Call for Papers

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MATES 2012 - The Tenth German Conference on Multi-Agent System Technologies "Research and Innovation for a Smarter Society" !! DEADLINE EXTENSION !! Abstracts due: EXTENDED May 7, 2012 (April 21, 2012) Full papers due: EXTENDED May 14, 2012 (April 28, 2012) October, 10th-12th, 2012. Trier, Germany mates2012.uni-trier.de =================================================================

The conference is over

Thanks you for participation. Special thanks to the speaker. The talks of the honored invited speaker are now available:
10th German Conference on Multiagent System Technologies - Dr. Jeffrey M. Bradshaw
10th German Conference on Multiagent System Technologies - Prof. Dr. Stefan Kirn

Aims and Scopes

The German conference on Multi-Agent system TechnologieS (MATES) provides an interdisciplinary forum for researchers, users (members of business and industry) and developers of intelligent agents and multi-agent systems. The thematic focus of this MATES 2012 is on technologies that enable societies and organisations to be more resilient, inter-connected and collaborative. The conference investigates technologies for truly open distributed systems --- covering a wide spectrum of approaches from self-organization and autonomous systems to agreement computing. Advances in research work, as well as prototyped or fielded systems of intelligent agents will be presented and discussed. The conference covers the whole range from theory to application of agent- and multi-agent technologies in order to promote theory and application of agents and multi-agent systems. The conference features an exhibition of practical applications with an advanced concept of agency. Integral part of the technical program will be an exhibition of a variety of tools for the development, and prototypes of all kinds of practical applications of agent and multiagent technology at the conference venue. The conference will also host a doctoral consortium.
For the tenth time the German special interest group on Distributed Artificial Intelligence jointly with the steering committee of MATES organizes this international conference in order to promote theory and application of agents and multi-agent systems. Building on the sequence of agent-related events in Germany in the past such as VDI 1998 (Chemnitz), VertIS 2001 (Bamberg), and KI 2002 (Aachen), the MATES conference series (from 2003 to 2011) now is exclusively devoted to agents and multi-agent systems, and the cross-fertilization between agent theory and application. This year is also the 20th year of the German special inerest group on Distributed Artificial Intelligence - another reason for an inspiring conference on agents! The conference language is English.
Salve - welcome to Trier! The conference takes place in Germany's oldest city - close to Saarbrücken, Frankfurt/Main and Luxemburg as well as the well-known Leibniz Center for Informatics (Schloss Dagstuhl).
The MATES series has been ranked by the Computing Research & Education initiative as a CORE B conference. The proceedings will be published as Springer LNCS #7598.
Contact: mates2012@easychair.org

 

