CFP: AAMAS 2005 Workshop on Agent Communication (AC2005)

["Huhns, Michael" <huhns@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

                         Call for Papers
        AAMAS 2005 Workshop on Agent Communication (AC2005)
     25th or 26th July 2005, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
            http://www.cs.uu.nl/people/rogier/AC2005/

              Submission deadline: March 14th, 2005

OVERVIEW

The domain of agent interaction has been considered first by the
distributed AI and later the multi-agent community for at least 15
years. During the last 7 years some standard agent communication
languages have been proposed. In practice most applications adhere to
the FIPA ACL standard. However, the discussion about the interpretation
and semantics of the standard messages has not yet abated. The use of
mental attitudes as pre- and postconditions of the communicative acts
makes it hard to verify them. On the other hand a pure syntactic
approach would not do justice to the intentional nature of agent
communication.

In the last few years some work based on commitments seems to offer an
interesting middle road. It remains to be seen what are the properties
of these commitments and how they interact with the other attitudes of
the agent. Although the FIPA ACL standard defines a few communication
protocols as well, very little work has been done on practically
implementing them in a standard way. Nor are the semantics of these
protocols unambiguously clear. A new area that opened up last year is
that of multi-party dialogues. That is, what are the issues to be dealt
with when more than two agents take part in a conversation? Especially
interesting will be the case when some of these agents are humans. This
opens up the integration of pure agent communication with agent to human
conversations.

The workshop builds on:
   * AAMAS 2004 Workshop on Agent Communication
   * AAMAS 2003 Workshop on Agent Communication Languages and
Conversation Policies
   * AAMAS 2002 Workshop on Agent Communication Languages and
Conversation Policies

The workshop will solicit papers looking at both theory and practice of
agent communication. Submission of papers linking technical or
theoretical work with applications of this research are strongly
encouraged.

The workshop will be collocated with the fourth international conference
on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems AAMAS 2005 in Utrecht.

TOPICS

We solicit papers dealing with, but not limited to, the following areas:
   * Agent communication languages
   * Semantics and pragmatics of ACL
   * Conversational agents
   * Dialogue games
   * Ontologies and communication
   * Human-agent communication
   * Natural language processing application to communication
   * Conversation policies
   * Specification and implementation of agent conversation policies
   * Validation of conversation policies
   * FIPA's work on semantics and ACL
   * Tools for communication
   * Coordination and cooperation
   * Negotiation
   * Interoperability
   * Multi-party conversations
   * Commitments in communication
   * Integration of protocols within agents
   * Reuse in communication
   * Practical aspects of the communication (medium, performance,
     fault-tolerance)
   * Grounding ACL theory in computer science
   * Speech Acts vs. method invocation

SUBMISSION PROCEDURE

Contributors may submit either full papers (no longer than 5000 words,
not including figures) or a one-page position statement that outlines
their interests, background, and discussion of an aspect of the workshop

theme.

All submissions should be sent either in Postscript format or in PDF
format by email to Roberto Flores on flores@xxxxxxxxxxx (cc:
robertof@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)

At least one author of each accepted papers must register for the
workshop.

IMPORTANT DATES
   Submission Deadline:        March 14th 2005 (no extensions)
   Notification of Acceptance: April 18th 2005
   Workshop:                   July 25th or 26th 2005

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
   * L. Amgoud (IRIT,France)
   * J. Bentahar (Laval University, Canada)
   * B. Chaib-draa (Laval University, Canada)
   * P. Cohen (Oregon Health and Science University, USA)
   * M. Colombetti (Politecnico di Milano, Italy)
   * M. Dastani (Utrecht University, The Netherlands)
   * F. Dignum (Utrecht University, The Netherlands)
   * A. El Fallah-Seghrouchni (University of Paris 6, France)
   * F. Guerin (University of Aberdeen, UK)
   * M. d'Inverno (Westminster University, UK)
   * A. Jones (King's College, London, UK)
   * N. Maudet (University of Paris 9, France)
   * P. McBurney (University of Liverpool, UK)
   * S. Parsons (Brooklyn College, City University of New York, USA)
   * J. Pitt (Imperial College, UK)
   * S. Paurobally (University of Southampton, UK)
   * N. Roos (Maastricht University, The Netherlands)
   * D. Traum (University of California Los Angeles, USA)
   * G. Weiss (Technical University Munich, Germany)
   * P. Yolum (Bogazici University, Turkey)

PUBLICATION

The proceedings of AC2005 will be printed and distributed at the
workshop.  Papers of the 2002, 2003 and 2004 AAMAS workshops on Agent
Communication have been published in the books:
   * Communication in Multiagent Systems (volume 2650 of LNAI,
Springer-Verlag)
   * Advances in Agent Communication (volume 2922 of LNAI,
Springer-Verlag)
   * Developments in Agent Communication (volume 3396 of LNAI,
Springer-Verlag)

Publication of a book on agent communication based on articles from this
years workshop is planned.

ORGANISING COMMITTEE

Co-Chairs:
   * Rogier van Eijk
     Institute of Information and Computing Sciences
     Utrecht University
     P.O. box 80089
     3508 TB Utrecht, the Netherlands
     rogier@xxxxxxxx

   * Roberto A. Flores
     Department of Physics, Computer Science & Engineering
     Christopher Newport University
     1 University Place, Newport News, VA 23606
     flores@xxxxxxxxxxx

   * Marc-Philippe Huget
     ESIA-LISTIC
     B.P. 806
     74016 ANNECY Cedex
     France
     Marc-Philippe.Huget@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx