CFP: ECAI Workshop on AI for Service Composition

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

                          AISC06
                4th INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON
         ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE for SERVICE COMPOSITION

                     CALL FOR PAPERS

               in conjunction with ECAI 2006
                 Riva del Garda - Italy
                     August 28, 2006

                http://ecai2006.itc.it/AISC06

                *** IMPORTANT DATES
         Paper submission:     April 25, 2006
         Author notification:  May 10, 2006
         Camera ready copy:    May 24, 2006

In the last years, there has been increasing interest in service
composition. According to this approach, existing distributed services=20
can be selected and combined into suitable workflows of tasks, in order=20
to provide new functionalities or applications. Service composition has=20
the potential to revolutionize the classical approaches to data
integration=20
and business process integration, reducing development time and
effort. Standards and platforms based on service models and supporting
service composition have been developed in different frameworks,
including web services, grid services, and agent services.

AI techniques have been used to support different key aspects of
the management of service compositions, including tasks such as their
generation, allocation of resources, execution, monitoring and
repair. For instance, knowledge representation techniques have been
exploited to provide suitable semantic annotations of services;
planning has been applied to an automatic generation of the workflows
composing the services; scheduling has been applied to resource
allocation and workflow optimization; and agent techniques have been
applied to support a dynamic adaptation of the workflows.

However, many issues remain to be resolved. These include (1) forming
precise, clean and general characterizations of service compositions,
and identifying the most appropriate ways to formalize the critical
steps in their life cycle; (2) determining suitable languages to
represent service compositions in all their relevant aspects and
finding ways of bridging the gap between service composition languages
used in the industry and languages exploited in AI; (3) highlighting
important challenges for AI to be effective in practical, industrial
contexts, proposing techniques and tools able to address these
challenges in realistic scenarios, and finding architectures for
integrating such techniques in a robust, integrated environment.

This workshop is the continuation of three successful workshops at
ICAPS 2003, ICAPS 2004, and AAAI 2005, and aims at becoming a regular
meeting place for researcher and practitioners working in the field of
AI and in the area of service composition. We invite contributions
discussing research issues on these themes, proposing real case
studies or presenting systems under development

***  RELEVANT TOPICS

Topics of interest include but are not limited to the following:
-  expressive description languages for services and service
compositions;
-  design and development of service compositions;
-  automatic and mixed-initiative composition of services;
-  validation and verification of service compositions;
-  execution monitoring, repair, and adaptation of service compositions;
-  resource allocation and optimization for service compositions;
-  design-time and run-time information gathering in service
composition;
-  storage, analysis, and retrieval of composed services.

*** SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Those wishing to attend are encouraged to submit either a full paper
of up to 8 pages in the ECAI format, or a short position paper of up
to 3 pages.  Please send the "pdf" file to aisc06@xxxxxx with the=20
subject line "AISC06 Paper Submission".

*** WORKSHOP CHAIR
Marco Pistore, University of Trento, Italy

*** ORGANIZING BOARD
Jose Luis Ambite, USC Information Sciences Institute, USA
Jim Blythe, USC Information Sciences Institute, USA
Jana Koehler, IBM Research Laboratory, Switzerland
Sheila McIlraith, University of Toronto, Canada
Biplav Srivastava, IBM Research Laboratory, India

*** CONTACT INFO
For more information about the AISC06 Workshop visit the official=20
web-page: http://ecai2006.itc.it/AISC06
or send e-mail to: aisc06@xxxxxx