Call for Agents

FedCSIS 2013

2013-03-07T02:21:00.000-08:00

2013 Federated Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems
(FedCSIS)

Krakow, Poland, 8 - 11 September, 2013

http://www.fedcsis.org 

We would like to cordially invite you to consider contributing a paper
to the FedCSIS 2013 – a flagship international multi-conference of
the Polish Information Processing Society (PTI), organized in
cooperation with the IEEE Region 8 (Europe, Middle East and Africa);
SERSC: Science & Engineering Research Support soCiety, Informatics
Europe and the Asociacion de Tecnicos de Informatica, as well as the
IEEE Computer Society Chapter, and the IEEE Gdansk Computer Society
Chapter, Poland, Polish Chapter of the IEEE Computational Intelligence
Society (CIS), Polish Association for Information Systems, Polish
Society for Business Informatics and Polish Chamber of Commerce for
High Technology. Please also forward this announcement to your
colleagues and associates who could be interested in it. 

CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS

Proceedings will be published in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library
(additional post-publications as determined by the individual FedCSIS
events). Since 2012, Proceedings of the FedCSIS conference are indexed
in the Thomson Reuters Web of Science.

IMPORTANT DATES

- Paper submission: May 12, 2013
- Author notification: June 17, 2013
- Final submission and registration opening: July 8, 2013
- Conference date: September 8-11, 2013

FedCSIS EVENTS

The FedCSIS multi-conference consists of EVENTS (conferences,
workshops, consortia, tutorials, etc.), grouped into six conference
areas.

AAIA'13 - 8th International Symposium Advances in Artificial
Intelligence and Applications

* AIMA'13 - 3rd International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence in
Medical Applications

* ASIR’13 - 3rd International Workshop on Advances in Semantic
Information Retrieval

* RSKD'13 - International Workshop on Rough Sets and Knowledge
Discovery

* WCO'13 - 6th Workshop on Computational Optimization

* WEO-DIA'13 - 2nd Workshop on Well-founded Everyday Ontologies –
Design, Implementations & Applications

CSNS - Computer Science & Network Systems

* CANA'13 - 6th Computer Aspects of Numerical Algorithms

* MMAP'13 - 6th International Symposium on Multimedia Applications and
Processing

ECRM - Education, Curricula & Research Methods

* DS-RAIT'13 - Doctoral Symposium on Recent Advances in Information
Technology

* ISEC'13 - Information Systems Education & Curricula Workshop

iNetSApp - Innovative Network Systems and Applications

* SAMAS'13 - Strong Authentication Methods and Systems

* WSN'13 - 2nd International Conference on Wireless Sensor Networks

* SoFAST-WS'13 -2nd International Symposium on Frontiers in Network
Applications and Network Systems

IT4MBS - Information Technology for Management, Business & Society 

* ABICT'13 - 4th International Workshop on Advances in Business ICT

* Agent Day'13

* AITM'13 - 11th Conference on Advanced Information Technologies for
Management

* IT4L'13 - 2nd Workshop on Information Technologies for Logistics

* KAM'13 - 19th Conference on Knowledge Acquisition and Management

* MMT'13 - 3rd Workshop on Modeling Multi-commodity Trade: Towards
Smart Systems

* TAMoCo'13 - Techniques and Applications for Mobile Commerce

SSD&A - Software Systems Development & Applications

* ATSE'13 - 4th International Workshop Automating Test Case Design,
Selection and Evaluation

* IWCPS'13 - International Workshop on Cyber-Physical Systems

* PBDA'13 - Performance of Business Database Applications

* WAPL'13 - 4th Workshop on Advances in Programming Languages

PAPER SUBMISSION AND PUBLICATION

Papers should be submitted by May 12, 2013. Only papers presented at
the conference will be included in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library
proceedings entitled: "2013 Federated Conference on Computer Science
and Information Systems (FedCSIS)." The IEEE proceedings will be
published under nonexclusive copyright. The Events' organizers arrange
quality journals, edited volumes, etc. and may invite selected
extended and revised papers for post-conference publications
(information can be found at the websites of individual events). 

Proceedings will be submitted for indexation by following citation
index services:

* Thomson Reuters Conference Proceedings Citation Index
* The DBLP Computer Science Bibliography
* Scirus (Elsevier)
* SCOPUS
* The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) Inspec 
* getCITED: Academic research, citation reports and discussion lists
* as well as other databases

Chairs of FedCSIS Conference Series

Maria Ganzha, Leszek A. Maciaszek, Marcin Paprzycki

Contact FedCSIS at: secretariat@fedcsis.org

FedCSIS on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/groups/367888070292/

11th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS OF AGENTS AND MULTI-AGENT SYSTEMS (PAAMS'13)

2012-11-20T00:36:00.001-08:00

11th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS OF AGENTS AND MULTI-AGENT SYSTEMS (PAAMS'13)

http://www.paams.net
paams@usal.es
Salamanca (Spain), 22nd-24th May, 2013

Plenary Speaker

Longbing Cao - Agent Mining: The Synergy of Multiagent Systems and Data Mining.

SCOPE
Research on Agents and Multi-Agent Systems has matured during the last decade and many effective applications of this technology are now deployed. PAAMS provides an international forum to present and discuss the latest scientific developments and their effective applications, to assess the impact of the approach, and to facilitate technology transfer. PAAMS started as a local initiative, but has since grown to become THE international yearly platform to present, to discuss, and to disseminate the latest developments and the most important outcomes related to real-world applications. It provides a unique opportunity to bring multi-disciplinary experts, academics and practitioners together to exchange their experience in the development and deployment of Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. PAAMS intends to bring together researchers and developers from industry and the academic world to report on the latest scientific and technical advances on the application of multi-agent system, to discuss and debate the major issues, and to showcase the latest systems using agent based technology. It will promote a forum for discussion on how agent-based techniques, methods, and tools help system designers to accomplish the mapping between available agent technology and application needs. Other stakeholders should be rewarded with a better understanding of the potential and challenges of the agent-oriented approach.

TOPICS
Problems
·    Agent-based simulation and prediction
·    Distributed problem solving
·    Agent cooperation and negotiation
·    Agent societies and social networks
·    Real-time multi-agent systems
·    Human agent interaction, user interfaces
·    Adaptation, learning and personalization
·    Reputation, trust, privacy and security
·    Agent engineering and development tools
·    Evaluation, ethical and legal issues
Domains
·    Information recovery and information systems
·    Knowledge management and data intensive systems
·    Intelligent control and manufacturing systems
·    Embodied agents and autonomous systems
·    Multi-robot systems and real world robotics
·    Internet softbots and web intelligence
·    Virtual agents, animation and games
·    Pervasive agents and ambient intelligence
·    E-learning and educational systems
·    User-centered applications and assisting agents

DEMO AWARD
The best demo paper in PAAMS'13 will be awarded with 2000? and a diploma.

GRANTS
The BISITE research group (http://bisite.usal.es) of the University of Salamanca, organiser of PAAMS 2013, offers 40 grants/awards to facilitate the attendance to doctoral and young doctors both to the event itself (including Workshops and Special Sessions) and to the parallel collocated events.
More information: http://www.paams.net/grants

SUBMISSION
Review process
PAAMS welcomes the submission of application papers with preference to the topics listed in the call for papers. All submitted papers will undergo a thorough review process; each paper will be refereed by at least three experts in the field based on relevance, originality, significance, quality and clarity.
Types of submissions
They must consist of original, relevant and previously unpublished sound research results related to any of the topics of the conference.
Submitting papers
All papers must be formatted according to the Springer template, with a maximum length of 10-12 pages in length, including figures and references. All proposed papers must be submitted in electronic form (PDF format) using the Paper Submission Page.
Publication
Accepted papers will be included in PAAMS 2012 Proceedings. At least one of the authors will be required to register and attend the symposium to present the paper in order to include the paper in the conference proceedings. All accepted papers will be published by Springer Verlag in the LNCS/LNAI series.

IMPORTANT DATES
·    Paper submission deadline: November 26th, 2012
·    Notification of acceptance: January 28th, 2012
·    Camera-Ready papers due: February 25th, 2013
·    Conference Celebration: May 22nd-24th, 2013

COMMITTEES
Scientific
·    Yves Demazeau - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (France)
·    Toru Ishida - Kyoto University (Japan)
Organizing
·    Juan M. Corchado - University of Salamanca (Spain)
·    Javier Bajo - Technical University of Madrid (Spain)

CONTACT
Dr. Juan M. Corchado
Dr. Javier Bajo
Web: http://www.paams.net
Email: paams@usal.es
Tel: +34 923 294400 (Ext:1525)
Tel: +34 618 696589
Fax: +34 923 294514
----

http://www.paams.net/sites/default/files/CFP/PAAMS13_Call_For_Papers.pdf

Cooperative Robots and Sensor Networks (RoboSense 2012)

2012-02-27T06:17:00.000-08:00

The International Workshop on Cooperative Robots and Sensor Networks (RoboSense 2012) 

http://www.coins-lab.org/events/RoboSense12/   
**************************************************************************

Springer Special Edition

Best selected papers will be invited to submit an extended version of their papers to the special edition of Springer Book “Cooperative Robots and Sensor Networks” under the book series “Studies in Computational Intelligence”.

Overview

Wireless connected robots and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have enabled great potentials and a large space for ubiquitous and pervasive applications. Robotics and WSNs have mostly been considered as separate research fields and little work has investigated the marriage between these two technologies. However, these two technologies share several features, enable common cyber-physical applications and provide complementary support to each other.

The objective of this workshop is to bring together researchers from academia, and industry working in to both robotics and sensor networks areas to present and discuss recent advances and innovative ideas pertaining to these fields. Papers dealing with the coupling between robots and sensor networks are particularly sought. The workshop also looks for contributions about cyber-physical applications based on robotics and sensor networks, such as intelligent transportation systems, healthcare monitoring, industrial automation, etc.

The workshop will provide a relaxed forum to present and discuss new ideas, new research directions and to review current trends in these areas. The workshop will be based on short presentations that should encourage discussions among the attendees. Statements which are innovative, controversial or that present new approaches are specially sought.


Workshop Chairs

Anis Koubaa, Al-Imam Mohamed bin Saud University (Saudi Arabia)/CISTER Research Unit, Portugal.
Abdelmajid Khelil, TU Darmstadt, Germany


Important Dates

Abstract Submission: February 28, 2012 (extended)
Paper Submission: March 06, 2012 (extended)
Notification of Acceptance: April 06, 2012 
Final Manuscript Due: May 01, 2012
Authors Registration Due: May 10, 2012 



Call for Papers

The workshop is seeking original research and position papers dealing with hot topics in mobile robots and sensor networks. Innovative and/or controversial ideas are specially sought. Papers presenting integration between sensor networks and robotics fields will be particularly appreciated. The workshop welcomes papers in three main tracks:

    Wireless Sensor Networks Track
        Communication and Network Protocols (MAC and Network Layers issues)
        Wireless Technologies (IEEE 802.11, IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee, 6LoWPAN, RPL, WiMax, UWB)
        Localization and Tracking
        Link Quality Estimation
        Fundamental Theoretical Limits and Algorithms
        Performance Evaluation, Simulation and Modelling Tools
        Measurement and Experimental Tools
        Security and Privacy
        Programming Models and Languages
        Operating Systems
        Service-Oriented Architecture
        Hardware Design and Implementation
    Mobile Robots Track
        Path Planning
        Multi-Robot Task Allocation
        Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM)
        Coordination and Cooperation
        Autonomous Navigation
        Robot Localization
        Swarm Intelligence
        Multi-robot systems
        Unmanned vehicle systems
        Learning for control
        Bio-inspired robotic
        Probabilistic Exploration and Coverage
        Object Detection & Collision Avoidance
        Motion estimation
    Cyber-Physical Applications
        Intelligent Transportation Systems
        Vehicular Networks
        Health-Care Monitoring
        Surveillance
        Smart Home
        Industrial Automation
        Internet-of-Things
        Case Studies


TPC Members (in progress)

    Adel Alimi, National School of Engineering of Sfax, Tunisia
    Luis Almeida, University of Aveiro, Portugal
    Mário Alves, CISTER Research Unit, Portugal
    Raul Aquino, University of Colima, Mexico
    Adel Ben Mnaouer, Dar Al-Uloom University, Saudi Arabia
    Xianghui Cao, Zhejiang University, China
    Michel Devy, LAAS/CNRS Group, France
    José Ramiro Martínez de Dios, University of Seville, Spain
    Fakir Dawood, Yanbu University College, Saudi Arabia
    Bernardine Dias, Carnegie Mellon University, Qatar
    Rüdiger Dillmann, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
    Mohamed Elarbi, Al-Imam University, Saudi Arabia
    Joerg Haehner, University of Hannover, Germany
    Tian Huang, University of Warwick, UK
    Geoffrey A. Hollinger, University of Southern California, USA
    Jiong Jin, University of Melbourne, Australia
    Omar Lengerke, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro - Brazil
    Xu Li, University of Waterloo, Canada, Canada
    Rongxing Lu, University of Waterloo, Canada
    Daniel Mosse, University of Pittsburgh, USA
    Gian Pietro Picco, University of Trento, Italy
    Carlos Sagues, University of Zaragoza, Spain
    Silvia Santini, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
    Ye-Qiong Song, IINPL / INRIA Lorraine, France
    Yuuichi Teranishi, University of Osaka, Japan
    Takashi Tsubouchi, University of Tsukuba, Japan
    Naoki Wakamiya, University of Osaka, Japan
    Andreas Willig, Canterbury University, New Zealand
    Habib Youssef, University of Sousse, Tunisia
    Andrea Zanella, University of Padova, Italy
    Fumin Zhang, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
    Marco Zuniga, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany

Self-organizing Systems - IWSOS 2012

2012-02-27T01:03:00.000-08:00

* IFIP IWSOS 2012
* 6th International Workshop on Self-organizing Systems
*
* Main technical sponsor: the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP)
*
* Technical co-sponsor: the European Network of Excellence Euro-NF
*
*http://iwsos2012.ewi.tudelft.nl/
*
* Delft, The Netherlands
* March 15-16, 2012
*
********************************************************************

We cordially invite you to participate in IFIP IWSOS 2012.

The main theme of the workshop is to discover the network science behind self-organizing systems, to facilitate and advance the understanding, learning, modeling, and analysis of self-organizational processes in nature (e.g., metabolic, DNA, brain networks) and to apply the knowledge of self-organization to man-made networks and systems.

The goal of the IWSOS workshops is to bring together leading international researchers and practitioners to create a visionary forum for discussing the future of self-organization. IWSOS addresses theoretical aspects of self-organization as well as applications in communication and computer networks and complex systems.

