PRELIMINARY CALL FOR PAPERS

Second International Conference on
AUTONOMOUS AGENTS (Agents '98)

Minneapolis/St. Paul, May 10-13, 1998

The conference welcomes submissions of original, high quality papers and videos with summaries concerning autonomous agents in a variety of embodiments and playing a variety of roles in their environments. As in Agents '97, the conference will emphasize "complete" agents that have actually been implemented or are currently under construction. Evaluation of agents and multi-agent systems will be a necessary component of each submission. Agents '98 will de-emphasize theory and focused treatments of isolated component capabilities (e.g., planning, pattern recognition, diagnosis, learning).

The conference will include presentations of papers and videos, panels and exhibits. Accepted papers and videos from different application areas will appear in shared sessions to facilitate an appreciation of application-independent issues in the design and implementation of autonomous agents. More generally, the conference will strive towards an informal atmosphere with plenty of time for presentations, questions, and discussions. Accepted papers and video summaries will be published in a Conference Proceedings. A limited number of student scholarships will be available.

The conference will include tutorials and workshops that will take place May 9, 1998.

SUBMISSION INFORMATION

October 1, 1997 Deadline for receipt of electronic title pages and abstracts
October 8, 1997 Deadline for receipt of papers and videos
December 15, 1997 Author notifications will be mailed.
January 15, 1998 Camera-ready copies due

Submissions should be sent to

Katia P. Sycara
General Chair, Agents '98
The Robotics Institute
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA. 15213
e-mail: katia@cs.cmu.edu

Technical Issues

• agent architectures
• coordinating perception, thought, and action
• network-centric agents
• action selection and planning
• real-time performance
• adaptation to run-time events
• longer-term adaptation and learning
• evolution of agents
• knowledge acquisition and accumulation
• integration and coordination of multiple activities
• multi-agent communication
• multi-agent coordination and collaboration
• middle-agents (e.g., matchmakers, brokers, routers)
• multi-agent teams
• semantic agent interoperability
• organization of agent societies
• communication between people and agents
• collaboration between people and agents
• function allocation between people and agents
• modeling the environment
• modeling the behavior of other agents
• meta-modeling of an agent by itself
• user modeling
• believability
• mobility
• life-like qualities
• models of emotion
• models of motivation
• models of personality
• other human-like qualities
• instructability
• mind-body relationship

General Chair

Katia P. Sycara (Carnegie Mellon University)

Technical Program Co-Chairs

Tim Finin (University of Maryland, Baltimore County)
Mike Wooldridge (Mitsubishi Electric Digital Library Group)

Finance Chair:

Jim Hendler (University of Maryland)

Local Arrangements Chair:

Maria Gini (University of Minnesota)

Publicity Chair:

Keith Decker (University of Delaware)

Tutorial Chair:

Anand Rao (Australian AI Institute)

Workshops Chair:

Mike Huhns (University of S. Carolina)

Marketing Chair:

D. Navin Chandra (NetsInc)

Demonstration Chairs:

Software Agents: Henry Kautz (ATT Bell Labs) Robotic Agents: Robin Murphy (Colorado School of Mines)

Poster Chair:

Afsaneh Haddadi (Daimler Benz)

Exhibits Chair:

David Musliner (Honeywell)