Invited Speakers

Dr. Jeffrey M. Bradshaw

Human-Agent Teamwork in Cyber Defense

Abstract: Despite the significant attention being given to the critical problems of cyber security, the ability to keep up with the increasing volume and sophistication of network attacks is seriously lagging. Throwing more computing horsepower at fundamentally-limited visualization and analytic approaches will not get us anywhere. Instead, we need to seriously rethink the way cyber security tools and approaches have been conceived, developed, and deployed.
IHMC is taking advantage of the combined strengths of humans and software agents to create new capabilities for Network Operations Centers (NOCs). These capabilities are being implemented in a new cyber defense framework called Sol. Our objective is to enable distributed sensemaking, rapid detection of threats, and effective protection of critical resources. Specifically, we use agents, policies, and visualization to enact coactive emergence as a sensemaking strategy for taskwork and teamwork, and we implement capabilities for organic resilience and semantically-rich policy governance as a means of assuring effective and adaptive human-agent team response.
IHMC has applied its long years of experience with software agents to the design of a new agent framework called Luna. Luna agents function both as interactive assistants to analysts and as continuously-running background aids to data processing and knowledge discovery. Luna agents achieve much of their power through built-in teamwork capabilities that, in conjunction with IHMC's KAoS policy services framework, allow them to be proactive, collaborative, observable, and directable. In order to support dynamic scalability and other features of the Sol framework, the Luna platform supports the policy-governed option of allowing the state of agents (vs. code of agents) to migrate between operating environments and hosts.
We believe that the approach to cyber defense embodied in Sol is equally relevant to applications of distributed sensemaking for other kinds of complex high-tempo tasks such as real-time disease control or disaster management.
Biography: Jeffrey M. Bradshaw (Ph.D., Cognitive Science, University of Washington) is a Senior Research Scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) where he leads the research group developing the KAoS policy and domain services framework. He co-leads the group developing IHMC's Sol Cyber Framework and the Luna agent framework. Formerly, Jeff led research groups at The Boeing Company and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Though his earliest publications were focused on memory and language, Jeff's research focus soon turned to a wide variety of topics relating human and machine intelligence. With Ken Ford, he edited the seminal volume Knowledge Acquisition as a Modeling Activity, and became well known for his role in helping develop a suite of successful methodologies and tools for automated knowledge acquisition. While at Boeing, he founded the emerging technologies group of the Aviation Industry Computer-Based Training Committee (AICC). Jeff helped pioneer the research area of multi-agent systems, and his first book on the topic, Software Agents, became a classic in the field and a best-seller for The MIT Press. Jeff served for over a decade on the Board of Directors of the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems.
Human-Agent-Robot Teamwork has been a central interest for many years. From 2002-2006, KAoS was used as part of a NASA series of annual two-week field tests of human-robot teams performing simulated planetary surface exploration at the Mars Desert Research Station in the Utah desert. Jeff was sponsored by DHS to undertake detailed simulation studies of the use of human-robot teams to secure facilities at Port Everglades. He has also led the ONR-sponsored NAIMT and Coordinated Operations projects where a team of humans and heterogeneous robots performed field exercises at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, aimed at port reconnaissance, and robot-assisted detection and apprehension of intruders. Jeff co-founded and organized the Human-Agent-Robot Teamwork Workshop series (HART), whose most recent meetings were held at the Lorentz Center in Leiden, The Netherlands, and at the 2012 Human-Robot Interaction conference in Boston. He recently served as lead editor for a special issue of IEEE Intelligent Systems on HART (April-May 2012). In June 2012, he led an international workshop for the National Academies on Intelligent Human-Machine Collaboration.
Jeff has been a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the European Institute for Cognitive Sciences and Engineering (EURISCO) in Toulouse, France; a visiting professor at the Institut Cognitique at the University of Bordeaux; is former chair of ACM SIGART; and former chair of the RIACS Science Council for NASA Ames Research Center. He served as a member of the National Research Council (NRC) Committee on Emerging Cognitive Neuroscience Research, was an advisor to the HCI and Visualization program at the German National AI Research Center (DFKI), and was a scientific advisor to the Japanese NEC Technology Paradigm Shifts initiative. He currently serves as a member of the Board on Global Science and Technology for the National Academies and as an external advisory board member of the Cognitive Science and Technology Program at Sandia National Laboratories. He is an Honorary Visiting Researcher at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, a member of the Graduate Faculty at the Florida Institute of Technology, a faculty associate at the University of West Florida. With Robert Hoffman and Ken Ford, he serves as co-editor of the Human-Centered Computing Department for IEEE Intelligent Systems. In 2011, he received the Web Intelligence Consortium Outstanding Contributions Award.

Prof. Dr. Stefan Kirn

25 Years of Distributed AI in Germany: From the very beginnings to multiagent applications in industry in Germany today

Abstract: I. The presentation starts with a brief report on the first steps of Distributed AI research in Germany, beginning in 1988, the year of the publication of the famous book of Bond / Gasser, followed by a stimulating discussion on Michael Huhns DAI mailing list (1991), and by a number of ambitious German PhD projects (Fischer, Klett, v. Martial, Kirn and others), and, finally, by the foundation of the German Special Interest Group on Distributed AI in the early 1990´s.
II. From its very beginning, German DAI research has been driven by three main forces:
(1) basic research: developing towards well-defined concepts for distributed problem solving and multiagent systems, coordination and cooperation, situated behaviors, etc. in two 6 years basic research programs on Socionik (1999-2005), and cooperative intelligent agents (2000-2006).
(2) industrial DAI/MAS applications in lots of branches, e.g. banking and finance, production planning and control, logistics and others, and
(3) the enrichment of other computer science technologies like databases, knowledge based systems, distributed systems, grid computing, and cloud computing nowadays by proven concepts of the multiagent field.
This part of the presentation gives introdcutions into and examples of these projects and to the results achieved.
III. Nowadays it is well understood that the multiagent paradigm is an important cutting edge technology for innovative solutions in the field of smart objects. National and international research programs offer a lot of opportunities for ambitious multiagent research and development. The presentation introduces some up to date examples from fields like food security, material logistics, and civil engineering.
Biography: Prof. Dr. Stefan Kirn holds a chair in Information Systems at University of Hohenheim at Stuttgart/Germany. He obtained master degrees in management science (Munich, 1980) and in computer science (Hagen, 1989). He did his Ph.D. in Distributed AI in 1991, and his habilitation in Organizational Theories for Multi-Agent Systems in 1995. Stefan Kirn has been the initiator and coordinator of a 6 years German Research Foundation priority program on business applications of agent technology (2000-2006). From this research program originated the agent technology testbed Agent.Hospital, which has been successfully presented to an international audience the first time at Barcelona in February 2003. The most important results of this program have been published as a Springer book entitled "Multiagent Engineering Handbok". From 2001-2003 he has been Chief Scientist of IWT GmbH/Erfurt, a research company owned by the Association of the Industry of Thuringia/Germany. Since 2005, Stefan Kirn is CEO of the Hohenheim Research Center on Innovation and Services. In 2004, he founded Jesselle GmbH, an agent technology based university spinoff. Since 2004, he initiated a series of series of national and European projects on industrial applications of multiagent technology, e.g. Akogrimo, AutoBauLog, BREIN, MIGRATE!, ProBauDok, etc. Stefan Kirn has published more than hundred peer reviewed international publications, is on the editorial board of several journals in information systems, and acts as a consultant to governments, industry, and professional organizations.