The following key topics will be addressed:
- Design and analysis of self-organizing and self-managing systems
- Inspiring models of self-organization in nature and society
- Structure, characteristics and dynamics of self-organizing networks
- Techniques and tools for modeling self-organizing systems
- Robustness and adaptation in self-organizing systems
- Self-organization in complex networks like peer-to-peer, sensor, ad-hoc, vehicular and social networks
- Control of self-organizing systems
- Decentralized power management in the smart grid
- Self-organizing group and pattern formation
- Self-organizing mechanisms for task allocation, coordination and resource allocation
- Self-organizing information dissemination and content search
- Risks and limits of self-organization

IFIP IWSOS 2012 is a two-day workshop that features two keynote talks given by:
1. Prof. Shlomo Havlin, Bar-Ilan University, Israel
2. Prof. Karl Aberer, EPFL, Switzerland
The first day of the workshop will focus on presenting new research contributions in the field of self-organizing systems, while the second day revolves around short paper presentations, panel discussions, and interaction with the workshop participants.

The entire program can be viewed athttp://iwsos2012.ewi.tudelft.nl/?page_id=65.

** Venue
Delft University of Technology - Aula
Mekelweg 5, 2628 CC, Delft, The Netherlands
March 15 - 16, 2012

** Committees

* General Chairs
Piet Van Mieghem, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
David Hutchison, Lancaster University, United Kingdom

* Program Chairs
Fernando Kuipers, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Poul Heegaard, NTNU-Trondheim, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway

* Publicity Chairs
Maria Kihl, Lund University, Sweden
Karin Anna Hummel, University of Vienna, Austria (on leave) and Marie Curie Fellow at ETH Zurich, Switzerland

* Local Organization
Christian Doerr, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Huijuan Wang, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Wendy Murtinu-van Schagen, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

* Steering Committee
Hermann de Meer, University of Passau, Germany
David Hutchison, Lancaster University, UK
Bernhard Plattner, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
James Sterbenz, University of Kansas, USA
Randy Katz, UC Berkeley, USA
Georg Carle, TU Munich, Germany (IFIP TC6 Representative)
Karin Anna Hummel, University of Vienna, Austria (on leave) and Marie Curie Fellow at ETH Zurich, Switzerland

Agent-Oriented Software Engineering -AOSE 2012

2012-02-24T07:26:00.000-08:00

                        AOSE 2012
13th International Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering

********** SUBMISSION DEADLINE EXTENDED ***********


Held with AAMAS 2012, Valencia, Spain, June 4, 2012
http://winf.in.tu-clausthal.de/events/aose12


MOTIVATION

Since the early 1990s, multi-agent system researchers have developed a
large body of knowledge on the foundations and engineering principles
for designing and developing agent-based systems. The 12 past editions
of the agent-oriented software engineering workshop (AOSE) had a key
role in this endeavor. For 2012, the workshop organizers and the
steering committee propose to organize an edition of AOSE workshop aimed
at exploring the new emerging role of agent-oriented software
engineering as a bridge from the now consolidated agent oriented
programming languages and platforms, to recent systems modelling
paradigms like self-*, autonomic systems, and systems of systems (SoS).
Thus, it is our hope to explore from an agent-based perspective,
foundations, models, methods, architectures, and tools for
engineering future software-intensive IT eco-systems.

The workshop organizers plan to publish accepted papers on a USB stick
as part of the AAMAS workshop registration package.
Revised post-proceedings papers will later be published in
a volume of the Lecture Notes for Computer Science series.


GOALS and TOPICS

The general goal of this year workshop is twofold: The first goal is to
study the role of agent-oriented software engineering in the design
phase of agents development. It is well known and accepted that agents -
from the software engineering perspective - are of particular interest
as an analysis abstraction. This has been true for several years but the
most recent advancements in agent-oriented programming languages have
proposed new challenges: software engineers may now design and code
their solutions in terms of agents. The old need of moving to the
object-oriented level of abstraction is overpassed and the new
developing platforms allow for a more natural transformation of AO
analysis models into AO design models. This reality has been soon
perceived by researcher and practitioners. An example of this new trend
may be found in the refreshed interest about testing of agents.

The second goal concerns the other side of the proposed ideal bridge:
the needs of new design approaches specifically suited for facing the
needs of self-organizing systems, autonomic systems and systems of
systems. In the last years we have seen considerable research efforts on
these topics; however, only few of them have their scope and foundations
in the software engineering field.

Novel efforts are necessary to cope with these new challenges in order
to find specific solutions that could bring such systems from research
to industrialization. In this context, a means for bridging the above
mentioned research (and application) streams may come from the advances
on organizations, norms, and institutions. Are they mature enough for
being applied to stable agent-oriented languages and for contributing to
the engineering of self-organizing and autonomic systems? The proposed
aim is find an answer to this question or to propose further hints for
future investigations on the application of organizations, norms and
institutions to the design of agent-oriented systems.

Topics of regular papers include but are not restricted to:

* Agent-based concepts for systems of systems engineering
* Agent-based solutions for managing complexity in software engineering
* Agents and model-driven approaches
* Agents and services
* Agents for self-adaptive systems
* Alignment of agents with service-oriented software development
* Autonomy vs. dependability and robustness
* CASE tools to support agent-oriented software development in practice
* Coordination infrastructures for multi-agent systems
* Engineering multi-agent organizations
* Engineering self-organizing systems
* Goal-oriented design
* Implications of introducing agent-based solutions on the development organization
* Integration of agents with legacy systems
* Middleware integration of agent-based software
* Multi-agent based simulation
* Programming agents and multi-agent systems
* Qualities and tradeoffs of agent-based architectures
* Reusable design knowledge: patterns and reference architectures
* Social engineering
* Software architectures for multi-agent systems
* Standardization efforts for multi-agent systems
* Testing of agent-based software
* Validation of agent technology in practice
* Verification of agent-based software


AUTHOR GUIDELINES

AOSE welcomes the submission of theoretical, experimental,
methodological as well as application papers with a clear research focus
on the topics outlined above. Each paper will be evaluated by three
members of the PC. Papers that present a valuable idea that needs
further development can be accepted as a short paper.


SUBMISSIONS

Papers should be between 8 and 12 pages, including the text, figures,
and references. The submissions must be formatted according to the
Springer Verlag LNCS style. PDF format is required. Papers can be
submitted via EasyChair 'AOSE2012',
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=aose2012
The good receipt of your submission will be confirmed by email.


PUBLICATIONS

Pre-proceedings containing all accepted papers are provided
electronically on a USB stick as part of the AAMAS workshop registration
package. The plan is to publish revised versions of accepted papers in a
Lecture Notes in Computer Science volume. For this purpose, authors will
be given the opportunity to revise and re-submit their contributions
after the conference.


IMPORTANT DATES

Paper submission deadline: 11th March 2012
Paper notifications: 6th April 2012
Camera ready paper (pre-proceedings): 8th April 2012
Workshop: 4th June 2012


COMMITTEES

Organizing Committee
* Massimo Cossentino, National Research Council of Italy, Palermo, Italy
* Joerg P. Mueller, Technische Universitaet Clausthal, Institut for Informatik, Germany

Preliminary Program Committee:

Carole Bernon,Universite Paul Sabatier, France
Lars Braubach,University of Hamburg, Germany
Scott A. Deloach,Kansas State University, USA
Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni,University Pierre and Marie Curie, France
Giancarlo Fortino,Universita della Calabria, Italy
Aditya Ghose,University of Wollongong, Australia
Holger Giese,University of Potsdam, Germany
Adriana Giret,Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, Spain
Marie-Pierre Gleizes,Universite Paul Sabatier, France
Jorge Gomez-Sanz,Universidad Complutense Madrid, Spain
Juan Carlos Gonzalez Moreno,Universidad de Vigo, Ourense, Spain
Joao Leite,University of Lisbon, Portugal
Philippe Mathieu,Universite Lille 1, France
Frederic Migeon,Universite Paul Sabatier, France
Ambra Molesini,University of Bologna, Italy
Pavlos Moraitis,Universite Paul Descartes, France
Andrea Omicini,University of Bologna, Italy
Flavio Oquendo,Universite de Bretagne Sud, France
Juan Pavon,Universidad Complutense Madrid, Spain
Alexander Pokahr,University of Hamburg, Germany
Alessandro Ricci,University of Bologna, Italy
Fariba Sadri,Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, England
Valeria Seidita,University of Palermo, Italy
Onn Shehory,IBM Haifa Research Lab, Israel
Danny Weyns,Linnaeus University, Sweden

Multi-agent Systems and Social Networks (MASSN2012)

2012-02-21T01:13:00.000-08:00

The 1st International Workshop on

        Multi-agent Systems and Social Networks (MASSN2012)


co–located with the 2012 International Conference on

        Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2012)

 26-29 August 2012, Kadir Has University, Istanbul, TURKEY


It is our pleasure to invite you to participate in the The 1st International
Workshop on Multi-agent Systems and Social Networks (MASSN2012)  that is held as a part of the International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2012).

Social networks and multi-agent systems share both the structure and the scope, since they are composed of  individuals  connected with  some kinds  of 
relationship  and  they are  realized  for accomplishing individual and/or common
goals. A multi agent system is a system composed of multiple interacting agents; therefore, it is natural to think about synergies between social network and multi-agent system research and application. In fact, multi-agent system models, techniques and technologies have been used and have important potentialities for the study of social networks and the development of social network models. Moreover, the results coming from the experimentation of the more widespread social network systems could be used for the improvement of multi-agent system models, techniques and technologies.

This workshop aims at promoting the interchange among the two communities to allow a transfer of methodologies and to clarify the meaning of the respective terminologies which share many concepts but only at an informal level. 
    
The workshop aims not only at presentation of papers but also to promote the discussion about the following research topics:

    i) to show the relationships of multi-agent systems with social network models and techniques; and

   ii) to discuss about the use of multi-agent systems in development of social network theories and systems.

 
Topic of Interest
 

The scope of the The 1st International Workshop on Multi-agent systems and Social Networks (MASSN2012) includes, but is not limited to the following topics:

 · Multi-agent social network modeling and analysis
 · Multi-agent recommendation networks
 · Multi-agent community discovery
 · Multi-agent data mining and network analysis
 · Multi-agent evolution of patterns in the Web
 · Dynamics and evolution patterns of social networks
 · Organizational structure evaluation
 · Collaborative environments, incl. wikis
 · Applications of multi-agent social network analysis
 

Special Issue

The extended versions of selected papers presented during the MASSN 2012 workshop will be published in the special issue of the prestigious Social Network Analysis and Mining (SNAM) journal.

 
Paper Submission

Papers reporting original and unpublished research results pertaining to the above topics are solicited. New full paper submission deadline is May 7, 2012. These papers will follow an academic review process. Full paper manuscripts
must be in English with a maximum length of 8 pages (using the IEEE two-column
template). Submissions should include the title, author(s), affiliation(s), e-mail address(es),tel/fax numbers, abstract, and postal address(es) on the first page. Papers should be submitted to the https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=massn2012. If Web submission is not possible, manuscripts
should be sent as an attachment via email to kaya@firat.edu.tr by May 7, 2012. The attachment must be in PDF or Word .doc format.

It is important to note that IEEE CPS will publish the proceedings of ASONAM 2012 and hence all the rules and regulations of IEEE CPS will be applied as explained in the following link:

http://www.computer.org/portal/web/cscps/policies

Papers will be selected based on their originality, timeliness, significance,
relevance, and clarity of presentation. Authors should certify that their
papers represent substantially new previously unpublished work. Paper
submission implies that the intent is for one of the authors to present the
paper if accepted and that at least one of the authors register for a full
conference fee.


Key Dates

· May 7, 2012 : Full paper submission deadline
· June 1, 2012 : Notification of acceptance
· June 15, 2012 : Camera-ready papers due
· June 15, 2012 : Presenting author registration due
· August 26, 2012 : Workshop 
 

General Chair

· Brahim Chaib-draa, Computer Science and Software Engineering Department, Laval University, Canada

Email: chaib@ift.ulaval.ca
 

Workshop Co-Chairs

· Mehmet Kaya, Department of Computer Engineering, Firat University, Elazig, Turkey
Email: kaya@firat.edu.tr
· Mohsen Afsharchi, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Zanjan, Zanjan, Iran
Email: afsharchim@znu.ac.ir


Program Committee (To be extended)

· Reda Alhajj, University of Calgary, Canada
· Kae Won Choi, SeoulTech, Korea

· Sertan Girgin, Google France, France
· Krzysztof Juszczyszyn, Wroclaw University of Technology, Poland
· Keivan Kianmehr, University of Western Ontario, Canada
· Tansel Ozyer, TOBB University of Economics and Technology, Turkey
· Faruk Polat, Middle East Technical University, Turkey
· Mehmet Tan, TOBB University of Economics and Technology, Turkey

Multi-Agent System Technologies - MATES 2012

2012-02-18T03:38:00.000-08:00

MATES 2012 - The Tenth German Conference on Multi-Agent System Technologies
"Research and Innovation for a Smarter Society"

October, 10th-12th, 2012.
Trier, Germany
http://mates2012.uni-trier.de
===========================================================================

The German conference on Multi-Agent system TEchnologieS (MATES) provides an interdisciplinary forum for researchers, users (members of business and industry) and developers of intelligent agents and multi-agent systems. The thematic focus of this MATES 2012 is on technologies that enable societies and organisations to be more resilient, inter-connected and collaborative. The conference investigates technologies for truly open distributed systems --- covering a wide spectrum of approaches from self-organization and autonomous systems to agreement computing. Advances in research work, as well as prototyped or fielded systems of intelligent agents will be presented and discussed. The conference covers the whole range from theory to application of agent- and multi-agent technologies in order to promote theory and application of agents and multi-agent systems. The conference features an exhibition of practical applications with an advanced concept of agency. Integral part of the technical program will be an exhibition of a variety of tools for the development, and prototypes of all kinds of practical applications of agent and multi-agent technology at the conference venue. The conference will also host a doctoral consortium.

For the tenth time the German special interest group on Distributed Artificial Intelligence jointly with the steering committee of MATES organizes this international conference in order to promote theory and application of agents and multi-agent systems. Building on the sequence of agent-related events in Germany in the past such as VDI 1998 (Chemnitz), VertIS 2001 (Bamberg), and KI 2002 (Aachen), the MATES conference series (from 2003 to 2011) now is exclusively devoted to agents and multi-agent systems, and the cross-fertilization between agent theory and application. This year is also the 20th year of the German special inerest group on Distributed Artificial Intelligence – another reason for an inspiring conference on agents! The conference language is English.

