[alife] CFP: Engineering Environment-Mediated Multiagent Systems

[Titus Brown]

		   C A L L  F O R  P A P E R S

   Engineering Environment-Mediated Multiagent Systems EEMMAS 2007
                    Springer LNCS Proceedings
	Selected and Revised Papers will be Published in a 
Special Issue of ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems

           Invited speakers: Marco Dorigo and Juan Pavon
	  
                 Satellite Conference of ECCS 2007
           The European Conference on Complex Systems
               Dresden, Germany, October 1-5, 2007

      http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~distrinet/events/eemmas/2007/
		        eemmas at cs.kuleuven.be



IMPORTANT DATES

Paper submission deadline: May 31, 2007 
Paper notifications: June 30, 2007 
Camera ready paper: July 31, 2007 
Conference: October 1-5, 2007 

SCOPE

The field of multiagent systems (MAS) studies the foundations and 
engineering of systems that consists of a network of autonomous 
entities (agents) that are situated in an environment. Due to the 
decentralization of control in MAS (each agent is a locus of control
in the system) interaction is essential to enable agents to 
achieve the system goals. Besides exchanging messages, agents can 
interact indirectly by manipulating marks in the environment. 
Classical examples are digital pheromones that represent paths to 
relevant information and gradient-fields that reflect dynamical 
structures in a network. In such environment-mediated MAS, the 
environment provides a coordination infrastructure that enables 
agents to share information and coordinate their behavior.

To build environment-mediated MAS, a disciplined engineering approach
is necessary. Self-organization is an approach to engineer 
decentralized, distributed and resource-limited systems that are 
capable of dynamically adapting to changing conditions without 
external intervention. This useful system property is often reflected
in functions such as self-configuration, self-optimization, and 
self-healing. Engineering approaches to self-organizing systems
often rely on global functionality to emerge from local and 
autonomous decisions of individual actors based on local information
typically communicated through a shared environment.

Although we have some initial understanding how to engineer such 
systems, many research issues are still open. When designing a 
system that is based only on local interactions in the environment 
and the emergent properties resulting from these interactions, it is
a difficult research problem on the one hand to obtain the required 
global behavior of the system and on the other hand to avoid 
undesired global properties. Environment engineering as well as the 
exploitation of emergent behavior in system design is still in its 
infancy, especially in complex distributed problem settings. 


OBJECTIVES

The general objective of EEMMAS is to advance state of the art 
theory and engineering of environment-mediated multiagent systems. 
As such EEMMAS aims to establish a synergetic collaboration between 
two research communities: Environments for Multiagent Systems 
(E4MAS http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~distrinet/events/e4mas/) and
Engineering Self-Organizing Applications 
(ESOA http://www.springerlink.com/content/3-540-33342-8/).
The event will be run in a highly interactive style with 
presentations and discussion sessions. Marco Dorigo and Juan Pavon 
both will give an invited talk at the event. 


TOPICS

Research topics include but are not restricted to:

Foundation 
- Application of principles from domains related to complex system 
  such as physics, biology, and economics to environment-mediated 
  MAS
- Mechanisms for self-organizing and emergent properties for 
  environment-mediated MAS
- Theories and models of environment-mediated MAS

Engineering 
- Requirements analysis and software architectures of environment-
  mediated MAS
- Reusable design approaches for self-organizing and emergent 
  properties
- Methodological support for the design and implementation of 
  environment-mediated MAS
- Middleware and frameworks for environment-mediated MAS
- Assessment metrics and performance evaluation

Experience Reports and Applications 
- Prototypical examples of environment-mediated MAS applications
- Practical applications of distributed environment-mediated MAS


PAPERS

EEMMAS welcomes the submission of orignal theoretical, experimental, 
methodological as well as application papers. Papers may report 
on completed work, descriptions of work in progress or discussion 
papers.

Submitted papers will be evaluated by three members of the PC. 
Papers that present a valuable idea that needs further development 
can be accepted as a short paper. The submission should be 12-16 
pages in length, including figures and references. The paper must 
be formatted according to the Springer Verlag LNCS style in A4 
format. 

Papers should be submitted in pdf format to eemmas at cs.kuleuven.be  


PUBLICATIONS

The proceedings of EEMMAS will be published as a volume in the 
Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.

Selected and Revised papers will be published in a special issue 
of the ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems 
(TAAS: http://www.acm.org/pubs/taas/).
 

CONTACT 

eemmas at cs.kuleuven.be


ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

- Danny Weyns, DistriNet Labs, K.U.Leuven, Belgium
- Sven Brueckner, NewVectors LLC, USA 
- Yves Demazeau, LIG, Grenoble, France 

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

- Flavien Balbo, LAMSADE, Universite Paris-Dauphine, France
- Tibor Bosse, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
- Cristiano Castelfrachi, ISTC-CNR, Rome, Italy 
- Giovanna Di Marzo Serugendo, University of London, UK 
- Marco Dorigo, Universit? Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium 
- Alexis Drogoul, IRD/IFI/MSI, Hanoi, Vietnam 
- Jacques Ferber, Universit? de Montpellier II, Lirmm, France 
- Marie-Pierre Gleizes, IRIT Toulouse, France 
- David Hales, University of Bologna, Italy 
- Tom Holvoet, DistriNet, K.U.Leuven, Belgium 
- Mark Jelasity, Hung. Acad. Sci. and University of Szeged, Hungary 
- Jeffrey Kephart, IBM, USA 
- Franziska Kluegl, University of Wurzburg, Germany 
- Marco Mamei, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy 
- Fabien Michel, LERI, Reims, France 
- James Odell (TBC), Intelligent Automation, Inc., Ann Arbor, USA 
- Andrea Omicini, Universit? di Bologna, Italy 
- Juan Pav?n Mestras, Universidad Complutense Madrid, Spain 
- H. Van Dyke Parunak, NewVectors LLC, Ann Arbor, USA 
- Alessandro Ricci, Universit? di Bologna, Italy 
- Nicolas Sabouret, LIP6 Paris, France
- John Sauter, NewVectors LLC, Ann Arbor, USA 
- Guy Th?raulaz, Universite Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France 
- Karl Tuyls, University of Maastricht, The Netherlands 
- Adelinde Uhrmacher, University of Rostock, Germany 
- Paul Valckenaers, PMA, K.U.Leuven, Belgium 
- Mirko Viroli, Universit? di Bologna, Italy 
- Daniel Yamins, Harvard University, USA 
- Franco Zambonelli, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy