DM: ECAI 2000 WS on Balancing Reactivity and Social Deliberation in MAS

[Markus Hannebauer]

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                First Call for Papers/Participation
                
                       ECAI 2000 Workshop on
 BALANCING REACTIVITY AND SOCIAL DELIBERATION IN MULTI-AGENT SYSTEMS
 
           http://www.first.gmd.de/plan/ecai-2000-ws.html
           
                 Berlin, Germany, August 22, 2000
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Important Dates
---------------

  Deadline for submission:              1.5.2000
  Notification:                         1.6.2000
  Deadline for camera-ready papers:    10.6.2000
  Workshop:                            22.8.2000


Scope
-----
  
  Today's envisioned  applications of  intelligent systems in general
  and  multi-agent  systems  in particular confront  researchers  and
  developers with the difficulty of finding the right balance between 
  reactive and socially deliberative behavior.  Reactive  systems are 
  capable of adapting  very quickly to  unforeseen changes in the en-
  vironment and are hence said to  be  more robust and efficient.  On 
  the other hand, they usually lack the necessary overview to produce 
  behavior that can  compete with the results of  in-depth  reasoning 
  techniques.  In  contrary  to  that,  socially deliberative systems 
  allow  for  exploiting  environmental information and  coordination 
  mechanisms to build up  through-thought  individual and even  team-
  oriented  strategies.  Though  their  problem-solving  results  are 
  usually much better than in reactive systems,  deliberative systems 
  are much more susceptible to  dynamic  environments  and often lack
  the potential for real-time computation.

  This workshop focuses on theoretical,  technical and practical work 
  on balancing between these two extremes in the context of  collabo-
  rative work in multi-agent  systems.  Contributions from Artificial 
  Intelligence as well as Robotics are welcome.

  Theoretical and technical topics of  interest include,  but are not 
  restricted to:

    - Extension of reactive systems by cooperation

    - Teaching deliberative systems reactivity and real-time

    - Efficient coordination, cooperation and organization approaches

    - Anytime approaches and algorithms

    - Design and evaluation of hybrid multi-level agent architectures

    - Short-term, medium-term and long-term intentionality

    - Enriching group behavior by environmental,  opponent and social 
      models
      
    - Individual and social adaptivity

  To keep the workshop focussed, we encourage practical contributions 
  to be directed at:

    - Multi-agent problem solving (planning, scheduling, control ...)

      Real-world problems  often require  distributed solving strate-
      gies,  because of  natural distribution,  social competence and 
      efficiency matters. Multi-agent approaches to such problems are 
      said to be more robust than monolithic systems, but usually en-
      tail worse solutions. How can this be overcome by better balan-
      cing between reactive and deliberative behavior?

    - RoboCup

      RoboCup has proven to be a  great and challenging  benchmarking
      scenario both  to  Robotics  and  Artificial  Intelligence.  In 
      RoboCup reactivity and real-time are a must, but social delibe-
      ration gets more and more important to match  the world's  lea-
      ding teams.  Hence, there is much research work to be done con-
      sidering the topics of this workshop.
      
      IMPORTANT:  Papers that focus on RoboCup-specific topics should
      make clear how the work could be applied to  other  domains  as 
      well. We encourage you to pick at least one specific domain and 
      argue that such is the case.
      

Submissions
-----------

  Participation in the workshop will be restricted to 30 persons.  We 
  encourage active participation by inviting only  people  with  sub-
  mitted papers or with a single-page statement of interest,  reflec-
  ting the authors' concrete relation to the  field  and  topic.  All 
  workshop participants must register for ECAI 2000.
  
  Informal pre-proceedings of the workshop will be published  in time 
  to be available at the workshop.  Additionally, Springer-Verlag has
  committed to publish an edited version of the workshop  proceedings
  in its well-known Lecture Notes on Artificial  Intelligence  series 
  (http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/index.html).  Authors of selected
  papers will be asked to extend their articles for inclusion in this
  LNAI volume.

  Papers should be formatted according to the LNAI  style  guide  for
  authors  (refer  to  http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html)
  and should not exceed 12 pages.

  Papers should be submitted as Postscript-files and  additionally as 
  pure Tex- and Eps-files via eMail to the contact person  named  be-
  low. Alternatively, send four copies of  your  paper  via  ordinary 
  mail to the address of the contact person. Electronic submission is 
  strongly prefered.

  Deadline for submission:              1.5.2000
  Notification:                         1.6.2000
  Deadline for camera-ready papers:    10.6.2000
  Workshop:                            22.8.2000


Organizing committee
--------------------

  Markus Hannebauer (contact person)
    Planning and Optimization Laboratory
    Research Institute for Computer Architecture 
      and Software Technology (FIRST)
    GMD - German National Research Center for Information Technology
   
    Kekulestrasse 7, 12489 Berlin, Germany

    Tel.:  +49-30-6392 1866
    Fax.:  +49-30-6392 1805
    eMail: hannebau@first.gmd.de
    WWW:   www.first.gmd.de/~hannebau

  Jan Wendler
    Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
    Department of Computer Science
    Humboldt University Berlin

    Rudower Chaussee 25, 12489 Berlin, Germany

    Tel.:  +49-30-2093 3170
    Fax.:  +49-30-2093 3168
    eMail: wendler@informatik.hu-berlin.de
    WWW:   www.informatik.hu-berlin.de/~wendler

  Enrico Pagello
    Department of Electronics and Informatics
    Faculty of Engineering
    University of Padua

    Via Gradenigo 6/a, 35131 Padova, Italy
    
    Tel.:  +39-049-827 7687
    Fax.:  +39-049-827 7699
    eMail: epv@dei.unipd.it
    WWW:   www.dei.unipd.it


Program committee
-----------------

  Minoru Asada, Osaka University, Japan
  Hans-Dieter Burkhard, Humboldt University Berlin, Germany
  Silvia Coradeschi, Oerebro University, Sweden
  Klaus Dorer, Freiburg University, Germany
  Peter Jarvis, SRI International, USA
  Christoph Jung, infor AG, Germany
  Gal Kaminka, University of Southern California, USA
  Joerg P. Mueller, Siemens AG, Germany
  Itsuki Noda, Stanford University, USA
  Daniel Polani, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany
  Martin Riedmiller, Karlsruhe University, Germany
  Jukka Riekki, University of Oulu, Finland
  Josep Lluis de la Rosa, University of Girona, Spain
  Peter Stone, AT&T Laboratories Research, USA
  Manuela Veloso, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
  Joerg Wilberg, GMD AiS, Germany


Additional information
----------------------

ECAI-2000 homepage
http://www.ecai2000.hu-berlin.de

Workshop homepage
http://www.first.gmd.de/plan/ecai-2000-ws.html

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| Markus Hannebauer                       www.first.gmd.de/~hannebau |
| Dipl.-Inform., Research Fellow               hannebau@first.gmd.de |
|                                                                    |
| Research Institute for Computer Architecture                       |
|   and Software Technology (FIRST)                                  |
|                                      phone:    +49- 30-63 92 18 66 |
| German National Research Center      cell. p.: +49-177-267 43 60   |
|   for Information Technology (GMD)   fax:      +49- 30-63 92 18 05 |
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