Salve – welcome to Trier! The conference takes place in Germany’s oldest city - close to Saarbrücken, Frankfurt/Main and Luxemburg as well as the well-known Leibniz Center for Informatics (Schloss Dagstuhl).

The MATES series has been ranked by the Computing Research & Education initiative as a CORE B conference. The proceedings will be published as Springer LNCS.

Contact: mates2012@easychair.org

TOPICS OF INTEREST

MATES 2012 welcomes contributions from the field of agent-oriented computing and agent technologies. We solicit both basic as well as applied research papers on recent advances in the area of intelligent agents and multi-agent systems in general. Also papers reporting on the successful application of agent technologies in any kind of domain are very welcome. MATES 2012 encourages submissions from recent and emerging areas of interest such as a Autonomic Computing, Self-organisation and Agreement Technologies. Additionally, we encourage the submission of elaborated vision and challenge papers that discuss mid-term and long-term directions for research and application.

The topics of interest for MATES-2012 include, but are not limited to, the following:
• Agent-based simulation and analysis of social networks
• Agents and communities
• Large-scale agent-based simulation of cities, economies, etc.
• Adaptive agents and multi-agent learning
• Advanced theories of collaboration: Modelling and formation of teams, coalitions, groups, and organizations
• Agents and autonomic computing
• Agent and multi-agent architectures
• Agents and peer-to-peer computing
• Agents and pervasive computing
• Agents for Ambient Intelligence
• Agent-based service discovery, matchmaking, brokering, and composition
• Agent communication languages
• Agents for e-business and e-government
• Agent technologies in the context of service-oriented computing and architectures
• Agent to non-agent interoperability
• Agents in novel applications
• Application of agent-technologies in industrial practice
• Artificial social systems: Conventions, norms, institutions; trust and reputation
• Autonomous robots and robot teams
• Commitment, delegation, responsibility, and obligations in artificial and hybrid societies
• Complex systems and their management
• Coordination, negotiation, argumentation, and conflict resolution
• Deployed agent-based business applications
• Hybrid human and agent societies
• User modelling and interface agents
• Embodied conversational actors and believable agents
• Mobile agents
• Model-driven design of multi-agent systems
• Multi-agent-based simulation
• Multi-agent planning and scheduling
• Multi-agent platforms and tools
• Multi-agent (social) simulation and (cognitive) modelling with agents
• Practical aspects of programming agent systems: Robustness, fault tolerance, scalability and performance measurement
• Roles and structures, adaptive learning and cognition in organizational models
• Semantics of the dynamics of organizational models
• (Semantic) web services and agents
• Standards for agents and multi-agent systems

SUBMISSION DETAILS

Paper submissions to MATES-2012 will be handled using the EasyChair system at this link: www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=mates2012.

Submissions must comply with the following requirements:

* For preparation of 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.
* The length of each paper including figures and references shall not exceed 14 pages.
* All papers must be written in English and submitted in PDF format.
* Papers that have been accepted or are under review by other conferences or journals are not eligible for submission. However, we encourage interdisciplinary contributions submitted or presented in part to a forum outside of agent technology.

Submissions not conforming to the above instructions may be rejected without review.

Please notice that the submission of a paper should be regarded as an undertaking that, should the paper be accepted, at least one of the authors will attend the conference to present the work.

MATES 2012 will include a doctoral mentoring program: This program will provide an opportunity for students to interact closely with established researchers in their fields, to receive feedback on their work and to get advice on managing their careers.

The Doctoral Mentoring Program will:

* Match each student with an established researcher who will act as a mentor.
* Allow students an opportunity to present their work to a friendly audience of other students, as well as mentors.
* Provide students with contacts and networking opportunities.

IMPORTANT DATES

Abstracts due: April 21, 2012
Full papers due: April 28, 2012
Notification: June 19, 2012
Doctoral mentoring: July 13, 2012
Camera-ready submission: July 13, 2012
Early registration: August 5, 2012
Conference: October 10-12, 2012

CONFERENCE CHAIRS

* Christian Guttmann (EBTIC - Etisalat BT Innovation Centre, Abu Dhabi, UAE)
* Ingo J. Timm (U Trier, Germany)

STEERING COMMITTEE

* Matthias Klusch (DFKI, Germany)
* Winfried Lamersdorf (U Hamburg, Germany)
* Jörg P. Müller (TU Clausthal, Germany)
* Paolo Petta (U Vienna, Austria)
* Rainer Unland (U Duisburg-Essen, Germany)
* Gerhard Weiss (Maastricht U, The Netherlands)

Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems - PRIMA 2012

2012-02-14T01:13:00.000-08:00

PRIMA 2012

The 15th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems

Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia

September 3-7, 2012

http://www.prima2012.org/

Co-located with PRICAI 2012, DC 2012 and PKAW 2012

Paper submission: March 30, 2012

Author notification: May 28, 2012

Camera-ready papers: June 15, 2012

Agent computing is an exciting, transformational approach to developing computer systems

that can rapidly and reliably solve real-world problems that usually demand human knowledge

and expertise. The value, power and flexibility of agent and multi-agent systems has been

demonstrated in application areas such as logistics, manufacturing, simulation, robotics,

decision support, entertainment, and especially in online market environments. As one of

the largest and fastest growing research fields of Computer Science, agent research today

includes a wealth of topics. The PRIMA 2012 Program Committee invites submissions of

original, unpublished, theoretical and applied work on any such topic, and encourages

reports on the development of prototype and deployed agent systems, and of experiments

that demonstrate novel agent system capabilities.

PRIMA 2012 proceedings will be published by Springer as a volume in the LNAI series and

proceedings will be available at the conference. Submitted papers should be 12-15 pages

in Springer LNCS format and must be in a form suitable for "double-blind" review.

Each submission will be subject to peer review in two rounds coordinated by an international

Senior Program Committee, and authors will be able to provide a short "rebuttal" of the

reviews before final decisions are made. A broad range of agent topics are of interest,

but all papers should clearly identify how their scientific or technical contributions

advance the state-of-the-art of agent computing practice or have a strong potential to do so.

Submitted papers should not be under review or submitted for publication elsewhere during

the review period.

Springer LNCS Author Instructions: http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html

Submission: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=prima2012

Enquiries: prima2012-pc-chairs@cse.unsw.edu.au

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Organization

General Chairs

Sandip Sen (University of Tulsa, USA)

Toshiharu Sugawara (Waseda University, Japan)

Local Arrangements Chairs

Dickson Lukose (MIMOS Berhad, Malaysia)

Cheah Wai Shiang (Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, Malaysia)

Sponsorship Chairs

Longbing Cao (University of Technology, Sydney, Australia)

Matthias Klusch (DFKI Saarbruecken, Germany)

Sarvapali Ramchurn (University of Southampton, UK)

Jie Zhang (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)

Program Chairs

Iyad Rahwan (Masdar Institute, UAE and MIT, USA)

Wayne Wobcke (University of New South Wales, Australia)

Senior Program Committee

Stephen Cranefield (University of Otago, New Zealand)

Frank Dignum (Utrecht University, The Netherlands)

Guido Governatori (NICTA, Australia)

Katsutoshi Hirayama (Kobe University, Japan)

Kate Larson (University of Waterloo, Canada)

Rey-Long Liu (Tzu Chi University, Taiwan)

Alessio Lomuscio (Imperial College London, UK)

Andrea Omicini (University of Bologna, Italy)

Jeremy Pitt (Imperial College London, UK)

David Pynadath (University of Southern California, USA)

Alex Rogers (University of Southampton, UK)

Paolo Torroni (University of Bologna, Italy)

Tutorial Chair

Edith Elkind (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)

Workshop Chairs

Sherief Abdallah (British University in Dubai, UAE and University of Edinburgh, UK)

Hiromitsu Hattori (Kyoto University, Japan)

Publicity Chairs

Jacob Crandall (Masdar Institute, UAE and MIT, USA)

Koen Hindriks (Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands)

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Topics

Foundations of Agents and Multi-Agent Systems

Logics of Agency

Logics of Multi-Agent Systems

Normative Systems

Computational Game Theory

Uncertainty in Agent Systems

Agent and Multi-Agent Learning

Agent and Multi-Agent System Architectures

Agent Programming Languages and Platforms

Multi-Agent System Languages and Platforms

BDI Architectures and Extensions

Normative Multi-Agent Systems

Agent-Oriented Software Engineering

AOSE Methodologies

Tools for Agent and Multi-Agent System Development

Formal Specification and Verification

Deployed System Case Studies

Agent-Based Modelling and Simulation

Simulation Languages and Platforms

Artificial Societies

Virtual Environments

Workflow Simulation

Emergent Behaviour

Modelling System Dynamics

Application Case Studies

Collaboration/Coordination/Communication

Agent Communication Languages and Protocols

Distributed Problem Solving

Teamwork Models

Coalition Formation

Argumentation, Negotiation, Bargaining

Auctions and Mechanism Design

Trust and Reputation

Computational Voting Theory

Hybrid Technologies

Agents in Planning

Agent-Based Scheduling

Agent-Based Optimization

Distributed Constraint Satisfaction

Agents and Data Mining

Semantic Web Agents

Agents and Grid Computing

Agents and Service Oriented Computing

Agents and Pervasive Computing

Robotics and Multi-Robot Systems

Application Domains

Healthcare

Transport/Logistics

Emergency/Disaster Management

Energy/Utility Management

Sustainability/Resource Management

Games/Entertainment

eBusiness/eCommerce/eGovernment

eResearch/eLearning

Security/Surveillance

Smart Cities

Applications

Adaptive Personal Assistants

Embodied Conversational Agents

Virtual Characters

Multi-Modal User Interfaces

Autonomous Systems

Mobile Agents

Human-Robot Interaction

Social Recommender Systems

EMOTIONAL AND EMPATHIC AGENTS (EEA'12)

2012-02-13T07:51:00.000-08:00

             ** WORKSHOP ON EMOTIONAL AND EMPATHIC AGENTS **

                                          at AAMAS 2012

                                 June 4-8, 2012, Valencia, Spain





                          http://gaips.inesc-id.pt/aamas12-wseea

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

                                      2ND CALL FOR PAPERS



                 [apologies for cross-postings, please distribute]



--------------------------

Workshop Organizers

--------------------------

João Dias (INESC-ID and Instituto Superior Técnico, PT)

Janneke van der Zwaan (Delft University of Technology, NL)

Jason Tsai (University of Southern California, USA)



---------------------------------

Senior Steering Committee

---------------------------------

Ana Paiva (PT)

Catholijn Jonker (NL)

Stacy Marsella (USA)

Virginia Dignum (NL)



-------

Goals

-------

The main goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers from different disciplines to discuss the creation of what we call "empathic agents". Empathy has been associated with the processes that make a person to have "feelings that are more congruent with another's situation than with his own situation". Humans, when interacting with virtual agents or robots can be led to feel empathy, and experience a diverse set of emotional reactions. On the other hand, agents and robots can in a certain, perhaps limited way, also show certain emotions in reaction to human emotions, thus seemingly expressing empathy towards other agents and towards humans.  Further, agents interacting in social simulation scenarios may react to the other agents in a way that is more congruent with the other's. Thus, by seeking inspiration in empathic relations established between humans and between humans and animals, in this workshop we expect to explore these dimensions of empathic agents.



This workshop is multidisciplinary in nature. We expect to involve researchers who are not only interesting in studying intelligent virtual agents, social simulation and social robotics, but also those interested in empathy, cognition, ethology, emotions, human interactions, computer graphics, human-robots interaction and human/computer interaction.



---------------------

Topics of Interest

---------------------

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

- Models of empathy

- Empathy for rational agents

- Architectures for empathic agents and robots

- Emotional contagion

- Emotional interactions and regulation with agents

- Emotion modeling for empathic agents and robots

- User modeling for empathic agents and robots

- Social robots and social agents and empathy

- Inter-agent communication and empathy

- Expression of virtual agents for empathic interactions

- Empathy and facial expressions in virtual agents

- Empathic synthetic speech for virtual agents

- Applications to health and social education

- Interactive storytelling and empathy

- Entertainment and education applications

- Emotional and empathic agents in video games

- Empathy and long term interactions with virtual agents and robots

- Evaluating empathy in agents and robots

- Evaluating human empathic reactions to artificial agents and robots



--------------------

Important Dates

--------------------

Paper submission: February 28, 2012

Acceptance notification: March 27, 2012

Camera ready: April 10, 2012

Uploading of workshop papers to website: May 1, 2012

Workshop: June 4-5, 2012 (provisory date)



---------------

Submissions

---------------

Researchers are invited to submit papers for the workshop focusing the topics of interest of the workshop stating clearly how they can contribute to the themes proposed. Papers should be no longer than 8 pages and must use the AAMAS format (http://aamas2012.webs.upv.es/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=19&Itemid=19). All papers will be reviewed by at least two members of the program committee in a single-blind review process. At least one author of each accepted paper is required to register for the workshop.



Papers should be submitted through Easychair in pdf format: https://www.easychair.org/account/signin.cgi?conf=eeaaamas2012



-------------------------

Program Committee

-------------------------
Please check the program committee members at http://gaips.inesc-id.pt/aamas12-wseea/index.php/committees

Ambient Systems, Networks and Technologies (ANT-2012)

2012-02-07T00:02:00.000-08:00

         The 3rd International Conference on Ambient Systems, Networks and Technologies (ANT-2012)

                                             27-29 August, 2012
                                       Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada

                            Website:http://cs-conferences.acadiau.ca/ant-12/
             ****************************************************************************

IMPORTANT DATES
===============
- Full Paper Submission:      February 29, 2012 (Extended)
- Acceptance Notification:    April 10, 2012
- Camera-Ready Submission:    May 10, 2012
- Workshops Proposals:        December 10, 2011

ANT-2012 accepted papers will be printed in the conference proceedings published by Elsevier Science in the open-access Procedia Computer Science series (on-line and CD). Procedia Computer Sciences is hosted on www.Elsevier.com and on Elsevier content platform ScienceDirect (http://www.sciencedirect.com), and will be freely available worldwide. All papers in Procedia will also be indexed by Scopus (http://www.scopus.com) and Engineering Village (Ei) (http://www.engineeringvillage.com). This includes EI Compendex (http://www.ei.org/compendex). The papers will contain linked references, XML versions and citable DOI numbers. All accepted papers will also be indexed in DBLP (http://dblp.uni-trier.de/). Selected papers will be invited for publication in special issues of international journals.

