@qmw.ac.uk piotr@cse.uta.edu huhns@sc.edu ICMAS'98 PROGRAMME COMMITTEE ---------------------------- Ron Arkin Georgia Institute of Technology, USA Magnus Boman Stockholm University, Sweden Cristiano Castelfranchi IP-CNR, Italy Krzysztof Cetnarowicz University of Mining and Metallurgy, Krakow, Poland Brahim Chaib-draa Laval University, Canada Philip Cohen Oregon Graduate Institute, USA Keith Decker University of Delaware, USA Jim Doran University of Essex, United Kingdom Alexis Drogoul Universite Paris 6, France Jacques Ferber Universite Montpellier II, France Klaus Fischer DFKI, Germany Francisco Garijo Telefonica Investigacion y Desarrollo, Spain Les Gasser National Science Foundation, USA Fausto Giunchiglia Universita di Trento, Italy Piotr Gmytrasiewicz University of Texas at Arlington, USA Vladimir Gorodetski Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia Rune Gustavsson University College of Karlskrona/Ronneby, Sweden Michael Huhns University of South Carolina, USA Toru Ishida Kyoto University, Japan David Kinny Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute, Australia Mark Klein Penn State University, USA Sarit Kraus Bar-Ilan University, Israel Christian Lemaitre Laboratorio Nacional de Informatica Avanzada, Mexico Jean-Pierre Muller University of Neuchatel, Switzerland Hideyuki Nakashima Electrotechnical Laboratory, Japan Eugenio Oliveira University of Porto, Portugal Ei-Ichi Osawa Sony Computer Science Laboratory Inc., Japan Lin Padgham Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia H. Van Dyke Parunak Industrial Technology Institute, USA John Perram Odense University, Denmark Anand Rao Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute, Australia Antonio Rocha Costa Pontifica Univ. Catolica do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil Jeff Rosenschein Hebrew University, Israel Tuomas Sandholm Washington University, USA Sandip Sen University of Tulsa, USA Carles Sierra AI Research Institute, Spain Munindar Singh University of North Carolina, USA Donald Steiner Siemens, Germany Leon Sterling The University of Melbourne, Australia Katia Sycara Carnegie-Mellon University, USA Milind Tambe University of Southern California, USA Jan Treur Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands Garimella Uma D E Shaw India Software Ltd, India Walter Van de Velde Riverland Next Generation, Belgium Jacques Wainer UNICAMP Campinas, Brazil Gerhard Weiss Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Germany Mike Wellman University of Michigan, USA Wayne Wobcke The University of Sydney, Australia Mike Wooldridge Queen Mary & Westfield College, United Kingdom Makoto Yokoo NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Japan Chengqi Zhang The University of New England, Australia Shi Zhongzhi Institute of Computing Technology CAS, China ICMAS'98 ADVISORY COMMITTEE --------------------------- John Campbell Christiano Castelfranchi (University College of London, UK) (Inst de Psicologia, CNR, Italy) Susan E. Conry Yves Demazeau (Clarkson University, USA) (LEIBNIZ/CNRS, France) Edmund Durfee Jacques Ferber (Univ. of Michigan, USA) (Univ. of Montpellier, France) Les Gasser Michael Georgeff (USC, USA) (Australian AI Institute, Australia) Carl Hewitt Michael N. Huhns (MIT, USA) (Univ. of S. Carolina, USA) Toru Ishida Nick Jennings (Kyoto University, Japan) (Queen Mary and W. College, London, UK) Christian Lemaitre Victor Lesser (LANIA, Xalapa, Mexico) (Univ. of Massachusetts, USA) Jean-Pierre Muller Jeffrey Rosenschein (Univ. Neuchatel, Switzerland) (Hebrew University, Israel) Donald Steiner Katia Sycara (Siemens AG Germany) (CMU, USA) Mario Tokoro (Keio Univ. / Sony CSL, Japan) FURTHER INFORMATION ABOUT ICMAS'98 AND OTHER AGENTS' WORLD COORDINATED EVENTS ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- More detailed information about ICMAS'98 and Agent's World is available on : ICMAS'98 http://www-leibniz.imag.fr/MAGMA/ICMAS98 Agents' World http://www-lipn.univ-paris13.fr/AgentsWorld The ICMAS'98 and the seven coordinated events will be held at Cite des Sciences - La Villette, in the northern part of Paris intra-muros. More detailed Information about the Cite des Sciences is available at : Cite des Sciences http://www.club-internet.fr/cite-sciences -------------------------------------------------------------------------------