12th International Workshop on Distributed Artificial Intelligence
Hidden Valley Resort Hidden Valley, Pennsylvania May 19-21, 1993
Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) is concerned with the study of knowledge and action as embodied in multiagent intelligent systems that include both humans and computers. More specifically, it is concerned with using computational models to understand coordination in both cooperative and competitive situations. Coordination is necessary to enable efficient resource use, synchronization of agent actions, and informed balancing of decision tradeoffs in achieving agents' goals.
The objective of the 12th International Workshop on DAI is to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in the broader issues of coordinating intelligent agents. Diverse perspectives and approaches are of interest including models of coordination, cooperative distributed problem solving, integration of heterogeneous systems, knowledge representation at social and organizational levels, distributed search and constraint satisfaction, cognitive modeling of multi-agent interactions, coordination support tools.
Participation at the Workshop will be by invitation only and will be limited to approximately 40 people. To participate, please submit a technical paper describing original research or significant applications in DAI to the Workshop chair. Preference will be given to work that addresses one or more of the four DAI themes listed below. We specifically discourage the submission of papers in areas such as fine-grained parallelism, hardware or language-level concurrency, and connectionism, because we feel that work in these areas is more appropriate for other workshops. A small number of "interested observers" may also be invited to attend. If you would like to be considered for attendance on this basis, please submit a written request justifying your participation.
To encourage participants to relate their work to ongoing themes in DAI beforehand, papers are solicited for (but not strictly limited to) the following themes:
1. Coordination/Collaboration Knowledge: The identification, encoding, and use of generic knowledge for coordination and collaboration. This theme focuses on general knowledge about resolving conflicts, compromising, and cooperating.
2. Coordination as Search: When viewing coordination as a search process, decisions are needed regarding algorithms for conducting the search, heuristics for controlling the search, and protocols for exchanging and updating portions of the search space. This theme broadly includes approaches such as distributed constraint satisfaction search, search for compatible distributed plans, search in cooperative problem-solving and design, negotiation search, and search for appropriate organizational designs.
3. Intelligent Agents in Enterprises and Applications: Embedding DAI systems in computer networks used by people to solve problems allows the automation of both cooperative problem-solving activities (such as distributed interpretation or diagnosis) and coordination activities (such as information filtering or resource allocation). This theme includes issues in identifying suitable applications of DAI technology and in developing DAI agents that interact effectively with people and each other.
4. Modeling Through Communication and Observation in Adversarial and Cooperative Systems: Building and maintaining models of other agents' beliefs, abilities, goals, and plans is crucial for intelligent interaction. Topics in this theme include acquiring modeling information (through communication and plan recognition) and using models to make decisions about communication (deciding whether to tell the truth, eliciting more information) and about other actions.
5. Societies and Organizations of Agents: Viewing the society rather than the agent as the building block on which to base collaborative behavior. Topics in this theme include emergent system behavior, swarm intelligence, organizational schemes, issues in organizational design and redesign, self-adapting organizations.
These themes are not mutually exclusive, and we welcome papers that integrate insights from more than one of them.
As DAI matures, it is appearing more and more in real-world applications. This welcome development raises the need for engineering principles that will help match particular techniques with kinds of problems. We welcome both theoretical and applied papers, and encourage each to contribute to the development of these principles. Specifically, theoretical papers should explain how their principles and methods can be mapped to applications, while applied papers should explain why they use the techniques that they do and why other approaches are less appropriate for the problem at hand.
LOCATION:
DAI'93 will be held at the Hidden Valley Resort, Hidden Valley, Pennsylvania. Hidden Valley Resort is 60 miles from Pittsburgh. The participants can arrive by rental car or by shuttle van (price depends on number of participants on a particular ride). The resort offers a variety of activities including, indoor/outdoor pools, whirlpool, sauna, lake fishing and boating, hiking and bike trails, tennis, basketball, volleyball and golf. We'll continue the DAI tradition of a participatory workshop by active practitioners in a setting that offers seclusion, natural beauty, and recreational intermissions.
SUBMISSION DETAILS:
Papers for review should be a maximum length of 15 pages, in a legible format (font size 11 or 12 pt). Please submit 4 copies to Katia P. Sycara (address below) and indicate on the title page the theme(s) for which the paper is most relevant. Also, please include an electronic mail address for the appropriate contact person along with the submission.
DATES:
Deadline for paper submissions (4 copies, 15 page max): February 1, 1993.
Notification of acceptance: March 20, 1993.
Final papers due (for distribution at the Workshop): April 20, 1992.
We expect that revised versions of the best papers from the Workshop will be considered for inclusion in an appropriate journal or in a published collection.
PROGRAM COMMITTEE: Katia P. Sycara (chair) The Robotics Institute School of Computer Science 5000 Forbes Av. Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA. 15213 Tel: (412) 268-8825 FAX: (412) 621-5477 e-mail: katia@cs.cmu.edu
Susan Conry, Clarkson University, USA Edmund Durfee, University of Michigan, USA Les Gasser, University of Southern California, USA Frank v. Martial, DETECON, Germany Van Dyke Parunak, Industrial Technology Institute, USA Jeff Rosenschein, Hebrew University, Israel Evangelos Simoudis, Lockheed AI Center, USA Marty Tenenbaum, Enterprise Integration Technologies, USA
ADVISORY COMMITTEE:
Mark Fox, University of Toronto, Canada Jacques Ferber, LAFORIA, France Mike Huhns, MCC, USA Carl Hewitt, MIT, USA Toru Ishida, NTT, Japan Victor R. Lesser, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA Eric Werner, INRIA, France