Conference Tracks:
=================
- Agent Systems, Intelligent Computing and Applications
- Automatic Networks and Communications
- Data Management
- Emerging Networking, Tracking and Sensing Technologies
- Multimedia and Social Computing
- Multimodal Interfaces
- Service Oriented Computing for Systems & Applications
- Smart Environments and Applications
- Systems Security and Privacy
- Systems Software Engineering
- Vehicular Networks and Applications
- General Track

COMMITTEES
=========

General Chairs
Nick Cercone, York University, Canada
Albert Zomaya, The University of Sydney, Australia

Program Chairs
Hossam Hassanein, Queen's University, Canada
Muhammad Younas, Oxford Brookes University, UK
Takahiro Hara, Osaka University, Japan

Advisory Committee
Ali Ghorbani, University of New Brunswick, Canada
Katia Sycara, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Erol Gelenbe, Imperial College, UK
Vincenzo Loia, University of Salerno, Italy
Ralf Steinmetz, Technische Universitaet Darmstadt, Germany
Peter Thomas, Manifesto Research, Australia
Sajal K. Das, The University of Texas at Arlington, USA
Timothy K. Shih, Tamkang University, Taiwan

Workshops Chairs
Senol Erdogan, Maltepe University, Turkey
Markus Aleksy, ABB Corporate Research Center, Germany

Program vice Chairs
Rainer Unland, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
Reiner Wichert, Fraunhofer-Institut for Computer Graphics IGD, Germany
Jiang Li, Howard University, USA
Tarek Sheltami, KFUPM, Saudi Arabia
Eric Pardede, La Trobe University, Australia
Irena Mlynkova, Charles University, Czech Republic
Abdelfettah Belghith, University of Manouba, Tunisia
Anis Koubaa, Al-Imam University, Saudi Arabia/CISTER Research Unit, Portugal
Keivan Kian-Mehr, University of Western Ontario, Canada
Tansel Ozyer, TOBB Econo & Tech University, Turkey
Thomas Grill, University of Salzburg, Austria
Mohyuddin, King Abdullah International Medical Research Center, Saudi Arabia
Zakaria Maamar, Zayed University, UAE
Jamal Bentahar, Concordia University, Canada
Abdallah Mhamed, Telecom SudParis, France
Wail Mardini, Jordan University of Science and Technology, Jordan
Ridha Khedri, McMaster University, Canada
Luis Javier Garc抋 Villalba, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
Agustinus Waluyo, Monash University, Australia
Bharat Jayaraman, University at Buffalo (SUNY), USA
Soumaya Cherkaoui, Sherbrooke University, Canada
G. Ram Mohana Reddy, National Institute of Technology Karnataka, India
Adnan Al-Anbuky, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand

International Journals Chair
Nauman Aslam, Northumbria University, UK

Local Arrangement Chairs
Ramiro Liscano, University of Ontario, Canada
Bessam Abdulrazak, Sherbrooke University, Canada

Publicity Chairs
Weiwei Fang, Beijing Jiaotong University, China
Djamal Benslimane, Lyon 1 University, France
Thais Regina de Moura Braga Silva, Federal University of Vicosa, Brazil
Wael M El-Medany, University of Bahrain, Bahrain

International Liaison Chairs
Karim Djouani, South African Institute of Technology, South African
Verdi Marchm, HP Labs Singapore, Singapore

Awards Chairs
Maytham Safar, Kuwait University, Kuwait
Bernady Apduhan, Kyushu Sangyo University, Japan

Steering Committee Chair
Elhadi Shakshuki, Acadia University, Canada

Optimisation in Multi-Agent Systems (OPTMAS V)

2012-02-06T23:55:00.000-08:00

Fifth International Workshop on Optimisation in Multi-Agent Systems (OPTMAS V)

To be held in conjunction with the *Eleventh International Conference on Autonomous and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 2012)*

4 or 5 June 2012

cfp at:https://sites.google.com/site/optmas2012

=====================================================================

Call
----
This workshop invites works from different strands of the multi-agent systems community that pertain to the design of algorithms, models, and techniques to deal with multi-agent optimisation problems. In so doing, this workshop aims to provide a forum for researchers to discuss common issues that arise in solving optimisation problems in different areas and elaborate common benchmarks to test their solutions.

Invited Talk
----------------
to be announced
(Previous invited speakers include Moshe Tennenholtz (2008), Milind Tambe (2009), Paul Scerri (2010), Sven Koenig (2011) ).

Background
----------------
The number of novel applications of multi-agent systems has followed an exponential trend over the last few years, ranging from online auction design, through in multi-sensor networks, to scheduling of tasks in multi-actor systems. Multi-agent systems designed for all these applications generally require some form of optimization in order to achieve their goal. Given this, a number of advancements have been made in the design of winner determination, coalition formation, and distributed constraints optimization algorithms among others. However, there are no general principles guiding the design of such algorithms that would enable researchers to either exploit algorithms designed in other areas or to ensure that their algorithms conform to some level of applicability to real problems.
This workshop aims to address the above issues by bringing together researchers from different parts of the Multi-Agent Systems research area to present their work and discuss acceptable solutions, benchmarks, and evaluation methods for generally researched optimization problems.
In particular, the main issues to be addressed by the workshop include (but are not limited to):

1. Techniques to model and solve optimisation problems in which the actors
are partly or completely distributed and can only communicate with their peers.
2. Algorithms to compute solutions to mechanisms that deal with different stakeholders who may be self interested or may have different computation/communication capabilities from their peers.
3. Techniques to manage and disseminate relevant information across different agents.
4. Dealing with privacy concerns: solving complex optimization problems while leaking as little private information as possible
5. Problems that require anytime algorithms.
6. Approximate algorithms that need to provide guarantees on the quality of the solution.
7. Mechanisms whose properties can be significantly affected if the solution computed is not the optimal one.
8. Techniques to deal with optimizations that have to be repeated with possibly only slight changes in the input data.
9. Techniques to deal with situations where the input data may be uncertain or unreliable, requiring that the solution computed be robust to slight differences from the true values.
10. Techniques to deal with agents that are tied to physical devices. This involves computation and communication constraints that need to be considered in the coordination techniques, as well as the possibility of failures of the devices and communication links.

Keywords
-------------
Topics include but are not limited to:

* Distributed Constraints Optimisation/Satisfaction
* Winner Determination Algorithms in Auctions
* Coalition Formation Algorithms
* Algorithms to compute Nash Equilibrium in games
* Optimisation under uncertainty
* Optimisation with incomplete or dynamic input data
* Algorithms for real-time applications

Workshop motivation
--------------------------
OPTMAS complements the objectives of the AAMAS conference by providing a forum for multi-agent algorithm designers. The workshop will be attractive to those working in the general areas of distributed optimization, auction design, coordination, learning, and uncertainty and will be a good place to present original work and discuss acceptable benchmarks and evaluation methods for generally researched optimization problems.
The aim of OPTMAS is to complement the theoretical angle taken by work presented in the main conference, and other workshops, by focusing on the implementation issues and the general trends in optimization problems that arise across a variety of multi-agent applications.

Important dates
---------------------
* 28th FEBRUARY, 2012 - Submission of contributions to workshops
* 27th MARCH, 2012 - Workshop paper acceptance notification
* 4th or 5th JUNE, 2012 - Workshop takes place in conjunction with AAMAS 2012.

Submission
---------------
Submissions should conform to the ACM SIG style (follow the formatting instructions available at the AAMAS-2012 website) and should not be more than *10* pages long (excluding appendices).

Authors can submit their papers through the OPTMAS 2012 Easychair submission site:
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=optmas2012

Reviewing process
-----------------
Papers will be reviewed by at least 2 reviewers. Criteria for selection of papers will include: originality, readability, relevance to themes, soundness, and overall quality.

Publication
-----------
Best papers from OPTMAS 2008 and OPTMAS 2009 were selected for publication in the
special issue on Optimisation in Multi-Agent System of the Journal of Autonomous and Multiagent Systems (http://www.springerlink.com/content/n7p264t41264 ).

We plan to continue this initiative for the 2010, 2011, 2012 edition. Therefore, we will negotiate the publication of selected, best papers in a quality journal (JAAMAS or similar).

Organizing committee
--------------------
Dr. Jesus Cerquides Bueno, IIIA - CSIC, Spain
Dr. Alessandro Farinelli, University of Verona, Italy
Dr. Sarvapali D. Ramchurn University of Southampton, UK
Dr. Juan Antonio Rodriguez-Aguilar,IIIA - CSIC, Spain
Dr. Meritxell Vinyals, University of Verona, Italy

Programme Committee
--------------------------------------
Mohsen Afsharchi         University of Zanjan
Ana L. C. Bazzan         Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul
Christian Blum           Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya
Archie Chapman           University of Sydney
Francesco M. Fave        University of Southampton
Katsutoshi Hirayama      Kobe University
Christopher Krenkintveld University of Texas
Sven Koenig              University of Southern California
Nikos Komodakis          University of Crete
Akshat Kumar             University of Massachusetts
Robert N. Lass           Drexel University
Victor Lesser            University of Massachusetts
Beatriz López            University of Girona
Pedro Meseguer           IIIA-CSIC
Maria Polukarov          University of Southampton
Marc Pujol               IIIA-CSIC
Talal Rahwan             University of Southampton
Norman Salazar           IIIA-CSIC
Onn Shehory              IBM Haifa Research Lab
Eric Shieh               University of Southern California
Sameer Singh             University of Massachusetts
Ruben Stranders          University of Southampton
Greet Vanden             Berghe KaHo Sint-Lieven
William Yeoh             Singapore Management University
Roie Zivan               Ben Gurion University of the Negev
_

Eighth International Conference on Swarm Intelligence - ANTS 2012

2012-01-31T09:52:00.000-08:00

ANTS 2012
Eighth International Conference on Swarm Intelligence

September 12-14, 2012. Brussels, Belgium

Call for papers prepared on November 17, 2011
More details and up-to-date information at
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/ants2012

Scope of the Conference
=======================

Swarm intelligence is a relatively new discipline that deals with the
study of self-organizing processes both in nature and in artificial
systems. Researchers in ethology and animal behavior have proposed
many models to explain interesting aspects of social insect behavior
such as self-organization and shape-formation. Recently, algorithms
and methods inspired by these models have been proposed to solve
difficult problems in many domains.

An example of a particularly successful research direction in swarm
intelligence is ant colony optimization, the main focus of which is on
discrete optimization problems. Ant colony optimization has been
applied successfully to a large number of difficult discrete
optimization problems including the traveling salesman problem, the
quadratic assignment problem, scheduling, vehicle routing, etc., as
well as to routing in telecommunication networks. Another interesting
approach is that of particle swarm optimization, that focuses on
continuous optimization problems. Here too, a number of successful
applications can be found in the recent literature. Swarm robotics is
another relevant field. Here, the focus is on applying swarm
intelligence techniques to the control of large groups of cooperating
autonomous robots.

ANTS 2012 will give researchers in swarm intelligence the opportunity
to meet, to present their latest research, and to discuss current
developments and applications.

The three-day conference will be held in Brussels, Belgium, on
September 12-14, 2012.

Relevant Research Areas
=======================

ANTS 2012 solicits contributions dealing with any aspect of swarm
intelligence. Typical, but not exclusive, topics of interest are:

Behavioral models of social insects or other animal societies that
can stimulate new algorithmic approaches.

Empirical and theoretical research in swarm intelligence.

Application of swarm intelligence methods, such as ant colony
optimization or particle swarm optimization, to real-world problems.

Theoretical and experimental research in swarm robotics systems.

Publication Details
===================

Conference proceedings will be published by Springer in the LNCS
series.

The journal Swarm Intelligence will publish a special issue dedicated
to ANTS 2012 that will contain extended versions of the best research
works presented at the conference. Further details will be
published on the web site.

Best Paper Award
================

A best paper award will be presented at the conference.

Invited talks
================

- Prof. Dirk Helbing (ETH Zurich, Switzerland) on "Towards Simulating the Foundations of Society"

- Prof. Nigel R. Franks (University of Bristol, UK) on "Ants, Bees and Brains"

- Prof. Vijay Kumar (University of Pennsylvania, USA) on "Architectures, abstractions, and algorithms for large teams of robots"

Further Information
===================

Up-to-date information will be published on the web site
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/ants2012/. For information about local
arrangements, registration forms, etc., please refer to the
above-mentioned web site or contact the local organizers at the
address below.

Conference Address
==================

ANTS 2012
IRIDIA CP 194/6 Tel +32-2-6502729
Université Libre de Bruxelles Fax +32-2-6502715
Av. F. D. Roosevelt 50 http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/ants2012
1050 Bruxelles, Belgium email: ants@iridia.ulb.ac.be

Important Dates
===============

Submission deadline March 2, 2012
Notification of acceptance May 3, 2012
Camera ready copy May 17, 2012
Conference September 12-14, 2012

ANTS 2012 Organizing Committee
==============================

General Chair:
Marco Dorigo, IRIDIA, ULB, Brussels, Belgium

Technical Program Chairs:
Christian Blum, ALBCOM, LSI, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
Andries Engelbrecht, University of Pretoria, South Africa
Roderich Groß, Sheffield University, UK

Publication Chair:
Anders Lyhne Christensen, Instituto Universitario de Lisboa, Portugal

Organization Chairs:
Mauro Birattari, IRIDIA, ULB, Brussels, Belgium
Thomas Stützle, IRIDIA, ULB, Brussels, Belgium

Local Arrangements:
Andreagiovanni Reina, IRIDIA, ULB, Brussels, Belgium
Arne Brutschy, IRIDIA, ULB, Brussels, Belgium

Agents Applied in Health Care

2012-01-31T09:35:00.000-08:00

*7th Workshop on Agents Applied in Health Care*
http://deim.urv.cat/~itaka/workshops/aamas2012

To be held in conjunction with the
Eleventh International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
(AAMAS 2012, 4th-8th June 2012, Valencia, Spain)

/LATEST NEWS

/
/.    If the quantity and quality of the papers submitted to the workshop is appropriate, those papers accepted for presentation at the workshop and presented in Valencia will be invited to present extended versions to a *special issue on agents applied in health care of the International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools (IJAIT)*, included in JCR.

.    Paper* submission deadline extended to February 28th* (this deadline will not be further extended)./

*Technical description*
Intelligent agent-based systems constitute one of the most exciting research areas in Artificial Intelligence. Due to the growing interest in the application of agent-based systems in health care, a number of applications addressing clinical problems are already based in agent technology. Thus, it may now be a good time for the specialists in the field to meet and report on the results achieved in this area, to discuss the benefits (and drawbacks) that agent-based systems may bring to medical domains, and also to provide a list of the research topics that should be tackled in the near future.

This workshop will try to incorporate two novel aspects with respect to related workshops held in the last years:

.    Interdisciplinary research: special efforts will be devoted to try to attract the attention of health care and biomedical specialists, so that they attend the workshop and realise the potential benefits of agent technology.
.    Applied research: the organising committee will also pay special attention to papers describing applications which are not just academic, but are already deployed and running in a real medical environment.

