----------------------------------------------------------------------- CALL FOR PAPERS Fifth International Conference on Autonomous Agents (Agents 2001) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Montreal, Canada, Monday 28 May - Friday 1 June 2001 http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~agents2001/ Autonomous agents are software and robotic entities that are capable of independent action in open, unpredictable environments. Agents are also one of the most important and exciting areas of research and development in computer science today. Agents are currently being applied in domains as diverse as computer games and interactive cinema, information retrieval and filtering, user interface design, electronic commerce, autonomous vehicles and spacecraft, and industrial process control. The aim of the Agents 2001 conference is to bring together researchers and developers from industry and academia to report on the latest scientific and technical advances, discuss and debate the major issues, and showcase the latest systems. The conference welcomes submissions of original, high quality papers concerning autonomous agents in a variety of embodiments and playing a variety of roles in their environments. The Agents 2001 conference, like its predecessors, will focus primarily on systems that have been or are being implemented; theory papers are welcome provided that they clearly relate to such systems, for example by helping us to predict their behavior, explain, or understand them. The submission of pure, abstract theory papers is not encouraged: there are other, more appropriate forums for such work. Papers that address isolated agent capabilities (such as planning or learning) are similarly discouraged, unless they are placed in the overall context of autonomous agents. Evaluation of agents or multi-agent systems will be considered a desireable component of each submission. In addition to conventional conference papers, we strongly encourage the submission of papers that focus on implemented systems or software prototypes. These papers require a demonstration of the software prototype at the conference and should include a detailed project/system description specifying hw/sw features and requirements. A clear description of the application domain(s) and other implementational/system oriented attributes should be included in the paper. Accepted software prototype papers will be presented within a special track at the conference along with the implemented system. The papers will also be reviewed specifically for the special track. Exciting robot demos will also be presented as part of the Agents 2001 Robot Program, providing an exceptional opportunity to demonstrate state-of-the-art research, to share ideas and technology from the very broad research perspectives addressed by the Agents scientific community, and to increase awareness of the key challenges in designing autonomous robotic agents. We encourage teams from universities and other research laboratories to participate. Information about the Robot Program and associated travel assistance is found on the Autonomous Agents web page. Furthermore the conference will include internationally known invited speakers and an exhibits session. More generally, the conference will strive towards an informal atmosphere with plenty of time for presentations, questions, and discussions. Accepted papers and posters will be formally published in a Conference Proceedings. A limited number of student scholarships will be available. IMPORTANT DATES Conference Papers: October 9, 2000 Deadline for electronic title pages October 16, 2000 Deadline for paper submission December 20, 2000 Notification of acceptance Workshops: December 8, 2000 Submission of WS proposals January 12, 2001 Notification of acceptance March 16, 2001 Workshop proceedings due for printing Tutorials: December 8, 2000 Submission of tutorial proposals January 12, 2001 Notification of tutors March 16, 2001 Tutorial notes due for printing CONFERENCE OFFICIALS General Chair: Joerg P. Mueller (Germany) Technical Program Co-Chairs: Elisabeth Andre (Germany), Sandip Sen (USA) Local Organisation Chair: Claude Frasson (Canada) Treasurer: Lewis Johnson (USA) Tutorials Chair: Paolo Petta (Austria) Workshops Chair Adele Howe (USA) Robotics Co-chairs Maja Mataric (USA) Francois Michaud (Canada) Software Demos Chair: Tom Wagner (USA) Sponsors Chair: Von-Wun Soo (Taiwan) Registration Chair: Michelle Martin (Canada) Publicity Chair: Simon Parsons (UK) SENIOR PROGRAM COMMITTEE Justine Cassell, MIT Media Laboratory, USA Tim Finin, University of Maryland-Baltimore County, USA Maria Gini, University of Minnesota, USA Toru Ishida, Kyoto University, Japan Nick Jennings, University of Southampton, UK Sarit Kraus, Bar-Ilan University, Israel James Lester, North Carolina State University, USA Matthias Klusch, DFKI GmbH, Germany Daniela Rus, Dartmouth College, USA Carles Sierra, IIIA-CSIC, Spain Milind Tambe, USC/ISI, USA Manuela Veloso, Carnegie Mellon University, USA Mike Wooldridge, University of Liverpool, UK CONFERENCE THEMES Technical issues to be addressed include, but are not restricted to: action selection and planning adaptation and learning agent architectures agent-based software engineering agent communication languages artificial market systems and electronic commerce autonomous robots believability communication, collaboration, and interaction of humans and agents conversational agents coordinating multiple agents designing agent systems - methodologies & software engineering expert assistants evolution of agents human-like qualities of synthetic agents information agents instructability integration and coordination of multiple activities knowledge acquisition and management lessons learned from deployed agents lifelike qualities meta-modeling and meta-reasoning middle-agents (e.g., matchmakers, brokers, routers) mobile agents modeling the behavior of other agents models of emotion, motivation, or personality multi-agent teams multi-agent communication, coordination, and collaboration multi-agent simulation, verification, and validation network agents organization of agent societies privacy and agents real-time performance standards for agents synthetic agents system support for the implementation of agents user modeling