DM: CFP: CIA-2000 Cooperative Information Agents

[Matthias Klusch]

(Please take our apologies if you receive multiple copies.)



           FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS

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   Fourth International Workshop CIA-2000 on

       COOPERATIVE INFORMATION AGENTS

           July 7 - 9, 2000
              Boston, USA

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   http://www.dfki.de/~klusch/cia2000.html


This event is co-sponsored by

- NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, USA.
- Swiss Life, Switzerland.

It is co-located with the ICMAS-2000 conference.


IMPORTANT DATES
===============

   Deadline for Paper Submission:  JANUARY 24, 2000

   Notification of
   Acceptance/Rejection: March 10, 2000
   Deadline for Camera-Ready Paper: March 27, 2000

WORKSHOP THEME
==============

Information agent technology is one of the major key
technologies for the Internet and worldwide Web.
An information agent is a computational software entity that has
access to one or multiple, heterogeneous and distributed information
sources, pro-actively searches for and maintains relevant information
on behalf of users or other agents preferably just-in-time.
In other words, it is managing and overcoming the difficulties mainly
associated with information overload in the open and exponentially 
growing Internet and Web.
Although low-level infrastructure has been developed to support
interoperability between heterogeneous databases and application 
programs, this is not sufficient when dealing with higher-level 
object organizations such as vertical business object frameworks 
and workflows. Existing multi-database or federated database systems
do not support any kind of pro-active information discovery. One 
key challenge of advanced information systems is to balance the 
autonomy of databases and legacy systems with the
potential payoff of leveraging them by the use of information agents 
to perform collaborative work.

Development of information agents requires expertise from different
research disciplines such as Artificial Intelligence (AI),
advanced databases and knowledge base systems, distributed information
systems, information retrieval, and Human Computer Interaction (HCI).

Like in the previous CIA workshops, all hot topics in the research 
area of intelligent and collaborating information agents are covered by
the CIA-2000 workshop.


TOPICS
======

Topics are but not limited to:

* Adaptation and Learning for Information Agents

  - Advanced methods for single and multiagent system learning.
  - Performance, relationship and application of multiagent learning
    for collaborating information agents.
  - Methods for automated uncertain reasoning for knowledge based
    information agents.
  - Self-emerging collaboration among information agents.
  - Computation and action under limited resources.

* Mobile Information Agents and Issues of Security in the Internet

  - Cooperating mobile information agents in wearable computers, 
hand-held and/or
    satellite-based control devices (Web handies, communicators, 
etc.).
  - Architectures, environments and languages for mobile and secure
    performance of information agents and servers.

* Rational Information Agents and Electronic Commerce

  - Virtual Agent-Based Marketplaces, Coalition Formation, Auctions.
  - Electronic Commerce with incomplete and uncertain informations.
  - Economic Models of cooperative problem solving among rational 
information agents in open information environments.
  - Standards for privacy of communication, security, and 
jurisdiction for
    agent-mediated deals.

* Advanced Database, Information System and Knowledge-Base Technology

  - Application of techniques for Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery 
in open, distributed and dynamically changing environments.
-   Adaptive Information Retrieval.
    Management of uncertain and incomplete knowledge for information
    gathering on the Internet or large corporate Intranets.

* Construction and Reuse of Ontologies for Multiagent Information 
Gathering

* Human-Agent Interaction and Intelligent User Interfaces for 
Information
Agents

  - Synthetic agents, believable avatars, and 3-D multimedia-based
    representation of user information spaces in the Internet.
  - Models and implementation of advanced interfaces for conversation 
and dialogue among information Agents and Users.
  - Dynamic inspection of information agents' work by the user.

* Systems and Applications

  Systems and applications of multiple collaborating information 
agents on the Internet.


PROCEEDINGS
===========

The workshop proceedings including all accepted papers will be 
published
by Springer as a volume in the LNAI series (Lecture Notes in
Artificial Intelligence).

The proceedings of the CIA-97, CIA-98, CIA-99 workshops appeared as
LNAI Vol. 1202, 1435 and 1652 respectively.



PREPARATION & SUBMISSION OF PAPERS
==================================

The length of each paper should not exceed 12 pages.
All papers must be written in English. Submissions will be refereed 
for quality,
correctness, originality and relevance. Papers accepted or under 
review by other
conferences, workshops or journals are not acceptable. Papers not
conforming to
the above requirements may be rejected without review.

For preparation of camera-ready 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

For those not using the Springer LNCS style files: The paper must be 
formatted in A4 size using 10 point Times. (If Times is not available, 
please use one of the similar
typefaces widely used in phototypesetting.) Printing area should be 
12.2 x 19.3 cm,
and the interline distance should be arranged in such a way that some 
42 to 45 lines occur on a full-text page.

Each submission includes the full paper (title, authors, abstract, 
text), and in addition a separate title page with the title, a 
300-400 word abstract, a list of keywords, authors (names, addresses,
email addresses, telephone and fax numbers).
You may submit your paper by Electronic Mail or Postal Mail.

+ Submission by E-Mail:
  Please send your contribution in postscript format, A4 printable, as
compressed file to:

   klusch@dfki.de

+ Submission by Postal Mail:
  Please send 4 hard-copies of your contribution to the following 
address.
  (Do not tack the pages together.)

     Dr. Matthias Klusch
     DFKI GmbH
     Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3
     66123 Saarbruecken
     Germany


ORGANIZATION
============

General Chair: Matthias Klusch (DFKI GmbH, Germany)

Co-Chairs: Larry Kerschberg (George Mason University, USA)
           Mike Papazoglou (University of Tilburg, The Netherlands)
           Onn Shehory (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)

Programme Committee:

Sonia Bergamaschi       (University of Modena, Italy)
Cristiano Castelfranchi (NRC Rome, Italy)
Frank Dignum            (TU Eindhoven, The Netherlands)
Tim Finin               (University of Maryland, USA)
Klaus Fischer           (DFKI GmbH, Germany)
Mike Huhns              (University of South Carolina, USA)
Vipul Kashyap           (Telcordia Technologies Inc., USA)
David Kinny            (University of Melbourne, Australia)
Sarit Kraus             (Bar-Ilan University, Israel)
Zakaria Maamar          (National Defence Department DREV, Canada)
Sascha Ossowski         (Rey Juan Carlos University, ESCET, Spain)
Sandip Sen              (University of Tulsa, USA)
Carles Sierra           (IIIA CSIC, Spain)
Katia Sycara            (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
Jan Treur               (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The 
Netherlands)
Christian Tschudin      (Uppsala University, Sweden)
Jose Vidal              (University of South Carolina, USA)
Gerhard Weiss           (TU Munich, Germany)
Mike Wooldridge         (QMW College, UK)
Jian Yang               (CSIRO, Australia)



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

CONTACT

For more information about the workshop please contact:

Matthias Klusch
DFKI German AI Research Center Ltd.
Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3
66123 Saarbruecken, Germany
Phone: +49-681-302-5297
Fax: +49-681-302-2235
EMail: klusch@dfki.de
URL: http://www.dfki.de/~klusch