Current topics of research include personalized health systems for remote and autonomous tele-assistance, communication and co-operation between distributed intelligent agents to manage patient care, information agents that retrieve medical information from distributed repositories, intelligent and distributed data mining, and multi-agent systems that assist the doctors in the tasks of monitoring and diagnosis. Several methodological and technical problems have been discovered by the researchers that attempt to deploy agent-based systems in the medical area; just to name a few, the growing number of huge databases that need to be integrated (e.g. genetic data from next generation sequencing), the difficulty to integrate new agent-based systems with legacy software, the need to apply changing national and international laws and regulations concerning the privacy of medical data and the security of the transaction of patient information between agents.

*Submitted papers should address at least one of the following issues:*

.    Co-operation between intelligent agents to improve patient management (e.g. distributed patient scheduling).
.    Agents that provide autonomous and remote care delivery.
.    Agents that provide information about medical services.
.    Multi-agent systems for patient monitoring and diagnosis.
.    Successful applications of agents and multi-agent systems in health care.
.    MAS that improve medical training or education (e.g. tutoring systems).
.    Medical agent-based decision support systems.
.    Information agents that gather compile and organise medical data and knowledge available on Internet.
.    Solutions to the basic methodological and technological problems associated to the real deployment of health-care agent-based systems:
-    Security, privacy of medical data.
-    Social acceptance of agent-based systems.
-    Integration and use of medical ontologies.
-    Lack of centralised control.
-    Communication standards.
-    Integration with other types of software.
.    Legal and ethical issues related to the use of agents in health care.
.    Surveys providing an up to date view of the state of the art in the area of agents in health care.

Submissions must be formatted following the guidelines of the main AAMAS conference. Papers must not be longer than 10 pages.

The workshop organisers would appreciate that anyone intending to submit a paper to the workshop communicates this intention before February 1st to the workshop contact person.

*Previous editions of the workshop*
.    First edition - ECAI 2002 in Lyon, France. Expanded versions of selected papers published in a special issue of AI Communications (Ed: A.Moreno, 2003).
.    Second edition - ECAI 2004 in Valencia, Spain. Expanded versions of selected papers published in a special issue of AI Communications (Ed: J.Nealon, 2005).
.    Third edition - IJCAI 2005 in Edinburgh, Scotland. Expanded versions of selected papers published in a special issue of IEEE Intelligent Systems (Ed: A.Moreno, December 2006).
.    Fourth edition - ECAI 2006 in Riva del Garda, Italy. Expanded versions of selected papers published in a volume of the Whitestein series in Software Agent Technologies and Autonomic Computing (December 2007).
.    Fifth edition - AAMAS 2008 in Estoril, Portugal.
.    Sixth edition - e-Health 2010 in Casablanca, Morocco. Papers published by Springer in a book of the series ICST Transactions on e-health.

*Preliminary workshop agenda *
The workshop will feature some of the following activities:
.    1-2 invited presentations by international experts in the field
.    Presentation of state-of-the-art papers with the latest developments in the field.
.    Possible demos of practical applications of MAS in health care.
.    Panel discussion of the main problems that have to be faced to deploy real agent-based health-care applications.

*Important dates*
.    February 28th, 2012: Deadline for paper submission (this deadline will not be further extended)
.    March 28th, 2012: Notifications of acceptance/rejection sent
.    April 10th, 2012: Deadline for sending camera-ready papers to workshop organisers.
.    June 4th or 5th, 2012: Workshop.
.    Autumn-Winter 2012: Possibility of publishing revised and expanded versions of selected papers in a special issue of an appropriate scientific journal or book.

*
Paper review process*
All the submitted papers will be revised by at least three members of the Program Committee. The main aspects to be reviewed will be originality, technical accuracy and relevance to the workshop.
*
Post --proceedings: special issue in IJAIT*
If the quantity and quality of the papers submitted to the workshop is appropriate, those papers accepted for presentation at the workshop and presented in Valencia will be invited to present extended versions to a special issue on agents applied in health care of the International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools (IJAIT), included in JCR.

*Organising committee*
Antonio Moreno (contact person)
University Rovira i Virgili (URV), Tarragona, Spain.
e-mail: antonio.moreno@urv.net
Ulises Cortés
Technical University of Catalonia (UPC), Barcelona, Spain
Magí Lluch-Ariet
Informatics Research Institute, Barcelona, Spain
David Isern
University Rovira i Virgili (URV), Tarragona, Spain.

*Scientific committee*
M.Beer, Sheffield Hallam Univ., UK
F.Grasso, Univ. of Liverpool, UK
A.Ilarramendi, Univ. of the Basque Country, Spain
P.Kostkova, City Univ., UK
L.Lhotska, Czech Technical Univ., Czech Republic
B.López, Univ. of Girona, Spain
M.Schumacher, Univ. of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland, Switzerland
A.Valls, Univ. Rovira i Virgili, Spain
L.Varga, ELTE University, Hungary

Trustworthy Multi-Agent Systems (TruMAS'12)

2012-01-31T04:45:00.000-08:00

1st International Workshop on Trustworthy Multi-Agent Systems (TruMAS'12)
KES-AMSTA 2012 Special Session, Dubrovnik, Croatia, 25-27 June 2012
http://www2.imm.dtu.dk/~ndra/TruMAS12
Proceedings published by Springer-Verlag in a volume of LNCS/LNAI.

IMPORTANT DATES

5 February 2012  Submission of papers
22 February 2012 Notification of acceptance
7 March 2012 Camera ready
25-27 June 2012 TruMAS and KES-AMSTA

WORKSHOP AIM AND SCOPE

The rapid development of computer-based technologies has made computers more and more complex and ubiquitous. Many computer-based systems are in charge of critical tasks such as, to mention only a few, the management of financial and medical databases, the monitoring of nuclear plants, the flying of airplanes, etc. Multi-agent systems (MAS) have been proposed as a new paradigm for conceptualizing, designing, and implementing open and distributed software systems. The foundational idea behind a Multi-Agent System is to have a loosely coupled network of software agents (i.e., sophisticated computer programs that act autonomously on behalf of their users) which interact to solve problems that are beyond the individual capacities or knowledge of each single agent. Therefore, it is not surprisingly MAS have received a lot of attention as reference computing paradigm to tackle complexity in modern computer-based systems.

However, the complexity of modern computer-based systems as well as their numerous applications has inherently increased the challenges for ensuring trustworthiness. Trustworthiness encompasses vital characteristics of a system such as safety (the non-occurrence of catastrophic consequences for the environment the system works in), security (the non-occurrence of unauthorized disclosure of information), integrity (the non-occurrence of inadequate information alteration), availability (the readiness for correct service of the system), reliability (the property of the system to continuously provide service) or more generically dependability. The overall trustworthiness of a system is connected to all the aforementioned properties and should be regarded holistically. Functional correctness, security, safety, reliability are facets that have to be ensured for the system's components as well as for the system as a whole.

The 1st International Workshop on Trustworthy Multi-Agent Systems (TruMAS 2012) aims at bringing together researchers, engineers and practitioners interested in all the different aspects of trust, dependability and security in Multi-Agent Systems. The workshop is expected to stimulate discussions about the future development of appropriate models, methods, notations, languages and tools for trustworthy Multi-Agent Systems. The overall goal is to explore the different facets of trustworthiness in Multi-Agent Systems, how every single aspect can be fostered, and how they relate.

Topics of interests include, but are not limited to:
- Trust and reputation models, metrics and assessment in Multi-Agent Systems
- Dependability facets in Multi-Agent Systems
- Fault-tolerance and robustness in Multi-Agent Systems
- Architectures for trustworthy Multi-Agent Systems
- Robust and secure communication in Multi-Agent Systems
- Robust and secure negotiation in Multi-Agent Systems
- Software engineering methodologies for trustworthy Multi-Agent Systems
- Security and access control in open Multi-Agent Systems
- Self-configuration and adaptation
- Formal methods and frameworks to model, analyze, prove, or measure aspects of trustworthy Multi-Agent Systems
- Industrial experiences in the adoption of trust-based Multi-Agent Systems approaches
- Rigorous software development to ensure trustworthiness in Multi-Agent Systems

Since the overall goal of trustworthy Multi-Agent Systems includes the investigation of several cross- disciplinary issues such as a deep understanding of trust vs. trustworthiness, trust-based approaches, dependability, etc..., a synergy between different scientific communities and research disciplines is needed. For this reason, although the workshop seems naturally focused on multi-agent issues, contributions from different disciplines such as philosophy, sociology, psychology, communication sciences, as well as from computer science specific sub-disciplines such as software engineering and dependability are welcomed and encouraged.

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS

Submitted full papers must not exceed 10 pages in length, including bibliography and well-marked appendices. Papers can be submitted using the PROSE Online Paper Submission system available on the KES-AMSTA'12 Web site. Please remember to select the TruMAS invited session entry in the "Session Name" drop-down box when submitting your paper.

Please use the LNCS templates and style files available on the Springer Web site (Information for LNCS Authors).

Submitted papers will be evaluated by the program committee and chosen for presentation based on their scientific contribution and relevance to the topics of the workshop. At least one author of each accepted paper must register to the workshop and participate presenting the paper.

Proceedings will be published by Springer-Verlag in a volume of LNCS/LNAI.

CHAIRS

Nicola Dragoni
DTU Informatics
Technical University of Denmark, Denmark
ndra@imm.dtu.dk

Manuel Mazzara
School of Computing Science
Newcastle University, UK
manuel.mazzara@newcastle.ac.uk

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Faycal Abouzaid, CRAC, Ecole Polytechnique of Montreal, Canada
Enrico Denti, DEIS, University of Bologna, Italy
Nicoletta Fornara, Faculty of Communication Sciences, University of Lugano, Switzerland
Katsuhide Fujita, Institute of Engineering Innovation, School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo, Japan
Mauro Gaspari, Department of Computer Science, University of Bologna, Italy
Paolo Giorgini, Information Engineering and Computer Science Department (DISI), University of Trento, Italy
Nathan Griffiths, Department of Computer Science, University of Warwick, UK
Koji Hasebe, Academic Computing & Communications Center, University of Tsukuba, Japan
Hiromitsu Hattori, Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, Japan
Takayuki Ito, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Nagoya Institute of Technology, Japan
Waqar Jaffry, Department of Artificial Intelligence, VU University, The Netherlands
Andrew J I Jones, Department of Informatics, King's College London, UK
Steve Marsh, Communications Research Centre, Canada
Hernan Melgratti, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina
Paul Scerri, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Eugen Staab, imc AG, Germany
Daniel Villatoro, Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, Spanish Scientific Research Council, Spain
Mirko Viroli, DEIS, University of Bologna, Italy

Cooperative Games in Multiagent Systems (CoopMAS-2012)

2012-01-31T04:40:00.000-08:00

The Third Workshop on Cooperative Games in Multiagent Systems                  (CoopMAS-2012)

            http://staff.science.uva.nl/~stephane/coopmas12/

                  Workshop co-located with AAMAS-2012
                            Valencia, Spain
                         June 4th or 5th, 2012

**Key dates**

* Submission of contributions: February 28th 2012
* Acceptance notification: March 27th 2012
* Workshop: June 4th or 5th, 2012

*Submission Instructions*

Submission must follow the Springer LNCS format and should be a maximum of 15 pages.

Papers must be submitted in PDF through easychair:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=coopmas2012

*Aims and Focus*

The use of cooperative game theory to study how agents should cooperate and collaborate, along with the related topic of coalition formation, has received growing attention from the multiagent systems, game theory, and electronic commerce communities.

The workshop is intended to focus on topics in cooperation in multi-agent systems, cooperative game theory and cooperative solution concepts, formation of coalitions, negotiation between agents, joint decision making, and voting. We encourage submission of papers describing original or recently published work (in venues that are not typically attended by AAMAS participants, i.e., conferences other than AAMAS/AAAI/IJCAI). We also encourage submission of full version of short papers accepted at AAMAS. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

* Cooperative game theory
* Coalition formation
* Joint decision making and voting
* Representation issues
* Negotiation
* Collaborative filtering
* Market and economics based cooperation
* Interact with humans (negotiation / collaboration)

The workshop should be of interest to researchers in cooperative game theory and coalition formation, as well as to those who examine collaboration between agents, cooperation in multiagent systems and design and implement collaborating agents. We also welcome participants who are interested in applications of cooperative game theory, which include trading agents, sponsored search and recommender systems.

*Program Committee*
Confirmed PC members (to be completed)
* Haris Aziz (Technische Universität München, Germany)
* Georgios Chalkiadakis (Technical University of Crete, Greece)
* Piotr Faliszewski (AGH University of Science and Technology, Poland)
* Gianluigi Greco (University of Calabria, Italy)
* Kate Larson (University of Waterloo, Canada)
* Tomasz Michalak (University of Warsaw, Poland)
* Maria Polukarov (University of Southampton, United Kingdom)
* Ariel Procaccia (Carnegie Mellon University, United States)

*Workshop Organizers*

* Stéphane Airiau (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
* Yoram Bachrach (Microsoft Research, Cambridge United Kingdom)
* Edith Elkind (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore) * Lirong Xia (CRCS, Harvard University, United States)

Prestigious Applications of Intelligent Systems (PAIS-2012)

2012-01-31T04:37:00.000-08:00

The Seventh Conference on Prestigious Applications of Intelligent Systems

29-30 August 2012 ## Montpellier, France

http://www.lirmm.fr/ecai2012

Deadline for submission of full papers: 6 March 2012

######################################################################
## INTRODUCTION                                                     ##
######################################################################

The PAIS 2012 Program Committee invites papers describing innovative
applications of AI techniques to real-world systems and problems for
the Technical Program of the 7th International Conference on the
Prestigious Applications of Intelligent Systems - a subconference of
the 20th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-2012).

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a central topic in contemporary
computing science.  The fruits of almost sixty years of AI research
have benefited application domains as disparate as industrial systems
control and medicine.  The milestone events in AI research are
increasingly regarded as milestones in scientific and technological
development: from the first chess playing program to defeat a reigning
world champion under standard chess tournament rules, via the first
robot to autonomously traverse 150 miles of rough terrain, to the
first computer program that beat humans in a quiz. Techniques,
concepts, and results developed under the banner of AI research have
proved to be of fundamental importance in areas such as medicine,
biology, economics, philosophy, linguistics, psychology, and
engineering. And of course, AI remains a topic of perennial
fascination in popular culture.

Papers highlighting all aspects of the application of intelligent
systems technology are most welcome. Our aim is to provide a forum for
academic and industrial researchers and practitioners to share
experience and insights on the applicability, development and
deployment of intelligent systems. PAIS is the largest showcase in
Europe of real applications using AI technology and the ideal place to
meet with those working to make successful applications.

PAIS-2012/ECAI-2012 will be held in the vibrant and elegant city of
Montpellier, France. With excellent opportunities for sightseeing and
gastronomy, Montpellier promises to be a wonderful venue for a
memorable conference.

######################################################################
## TOPICS OF INTEREST                                               ##
######################################################################

Papers are welcome on all novel and significant applications of
intelligent systems -- the following list of application areas is
indicative only:

* AI&  Life Sciences and Medicine
* AI&  Autonomous Vehicles
* AI&  Energy
* AI&  Ecology
* AI&  Education
* AI&  Mobile Computing and the Internet
* AI&  Sensor Networks
* AI&  Smart Surroundings
* AI&  Aerospace


######################################################################
## IMPORTANT DATES                                                  ##
######################################################################

Paper submission deadline: 
 Tuesday, 6 March 2012

Notification of acceptance/rejection: 
 Monday, 21 May 2012

Camera-ready papers due:
         Sunday, 3 June 2012

Conference:
 29-30 August 2012

######################################################################
## SUBMISSION INFORMATION                                           ##
######################################################################

Both long and short papers can be submitted.  Long papers must not
exceed *SIX* (6) pages in camera-ready format. Over-length submissions
will be rejected without review. Papers should be submitted using the
ECAI formatting style, to be available soon on the conference website
(this will be very close to previous ECAI styles). Each accepted paper
will be allocated six pages in the proceedings. Submission of short
papers, not exceeding *TWO* (2) pages in ECAI page format, is also
encouraged. Short papers are meant for highly promising but still
preliminary work. Short papers will be presented as a poster. Rejected
long papers will not be considered for poster presentation.

All submissions will be subject to peer review by the PAIS-2012
Programme Committee, and evaluated on the basis of: social relevance,
scientific and technological impact, originality, technical quality,
and quality of presentation.

Reviewing for PAIS-2012 will be double blind: reviewers will not be
presented with the identity of paper authors. To allow for double
blind review, author names in a submitted paper or poster should be
replaced by the unique tracking number assigned by the conference
website at the submission of an electronic abstract.  Authors should
avoid writing anything that makes their identity obvious in the text.
Submissions should be original, and in particular should not
previously have been formally published. (As a rule of thumb, any
publication venue with an ISBN or ISSN number counts as a formal
publication.) Submissions should not be submitted elsewhere during the
PAIS-2012 review phase.

The primary authors of submitted papers will be offered the
opportunity to respond to the reviewers before the final discussion
and decision phase.

The proceedings of the PAIS conference, together with those of the
main conference, and STAIRS, will be published online (as an open
access book) and USB sticks with the proceedings will be given to the
participants. The authors will be responsible for producing
camera-ready copies of papers, conforming to the ECAI-2012 formatting
guidelines for inclusion in the proceedings.  At least one author of
each accepted paper or poster is required to attend the conference to
present the contribution. Based on the recommendations made by the
reviewers and a separate award committee, one of the accepted long
papers will receive the *BEST PAIS PAPER AWARD*. In addition, there
will be a *BEST STUDENT PAIS PAPER AWARD* (first author should be a
student to qualify).

######################################################################
## ORGANISATION                                                     ##
######################################################################

PAIS Conference Co-Chairs:

         Paolo Frasconi (Universita degli Studi di Firenze, Italy)
 mailto:p-f@dsi.unifi.it
 Peter Lucas (Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands)
 mailto:peterl@cs.ru.nl

Local Organisation Chair:

 HAVE TO FIND ONE!

######################################################################
## PROGRAM COMMITTEE                                                ##
######################################################################

Juan-Manuel Ahuactzin, France
Peter Antal, Hungary
Roberto Bayardo, USA
Samy Bengio, USA
Diego Calvanese, Italy
Robert Castelo, Spain
Marc Cavazza, UK
Fabrizio Costa, Germany
Jesse Davis, Belgium
Yves Deville, Belgium
Kurt Driessens, Netherlands
Norman Fenton, UK
Pierre Flener, Sweden
Maria Fox, UK
Thore Grapel, USA
Johan de Kleer, USA
Yolanda Gil, USA
Peter Haddawy, Macau
Jesse Hoey, Canada
Arjen Hommersom, Netherlands
Vanja Josifovski, USA
Hidde de Jong, France
Ross King, UK
Pedro Larranaga, Spain
Tze-Yun Leong, Singapore
Michael Madden, Ireland
Chris Manning, USA
Stephen Muggleton, UK
Tartar Mugur, Germany
Daniele Nardi, Italy
David Page, USA
Andrea Passerini, Italy
Pedro Pereira Rodrigues, Portugal
Alun Preece, UK
Gregory Provan, Ireland
Dan Roth, USA
Carles Sierra, Spain
Barry Smith, Ireland
Peter Struss, Germany
Enrique Sucar, Mexico
Louise Trave-Massuyes, France
Paolo Traverso, Italy
Allan Tucker, UK
Peter Van Roy, Belgium
Marina Velikova, Netherlands
Jiri Vomlel, Czech Republic

Autonomic Computing (ICAC 2012)

2012-01-31T04:32:00.000-08:00

The 9th International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC 2012)

September 17-21, 2012. San Jose, CA, USA
http://icac2012.cs.fiu.edu/
-----------------------------------------------------------------

IMPORTANT DATES

Paper and Poster Submission: March 9, 2012, 11:59pm PST
Notification: May 18, 2012
Camera-ready Due: June 8, 2012
Workshop Proposal Submission: February 10, 2012
-----------------------------------------------------------------

OVERVIEW
ICAC is the leading conference on autonomic computing techniques, foundations, and applications. Autonomic computing refers to methods and means for automated management of performance, fault, security, and configuration with little involvement of users or administrators. Systems introducing new autonomic features are becoming increasingly prevalent, motivating research that spans a variety of areas, from computer systems, networking, software engineering, and data management to machine learning, control theory, and bio-inspired computing. ICAC brings together researchers and practitioners across these disciplines to address multiple facets of adaptation and self-management in computing systems and applications from different perspectives. Autonomic computing solutions are sought for clouds, grids, data centers, enterprise software, internet services, data services, smart phones, embedded systems, and sensor networks. In these environments, resources and applications must be managed to maximize performance and minimize cost, while maintaining predictable and reliable behavior in the face of varying workloads, failures, and malicious threats. Papers are solicited from all areas of autonomic computing, including (but not limited to):

* End-to-end techniques for management of resources, workloads, performance, faults, power/cooling, security, and others.

* Self-managing components, such as server, storage, network protocols, or specific application elements, and embedded and mobile end systems such as smart phones.

* Decision and analysis techniques and their use, such as machine learning, control theory, predictive methods, probability and stochastic processes, queuing theory methodologies, emergent behavior, rule-based systems, and bio-inspired techniques.

* Monitoring systems for autonomic computing.

* Hypervisor, operating systems, hardware, or application support for autonomic computing.

* Novel human interfaces for monitoring and controlling autonomic systems.

* Management topics, such as specification and modeling of service-level agreements, behavior enforcement and tie-in with IT governance.

* Toolkits, frameworks, principles and architectures, from software engineering practices and experimental methodologies to agent-based techniques and virtualization.

* Fundamental science and theory of self-managing systems: understanding, controlling or exploiting system behaviors to enforce autonomic properties.

* Applications of autonomic computing and experiences with prototyped or deployed systems solving real-world problems in science, engineering, business and society.

Papers will be judged on originality, significance, interest, correctness, clarity and relevance to the broader community. Papers should report on experiences, measurements, user studies, or other evaluations, as appropriate. Evaluations of a prototype or large-scale deployment of systems and applications is expected.

PAPER AND POSTER SUBMISSIONS
Full papers (a maximum of 10 pages in the two-column ACM proceedings format) and posters (2 pages) are invited on a wide variety of topics relating to autonomic computing. Submitted papers must be original work, and may not be under consideration for another conference or journal. Complete formatting and submission instructions can be found on the conference web site. Accepted papers and posters will appear in proceedings distributed at the conference and available electronically. Relevant top ICAC'12 papers will be invited for "fast-track" submissions to the ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (TAAS).

WORKSHOPS, DEMONSTRATIONS AND EXHIBITION
ICAC'12 welcomes proposals for co-located workshops on topics of interest to the autonomic computing community. Workshop proposals should be submitted to the Workshop Chair, Fred Douglis (f.douglis@computer.org) by February 10, 2012. Workshops are expected to publish proceedings, and should cover areas that complement the main program. ICAC'12 will also feature a demonstration and exhibition session consisting of prototypes and technology artifacts such as demonstrating autonomic software or autonomic computing principles. Entries will be judged by a separate committee led by the demo/exhibit chair.

INDUSTRY SESSION
One of ICAC's important roles is to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry. In its industry session, ICAC helps fulfill this role by presenting an industry viewpoint on technologies, products, and market needs. The industry session also addresses current challenges, and opportunities for academic and corporate research collaborations. We encourage industry leaders, including entrepreneurs, product developers, architects, managers, marketers and end users, to submit their papers and posters reflecting such industry perspectives as part of the regular submission process.
------------------------------------------------------------------

ORGANIZERS

GENERAL CHAIR
Dejan Milojicic, HP Labs

PROGRAM CHAIRS
Dongyan Xu, Purdue University
Vanish Talwar, HP Labs

INDUSTRY CHAIR
Xiaoyun Zhu, VMware

WORKSHOPS CHAIR
Fred Douglis, EMC

POSTERS/DEMO/EXHIBITS CHAIR
Eno Thereska, Microsoft Research

FINANCE CHAIR
Michael Kozuch, Intel

LOCAL ARRANGEMENT CHAIR
Jessica Blaine

PUBLICITY CHAIRS
Daniel Batista, University of SÃ£Paulo Vartan Padaryan, ISP/Russian Academy of Sci. Ioan Raicu, Illinois Inst. of Technology Jianfeng Zhan, ICT/Chinese Academy of Sci.
Ming Zhao, Florida Intl. University

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Tarek Abdelzaher, UIUC
Umesh Bellur, IIT, Bombay
Ken Birman, Cornell University
Rajkumar Buyya, Univ. of Melbourne
Rocky Chang, Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Yuan Chen, HP Labs
Alva Couch, Tufts University
Peter Dinda, Northwestern University
Fred Douglis, EMC
Renato Figueiredo, University of Florida
Mohamed Hefeeda, Qatar Computing Research Institute
Joe Hellerstein, Google
Geoff Jiang, NEC Labs
Jeff Kephart, IBM Research
Emre Kiciman, Microsoft Research
Fabio Kon, University of SÃ£Paulo
Michael Kozuch, Intel
Dejan Milojicic, HP Labs
Klara Nahrstedt, UIUC
Priya Narasimhan, CMU
Manish Parashar, Rutgers University
Ioan Raicu, Illinois Inst. of Technology
Omer Rana, Cardiff University
Masoud Sadjadi, Florida Intl. University
Rick Schlichting, AT&T Labs
Hartmut Schmeck, KIT
Karsten Schwan, Georgia Tech
Onn Shehory, IBM Research
Eno Thereska, Microsoft Research
Xiaoyun Zhu, VMware

Workshop on WEB INTELLIGENCE & COMMUNITIES (WI&C'12)

2012-01-25T03:09:00.000-08:00

4th International Workshop on WEB INTELLIGENCE & COMMUNITIES (WI&C'12)
http://wic.litislab.fr

to be held at the 2012 World Wide Web International Conferences (WWW'12)
Lyon, France, April 16-20, 2012

*Important Dates:*

Paper submission deadline: January 27th, 2012
Acceptance notification : February 27th, 2012
Camera ready paper : March 23rd, 2012
Workshop : April 16th, 2012

*INVITED SPEAKER*

We are honored to have a invited talk from Ashwin Ram (PARC & Georgia Tech).
Title: Health & Wellness 2.0 with social networks for healthcare

*SCOPE OF THE WORKSHOP*

Web Intelligence consists of a multidisciplinary area dealing with exploiting data and services over the Web, to create new data and services using both Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques. Communities appear as a first-class object in the areas of web intelligence and agent technologies, as well as a crucial crossroads of several sub-domains (i.e. user modelling, protocols, data management, data mining, content modelling, etc.). These sub-domains impact the nature of the communities 
and the applications which are related to them. These applications are numerous, and the success of well-known Social Network Sites for entertainment should not be allowed to over-shadow the other application domains, for instance in education, health, design, knowledge management, and so forth. 

The workshop will provide presentation and discussion opportunities for researchers working on web intelligence applied to collaborative networks, such as virtual communities. The possibilities and consequences of the web usage for collaborative networks are tremendous and new tools are required to satisfy users and service providers.

The workshop Web Intelligence and Communities expects contributions on topics such as:
 Multi-agent models and tools for Virtual Communities (VC)
 Services and Grid Services for VC, Service oriented architectures
 Web information mining, filtering and retrieval within/for VC
 Web-based applications and platforms for VC
 Intelligent web interaction, querying, diffusion
 Semantics and ontology engineering for VC
 Self-* models and techniques for VC
 Social networks modelling, virtual communities, social intelligence
 Context-based approach, profile management, personalization and recommendations for/through VC
 Privacy preserving, security, trust-based computing & reputation systems
 Applications: E-* (market, procurement, technologies, health, government, etc.) and VC
 VC and content and knowledge repositories, behaviour modelling and exchange
 Web intelligence, mobility and VC, Ambient Intelligence, Pervasive computing
 Performances evaluation, experiments, user feed-back
 Surveys on WI and VC
 Semantic Web technologies for Social Data integration and fusion
 Human-based behaviour patterns and modelling


*SUBMISSIONS*

The Web Intelligence and Communities workshop welcomes the submission of theoretical, experimental, methodological as well as application papers. Discussion papers and demonstration papers (for presentation during the workshop) are also welcome.

Submitted papers should be 10 pages maximum in length (4 pages for the discussion and demonstration papers), including figures and references. The paper must be formatted in pdf according to style guidelines of ACM SIG Proceedings Template available here: http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates

All submissions should be done online on the workshop submission web site:https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wic2012

The WI&C workshop are traditionnaly followed by post-proceedings
published in a renowned international journal (for the 2 last ones, it
was the International Journal on Web Intelligence & Agent
Systems). Discussions are in progress to decide which journal will
publish a special issue with the post-proceedings of WI&C 2012.

* WORKSHOP CHAIRS *

 • Rajendra Akerkar, Western Norway Research Institute, Norway
 • Pierre Maret, Hubert Curien Laboratory, Université Jean Monnet, Saint-Étienne, France
 • Laurent Vercouter, LITIS Laboratory, INSA de Rouen, France

* PROGRAM COMMITTEE *

Altmann Jorn, Seoul National University, South Korea
Amblard Frédéric, University of Toulouse I, France
Badica Costin, University of Craiova, Romania
Calmet Jacques, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
Camacho Fernández David, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain
Corcho Oscar, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
Currie Ken, CAPDM Ltd., Edinburgh, UK
De Coi Juri Luca, University of Saint Etienne, France
Delaforge Nicolas, INRIA Sophia Antipolis, France
Dey Anind, Carnegie Mellon Institute, USA
El Morr Christo, York University, Canada
Favre Cécile, ERIC, University of Lyon 2, France
Gilani Wasif, SAP Research, United Kingdom
Halpin Harry, W3C, Scotland
Heckmann Dominikus, Saarland University, Germany
Kawash Jalal, University of Calgary, Canada
Kristoffersen Steinar, Ostfold University College, Norway
Letia Ioan, Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Lingras Pawan, Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Canada
Lopez Guillaume, University of Tokyo, Japan
Molli Pascal, University of Nantes, France
Occello Michel, University Pierre Mendes France, France
Ramanath Maya, Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, India
Ribière Myriam, Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs France
Rios Sebastián, University of Chile, Chile
Sasikumar M, C-DAC, India
Soulier Eddie, University of Technology of Troyes, France
Stahl Christoph, DFKI Saarbrucken, Germany
Stan Johann, Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs France
Story Henry, W3C
Tarkkanen Kimmo, University of Turku, Finland
Teigland Robin, Stockholm School of Economics, Sweden
Tellioglu Hilda, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
van Beijnum Bert-Jan, University of Twente, Netherlands
Werthner Hannes, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
Ying Ding, Indiana University Bloomington, USA


--
*Laurent Vercouter* Professor in Computer Science
LITIS lab, INSA de Rouen, Rouen, France
Ph: (+33) 232 959 986

Autonomous Robots and Multirobot Systems (ARMS 2012)

2012-01-18T08:28:00.000-08:00

Autonomous Robots and Multirobot Systems (ARMS) 2012



A full-day workshop to be held as part of AAMAS-2012 and to accompany the AAMAS Special Track on Robotics



June 2012, Valencia, Spain

Website: http://mmi.tudelft.nl/arms2012/



-------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Important Dates

----------------------

  Paper submission deadline: February 28, 2012

  Notification of acceptance: March 27, 2012

  Submission of camera-ready version: April 10, 2012



Overview

-------------

Robots are agents, too.  Indeed, agent researchers are sometimes inspired by robots, sometimes use robots in motivating examples, and sometimes make contributions to robotics. Both practical and analytical techniques in agent research influence, and are influenced by, research into autonomous robots and multi-robot systems. Areas of particular recent cross-fertilization include (but are not limited

to):



- motion planning and path planning for single and multiple mobile robots

- market-based for coalition formation and task allocation

- machine learning in robotics

- multi-robot teams and swarms

- human-agent-robot teamwork

- analysis of large-scale multi-robot systems and swarms

- decision-theoretic single- and multi-robot planning

- imitation and learning by demonstration/example

- formal methods and control architectures

- Canonical robotics problems, such as robotic soccer, coverage,

   foraging, or patrolling



Despite the rich cross-fertilization between AAMAS and robotics research areas, roboticists and agents researchers have only a few opportunities to meet and interact. The recently established robotics track at AAMAS is one such opportunity. The goal of the proposed workshop is to extend and widen this opportunity, by offering a forum where researchers in this area of research can interact and present promising innovative research directions, and new results. The workshop is coordinated and associated with the AAMAS robotics track.



Submissions and Publication

----------------------------------------

The submission website is http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=arms2012.



Contributions are sought in all areas of robotics, in particular as related to autonomous agents research, but not necessarily so.

Theoretical papers are welcome, as long as they clearly address challenges in robotics. Empirical studies should ideally present experiments with real robots, though physical simulation studies are also acceptable.  Papers that focus on mechanical aspects and low-level control should be make an effort to relate to the agents community.



Submissions should follow Springer's LNCS format (see http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html) and should not exceed 16 pages in length.



Organizing Committee TBA

-------------------------------

The contact organizers are Gal Kaminka (galk@cs.biu.ac.il) and Koen Hindriks (k.v.hindriks@tudelft.nl).

Infrastructures and Tools for Multiagent Systems (ITMAS 2012)

2012-01-18T07:33:00.000-08:00

The 3rd International Workshop on Infrastructures and Tools for Multiagent Systems
ITMAS 2012
Web page: http://itmas2012.gti-ia.upv.es

5 June, 2012, Valencia, Spain

Special issue in the *SCI-indexed journal*:
Information Systems Frontiers with a JCR Impact factor 1.596 (2010)

****************************************************************************************

------------------------------
DESCRIPTION
------------------------------
ITMAS aims at bringing together leading researchers from both academia and industry to discuss issues on the design and implementation of infrastructures and tools for Multiagent Systems. When developing applications based on Multiagent Systems, developers and users demand infrastructures and tools which support essential features in Multiagent Systems (such as agent organizations, mobility, etc.) and facilitate the system design, management, execution and evaluation. Agent infrastructures are usually built using other technologies such as grid systems, service-oriented architectures, P2P networks, etc. In this sense, the integration and interoperability of such technologies in Multiagent Systems is also a challenging issue in the area of both tools and infrastructures for Multiagent Systems. A long term goal is the industrial development of infrastructures for building highly scalable applications comprising pre-existing agents that must be organized or orchestrated.

In order for Multiagent Systems to be included in real domains such as media and Internet, logistics, e-commerce and health care, infrastructures and tools for Multiagent Systems should provide efficiency, scalability, security, management, monitorization and other features related to building real applications.

We encourage the submission of papers describing any kind of infrastructures and tools that are used to provide support for Multiagent Systems. We are particularly interested in infrastructures and tools that allow agent-based systems to be adopted by designers and programmers both in academia and industry.

Specific topics for this workshop include, but are not limited to:
* Agent Infrastructures
* Agent Communication Technologies
* Interoperability and Standards
* Integration of technologies to support Multiagent Systems
* Integration of Agent Infrastructures with non-agent Infrastructures
* Efficiency and Scalability Evaluation
* Agent Infrastructure Benchmarks
* Security, Privacy and Identity Management in Multiagent Systems
* Secure Infrastructures and Tools for Multiagent Systems
* Infrastructures and tools supporting Social and Organizational Models
* Infrastructures and tools supporting Trust and Reputation Models
* Infrastructures and tools supporting Intelligent Virtual Environments
* Infrastructures and tools supporting Electronic Institutions
* Infrastructures for agent-based Service-Oriented Systems
* Design, Management and Monitoring tools for Multiagent Systems
* Models and Architectures for Designing Agent Infrastructures
* Coordination infrastructures for Multiagent Systems
* Environment infrastructures for Multiagent Systems
* Infrastructure support to Model-driven Engineering in Multiagent Systems
* Infrastructure mechanisms for self-organising Multiagent Systems
* Information Retrieval Tools for Multiagent Systems
* Semantic Web Tools for Multiagent Systems
* Mobile Agent Technologies
* Industry implementations of Multiagent Systems
* Experiences using Infrastructures and Tools for Multiagent Systems
* Infrastructures and Tools for Biomedical Multiagent Systems

---------------------------------
IMPORTANT DATES
---------------------------------
* Paper Sumbission Deadline: 2 April 2012
* Paper Acceptance Notification: 30 April 2012
* Camera-ready copies due: 6 May 2012
* Workshop Date: 5 June 2012

---------------------------------
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
---------------------------------
* Juan M. Alberola (Universitat Politecnica de Valencia, Spain)
* Vicent Botti (Universitat Politecnica de Valencia, Spain)
* Ana Garcia-Fornes (Universitat Politecnica de Valencia, Spain)
* Michal Pechoucek (Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic)
* Alessandro Ricci (Alma Mater Studiorum-Universita di Bologna, Italy)
* Jose M. Such (Universitat Politecnica de Valencia, Spain)
* Danny Weyns (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium)

---------------------------------
SUBMISSION and REVIEW DETAILS
---------------------------------
Papers will be peer-reviewed by at least 3 reviewers from the Program Committee. Criteria for the selection of papers will include: high quality, clear presentation, novelty of research, relevance to the topics, coverage of relevant state of the art and the practical implementation of the infrastructures and tools presented.

Submissions must follow the itmas2012 paper format (http://itmas2012.gti-ia.upv.es) and should be a maximum of 14 pages.

Papers must be submitted in pdf format via the conference management system, available at:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=itmas2012

Proceedings will be published with ISBN and following an open access policy. At least one author for each accepted paper must register for the paper to be included in the proceedings.

Selected papers will be invited to submit extended and revised versions to a special issue in the SCI-indexed journal Information Systems Frontiers with a JCR Impact factor 1.596 (2010).

--------------------------
CONTACT
--------------------------
ITMAS2012 Organizers itmas2012(at)dsic(dot)upv(dot)es

Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies (DALT 2012)

2012-01-12T00:11:00.000-08:00

            10th International Workshop on
             Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies
                             (DALT 2012)

                          4 or 5 June 2012

                           Valencia, Spain
                (held in conjunction with AAMAS 2012)

         URL: http://www.di.unito.it/~baldoni/DALT-2012/

----------------------------------------------------------------------
                           CALL FOR PAPERS
----------------------------------------------------------------------

The workshop on Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies (DALT),
in its tenth edition this year, is a well-established forum for
researchers interested in sharing their experiences in combining
declarative and formal approaches with engineering and technology
aspects of agents and multiagent systems.   Building complex agent
systems calls for models and technologies that ensure predictability,
allow for the verification of properties, and guarantee flexibility.
Developing technologies that can satisfy these requirements still
poses an important   and difficult challenge.   Here, declarative
approaches have the potential of offering solutions satisfying the
needs   for both specifying   and developing   multiagent systems.
Moreover, they are gaining more and more attention in important
application   areas such as   the semantic   web, service-oriented
computing, security, and electronic contracting.

DALT 2012 will be held as a satellite workshop of AAMAS 2012, the 11th
International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent
Systems, in June 2011 in Valencia, Spain.   Following the success of
nine previous editions, DALT will again aim at providing a discussion
forum to both (i) support the transfer of declarative paradigms and
techniques to   the broader community of   agent researchers and
practitioners, and (ii) to bring the issue of designing complex agent
systems to the attention of researchers working on declarative
languages and technologies.

DALT 2012 will have as a special interest topics those future trends of
the web, where declarative languages and technologies for multiagents
systems will play an effective role: in particular, social computing
(models of social interactions, trust, commitments, and contracts;
social environments based on declarative technologies) and its related
semantic issues (explicit representation of knowledge and mechanisms for
allowing societies of agents to reason on that).

----------------------------------------------------------------------
                          TOPICS OF INTEREST
----------------------------------------------------------------------

DALT topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

DALT 2012 special topic: declarative approaches for agent-based social
computing
* models of social interactions among agents
* models of buiness interactions among agents
* models of trust, commitments, and reputation for agents
* declarative description of contracts and negotiation policies
* social environments based on declarative technologies
* Semantic Web-aware declarative agents

General themes:
* specification of agents and multi-agent systems
* declarative approaches to engineering agent-based systems

Formal techniques:
* (constraint) logic programming approaches to agent systems
* distributed constraint satisfaction
* modal and epistemic logics for agent modeling
* game theory and mechanism design for multi-agent systems
* semantics of agent communication
* model checking agents and multi-agent systems
* agent communication and coordination languages
* protocol specification, verification, and reasoning

Declarative models:
* declarative models of agent beliefs, goals and capabilities
* declarative models of bounded rationality
* declarative approaches for agent-based grid computing
* declarative paradigms for the combination of heterogeneous agents
* declarative approaches to organizations and electronic institutions
* agent-inspired declarative approaches to Web services and
service-oriented computing

Applications of declarative techniques to:
* multi-agent systems for service-oriented computing
* agent-based grid computing
* security and trust in multi-agent systems
* e-health, e-commerce, e-learning, sociotechnical systems, social
networks, virtual organizations.

Evaluation of declarative approaches:
* experimental analysis of declarative agent technologies
* industrial experiences with declarative agent technologies

----------------------------------------------------------------------
                       SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS
----------------------------------------------------------------------

We welcome and encourage the submission of high-quality, original
papers, which are not being submitted simultaneously for publication
elsewhere. Papers should be written in English, formatted according
to the Springer LNCS style, and not exceed 16 pages. Paper submission
is electronic via the conference website.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
                         WORKSHOP PROCEEDINGS
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Printed copies of the proceedings will be available at the workshop.
Assuming a sufficient number of high-quality submissions, we are again
going to consider the publication of formal post-proceedings with an
international publisher.   The post-proceedings of DALT 2003 (LNAI
2990), DALT 2004 (LNAI 3476), DALT 2005 (LNAI 3904), DALT 2006 (LNAI
4327), DALT 2007 (LNAI 4897), DALT 2008 (LNAI 5397), DALT 2009
(LNAI 5948), and DALT 2010 (LNAI 6619) have been published by
Springer-Verlag in the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
                           IMPORTANT DATES
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Paper submission deadline:                    28 February 2012
Notification of acceptance/rejection:         27 March 2012
Camera-ready copies due:                      10 April 2012
Workshop Date:                                4 or 5 June     2012

----------------------------------------------------------------------
                         WORKSHOP ORGANISERS
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Matteo Baldoni (University of Torino, Italy)
Louise Dennis (University of Liverpool, UK)
Viviana Mascardi (University of Genova, Italy)
Wamberto Vasconcelos (University of Aberdeen, UK)
_______________________________________________

Programming Multi-Agent Systems (ProMAS'12)

2012-01-11T11:44:00.000-08:00

Tenth International Workshop on Programming Multi-Agent Systems (ProMAS'12)


ProMAS'12 is a satellite workshop at AAMAS 2012 Valencia, Spain, 4-5 June 2012


Over the last decade, the ProMAS workshop series has provided a venue
for state-of-the-art research in programming languages and tools for
the development of multi-agent systems. With the increasing commercial
application of multi-agent systems, the need for development tools and
platforms capable of supporting "professional" or "industrial
strength" MAS development has only increased. Such languages and tools
must be developed in a way that is principled and and at the same time
practical, and ProMAS aims to address both theoretical and practical
issues related to developing and deploying multi-agent systems.

Now in its 10th edition, ProMAS has proved to be an invaluable venue
for bringing together leading researchers from both academia and
industry to discuss key issues in the design of programming languages
and tools for multi-agent systems. In particular, the workshop
promotes the discussion and exchange of techniques, concepts,
requirements and principles central to multi-agent programming
technology. These include the theory and application of agent
programming languages, how to effectively implement a multi-agent
system specification or design, the verification and analysis of agent
systems, as well as the implementation of social structures in
agent-based systems (e.g., organisations, coordination, and
communication in multi-agent systems).

We encourage the submission of papers describing proposals for
programming languages and tools that provide specific programming
constructs to facilitate the implementation of multi-agent system
concepts (e.g., mental attitudes, distribution, and social
interaction). We also welcome submissions describing significant
multi-agent applications, as well as agent programming tools that
allow the integration of agents with legacy systems. We are
particularly interested in approaches or applications that show
clearly the added-value of multi-agent programming, and explain why
and how this technology should be adopted by designers and programmers
both in academia and industry.

TOPICS OF INTEREST

Specific topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

- Programming languages, models and abstractions for MAS
- Extensions of traditional languages for multi-agent programming
- Programming mobile agents
- Semantics for multi-agent programming languages
- Computational complexity of MAS
- Algorithms, techniques, or protocols relevant to multi-agent
programming (e.g., coordination, cooperation, negotiation)
- Agent communication issues in multi-agent programming
- Programming social, organizational, and normative aspects of MAS
- Interoperability and standards for MAS
- Safety and security for mobile MAS deployment
- Fault tolerance and load balancing for mobile MAS
- Generic tools and infrastructures for multi-agent programming
- High-level executable multi-agent specification languages
- Formal methods and tools for specification and verification of MAS
- Agent/environment/interaction/organization development tools and platforms
- Benchmarks and testbeds for comparing multi-agent programming
languages and tools
- Applications of multi-agent programming languages including: legacy
systems, pervasive applications, multi-robot systems, autonomous
software (e.g., UAVs), (Semantic) Web and Grid-based applications, and
deployed (industrial-strength) multi-agent systems
- Integration of multi-agent and mainstream technologies

IMPORTANT DATES

Paper submission deadline:                    28  February 2012
Notification of acceptance/rejection:         27  March    2012
Camera-ready copies due:                      10  April    2012
Workshop Date:                                4-5 June     2012

SUBMISSION DETAILS

Authors should submit their papers via the easychair conference
management system:


Papers should be formatted using Springer LNCS style

and should be less than 16 pages in length.

PUBLICATION

Accepted papers will be appear in informal proceedings to distributed
among participants during the workshop. As was the case with previous
editions of the ProMAS workshop, we are planning to publish extended
versions of selected and invited papers as a volume of the Lecture
Notes in Computer Science series by Springer-Verlag.


ORGANISING COMMITTEE

- Mehdi Dastani (Utrecht University, Netherlands)
- Brian Logan (University of Nottingham, UK)
- Jomi Hubner (Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil)


STEERING COMMITTEE

- Rafael H. Bordini (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil)
- Mehdi Dastani (Utrecht University, Netherlands)
- Juergen Dix (Clausthal University of Technology, Germany)
- Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni (University of Paris VI, France)

Agents in Traffic and Transportation

2012-01-05T04:07:00.000-08:00

************************************************************************
* CALL FOR PAPERS                                                      *
* 7th Workshop on Agents in Traffic and Transportation @AAMAS 2012     *
* 4 or 5 June 2012 - Valencia, Spain                                   *
* Website: http://www.ia.urjc.es/att2012                               *
************************************************************************

Building effective and user-friendly transportation systems is one of the
big challenges for engineers in the 21st century. The rapid change of
location, enabled by plane, high-speed rail, sea and road travel, has
constantly become easier and more natural.
These days we travel without any of the difficulties that accompanied
taking a trip less than a century ago. All we have to do is to organize
and to pick up the transport mode that comes closest to our objectives. In
much the same way, many new opportunities for the delivery of goods are
being explored and commercially exploited.

The purpose of this workshop is to bring researchers and practitioners
together in order to set up visions on how agent technology can be and is
used for today's isolated IT-tools so as to model, simulate, and manage
large-scale complex transportation systems. Therefore, we are interested
in research papers, case studies and practitioners' reports on the
implementation and use of Autonomous Agents in all areas related to
transportation, traffic and logistics. Besides running real-world
applications, we are also interested in papers concerning demonstrators or
testbed that are still under development. Conceptual papers and those
reporting on particular components of transportation systems are also
welcome.

This is the seventh of a well established series of workshops since  2000.
Most of them have published post-proceedings in special issues of journals
such as Transportation Research C.

************************************************************************
Relevant topics include (but are not limited to):

- applications of multiagent technology in traffic, transportation, and
transport logistics
- coordination in multiagent transportation systems
- agent-based traffic control
- distributed decision making in traffic, transportation and transport
logistics
- multi-agent systems for intelligent vehicles
- mobile devices and agents in transportation systems
- intelligent monitoring of transportation systems using agents
- data collection, filtering and distribution of traffic information
- autonomous vehicles and collaborative driving
- cognitive approaches to modeling traffic participants
- machine learning approaches to transportation systems
- agent-based approaches to modelling driver behaviour
- agent-based simulation of traffic and transportation systems
- agent-based pedestrian and crowd simulation
- future technologies: opportunities for multiagent systems
- vehicle2vehicle communication and multiagent systems
- requirements and issues involved in electromobility

For ATT2012 we specially encourage submissions on real-world applications
using a minimum of assumptions about future equipments and using novel
techniques from the area of Autonomic Traffic Control and Management.

************************************************************************
Submission Details

Contributions should not exceed ten pages in English. For preparation of
papers to be submitted please use the IFAAMAS template and follow the
formatting instructions for authors available at the AAMAS-2012 website.
Contributions should carry the title, author(s) name(s), and affiliation
including e-mail address, and should include an abstract.

Electronic submission via the conference management system is mandatory:
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=att2012

Submissions are accepted as documents in PDF only.

************************************************************************
Important Dates

Paper submission deadline: 28 February 2012
Notifications of acceptance/rejection:  27 March 2012
Camera-ready copies due: 10 April 2012
Workshop Date: 4 or 5 June 2012

************************************************************************
Organizing Committee

Matteo Vasirani, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (Spain), matteo.vasirani@urjc.es

Eduardo Camponogara, Federal University of Santa Catarina (Brazil),
camponog@das.ufsc.br

Hiromitsu Hattori, Kyoto University (Japan), hatto@i.kyoto-u.ac.jp

Franziska Klügl, Örebro University (Sweden), franziska.klugl@oru.se

*************************************************************************
PLEASE TAKE A LOOK AT THE WEBSITE FOR UPDATED INFORMATION
*************************************************************************

Ambient Intelligence Environments (AmI Environments 2011)

2011-03-28T01:29:00.000-07:00

---------------------------------- - - - - - - - - - -  -  -  -  -   -
AmI_Environments@EPIA2011 :: CALL FOR PAPERS
---------------------------------- - - - - - - - - - -  -  -  -  -   -

Special Track on Ambient Intelligence Environments (AmI Environments 2011) 

15th Portuguese Conference on Artificial Intelligence - EPIA 2011 

10th-13th October, 2011 :: Lisbon, Portugal http://epia2011.appia.pt

---------------------------------- - - - - - - - - - -  -  -  -  -   -
Submission deadline: 10th May, 2011 
---------------------------------- - - - - - - - - - -  -  -  -  -   -

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) is a paradigm emerging from Artificial
Intelligence (AI), where computers are used as proactive tools assisting
people with their day-to-day activities, making everyone's life more
comfortable.
These environments should be aware of the needs of people, customizing
requirements and forecasting behaviours. 

AmI environments may be highly diverse, such as homes, offices, meeting
rooms, schools, hospitals, control centers, transport facilities, tourist
attractions, stores, sport installations, music devices, etc.

In the track on AmI Environments we will create a multi-disciplinary
discussion forum that will bring together researchers from the different
fields addressed discussing issues in Artificial Intelligence topics
included in the Ambient Intelligence environments. Researchers are welcome
to present both theoretical and practical works as well as the lessons
learned with their application in the varied range of domains. Emphasis will
be placed on the presentation of concrete systems, discussion of
implementation and development challenges and sharing of conclusions
achieved and relevant results. 


---------------------------------- - - - - - - - - - -  -  -  -  -   -
CONTRIBUTIONS 
---------------------------------- - - - - - - - - - -  -  -  -  -   -

In order to fulfill these objectives, submissions of substantial, original
and previously unpublished work are invited in all areas of Ambient
Intelligence. 
The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
 
- Applications
- Ambient Assisted Living
- Ubiquitous Computing
- Artificial Intelligence for AmI
- Intelligent Environments
- Pervasive Computing
- Context Aware Computing
- Agent & Multiagent Systems for AmI
- Mobile Computing
- Sentient Computing
- e-Health
- Context Modelling
- AmI for e-Learning
- On-line Dispute Resolution
- Memory Assistant


---------------------------------- - - - - - - - - - -  -  -  -  -   -
SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS and PAPERS FORMAT
---------------------------------- - - - - - - - - - -  -  -  -  -   -

Papers should not exceed fifteen (15) pages in length and must be formatted
according to the information for LNCS authors. Papers must be submitted in
PDF (Adobe's Portable Document Format) format and will not be accepted in
any other format. 

Papers that exceed 15 pages or do not follow the LNCS guidelines risk being
rejected automatically without a review. At least one author of each
accepted paper must register for the conference. More information about the
Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) are available on the
Springer LNCS Web site
http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0.

---------------------------------- - - - - - - - - - -  -  -  -  -   -
SUBMITTING PAPERS 
---------------------------------- - - - - - - - - - -  -  -  -  -   -

In order to submit a paper, authors must register at the EPIA 2011
conference management system (available soon), using the entry of the
AmI_Environments.

---------------------------------- - - - - - - - - - -  -  -  -  -   -
IMPORTANT DATES
---------------------------------- - - - - - - - - - -  -  -  -  -   -

Submission deadline:           10th May, 2011
Notification of acceptance:    10st June, 2011
Camera-ready papers:           1st July, 2011
EPIA 2011 Conference:          10th - 13th October, 2011 

---------------------------------- - - - - - - - - - -  -  -  -  -   -
PUBLICATION
---------------------------------- - - - - - - - - - -  -  -  -  -   -

As usual in the EPIA conference series, a set of the best full accepted
papers will be published in a volume of the LNAI series published by
Springer, edited by EPIA 2011 Conference Chairs. 

All other accepted papers presented at the conference appear in a published
book.  

---------------------------------- - - - - - - - - - -  -  -  -  -   -
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
---------------------------------- - - - - - - - - - -  -  -  -  -   -

Paulo Novais, University of Minho, Portugal (pjon@di.uminho.pt) 

Ana Almeida, Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto, Portugal
(ana@dei.isep.ipp.pt) 

Sara Rodriguez, University of Salamanca, Spain (srg@usal.es)

---------------------------------- - - - - - - - - - -  -  -  -  -   -
CONTACTS AmI_Environments@EPIA2011
---------------------------------- - - - - - - - - - -  -  -  -  -   -

http://epia2011.appia.pt
http://isrt.di.uminho.pt/ae2011/

email: amie2011@appia.pt

Affective Computing (AC’2011)

2011-03-28T01:27:00.000-07:00

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AC@EPIA2011 :: CALL FOR PAPERS

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Special Track on Affective Computing (AC’2011)

15th Portuguese Conference on Artificial Intelligence - EPIA 2011

10th-13th October, 2011 :: Lisbon, Portugal

http://epia2011.appia.pt

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Submission deadline: 10th May, 2011

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The workshop on Affective Computing (AC) will focus on the role of affect, social behaviour, and related issues in the development of computer systems. Relevant topics include the consideration of factors like emotions, mood, personality traits, and attitudes in human-computer, human-robot, and human-environment interaction, especially insofar as they provide better or more "natural" support for humans. Also relevant is the role of such factors in facilitating access to the knowledge essential for making better decisions in response to interactions between individuals and the environments (e.g. facilitating social interaction among humans or among humans and artificial characters).

Affective Computing is a multidisciplinary field that draws upon such areas as sociology, psychology, human-machine interaction, virtual environments, and, obviously, Artificial Intelligence. It is also a field with a wide range of applications, including virtual reality, decision support, computer games, and ambient intelligence, social robotics, and ECAs (Embodied Conversational Agents).

The purpose of this workshop on Affective Computing is to bring together researchers to discuss theories, architectures and applications which are based on a combination of cognitive and affective considerations and that can be applied to groups of individually different persons and their interactions.

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CONTRIBUTIONS

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In order to fulfill these objectives, submissions of substantial, original and previously unpublished work are invited in all areas of Affective Computing.

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Computational models of emotions

Individual Emotion recognition

Social Web

Personality in Agents Architectures

Group Emotion

Emotion and learning

Artificial characters

Affect and emotion recognition

Emotion and memory

Emotion content classification and affect content classification, used to evaluate or analyse human-X interaction;

Using reputation and trust models in social interactions

Using negotiation and persuasion in social interactions

Infrastructure and policy for affective computing

Understanding and Modelling groups and other social systems

Social aspects of globally distributed computing and new cooperative work technologies

New forms of education, entertainment and social relations based on cooperation technologies

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SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS and PAPERS FORMAT

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Papers should not exceed fifteen (15) pages in length and must be formatted according to the information for LNCS authors. Papers must be submitted in PDF (Adobe's Portable Document Format) format and will not be accepted in any other format.

Papers that exceed 15 pages or do not follow the LNCS guidelines risk being rejected automatically without a review. At least one author of each accepted paper must register for the conference. More information about the Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) are available on the Springer LNCS Web site http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0.

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SUBMITTING PAPERS

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In order to submit a paper, authors must register at the EPIA 2011 conference management system (available soon), using the entry of the Affective Computing.

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IMPORTANT DATES

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Submission deadline:           10th May, 2011

Notification of acceptance:    10st June, 2011

Camera-ready papers:           1st July, 2011

EPIA 2011 Conference:          10th - 13th October, 2011

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PUBLICATION

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As usual in the EPIA conference series, a set of the best full accepted papers will be published in a volume of the LNAI series published by Springer, edited by EPIA 2011 Conference Chairs.

All other accepted papers presented at the conference appear in a published book.

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ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

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Goreti Marreiros, goreti@dei.isep.ipp.pt(ISEP, Portugal)

Andrew Ortony, ortony@northwestern.edu(Northwestern University, USA)

Ana Paiva, Ana.Paiva@inesc-id.pt, (INESC-ID and IST, Portugal)

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CONTACTS  goreti@dei.isep.ipp.pt