Topics of Interest

MATES 2012 welcomes contributions from the field of agent-oriented computing and agent technologies. We solicit both basic as well as applied research papers on recent advances in the area of intelligent agents and multi-agent systems in general. Also papers reporting on the successful application of agent technologies in any kind of domain are very welcome. MATES 2012 encourages especially submissions from recent and emerging areas of interest such as a Autonomic Computing, Self-organisation and Agreement Technologies. Additionally, we encourage the submission of elaborated vision and challenge papers that discuss mid-term and long-term directions for research and application.
The topics of interest for MATES-2012 include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Agent-based simulation and analysis of social networks
  • Agents and communities
  • Large-scale agent-based simulation of cities, economies, etc.
  • Adaptive agents and multi-agent learning
  • Advanced theories of collaboration: Modelling and formation of teams, coalitions, groups, and organizations
  • Agents and autonomic computing
  • Agent and multi-agent architectures
  • Agents and peer-to-peer computing
  • Agents and pervasive computing
  • Agents for Ambient Intelligence
  • Agent-based service discovery, matchmaking, brokering, and composition
  • Agent communication languages
  • Agents for e-business and e-government
  • Agent technologies in the context of service-oriented computing and architectures
  • Agent to non-agent interoperability
  • Agents in novel applications
  • Application of agent-technologies in industrial practice
  • Artificial social systems: Conventions, norms, institutions; trust and reputation
  • Autonomous robots and robot teams
  • Commitment, delegation, responsibility, and obligations in artificial and hybrid societies
  • Complex systems and their management
  • Coordination, negotiation, argumentation, and conflict resolution
  • Deployed agent-based business applications
  • Hybrid human and agent societies
  • User modelling and interface agents
  • Embodied conversational actors and believable agents
  • Mobile agents
  • Model-driven design of multi-agent systems
  • Multi-agent-based simulation
  • Multi-agent planning and scheduling
  • Multi-agent platforms and tools
  • Multi-agent (social) simulation and (cognitive) modelling with agents
  • Practical aspects of programming agent systems: Robustness, fault tolerance, scalability and performance measurement
  • Roles and structures, adaptive learning and cognition in organizational models
  • Semantics of the dynamics of organizational models
  • (Semantic) web services and agents
  • Standards for agents and multi-agent systems

Submission Details

Paper submissions to MATES-2012 will be handled using the EasyChair system at this link: www.easychair.org/conferences/ Submissions must comply with the following requirements:

  • For preparation of papers to be submitted please follow the instructions for authors available at the Springer LNCS Web page: http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html.
  • The length of each paper including figures and references shall not exceed 14 pages.
  • All papers must be written in English and submitted in PDF format.
  • Papers that have been accepted or are under review by other conferences or journals are not eligible for submission. However, we encourage interdisciplinary contributions submitted or presented in part to a forum outside of agent technology.

Doctoral Consortium

The focus of this year's MATES lies on techniques for enabling societies and organizations to be more inter-connected and collaborative. The doctoral consortium (DC) is one means to enable these goals for the researchers working in the area of intelligent agents or multi-agent systems. It aims to connect researchers, and give especially PhD students a place to present and discuss their ideas and make them work together collaboratively.
The field of intelligent agents and multi-agent systems has become broader in the last years. It has attracted researchers with different backgrounds like game theory, cognitive science, logics, human-computer interaction and business informatics to name only a few. This field has become interdisciplinary in itself. For young researchers who want to enter this field of research, it becomes relevant to have a broader view and a good network within the research community.
The goal of the DC is to bring together and support young researchers with different backgrounds, who are interested in intelligent agents or multi-agent systems. We invite PhD students at all stages of their research. The DC wants to offer a platform for PhD students for presenting and discussing their results, ideas and planed work in a constructive atmosphere.
Moreover, each PhD student will be mentored by an experienced researcher, who will provide detailed feedback and advice to help with their intended research. This often gives valuable external input and provides the opportunity to get in touch with different researchers to grow the personal academic network.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact René Schumann (rene.schumannhevsch).

How to apply?

Please send the following documents via e-mail to rene.schumannhevsch

  1. A two-page abstract of your thesis, formatted following the MATES guidelines, outlining your PhD project.
  2. Research status (1 page) addressing the following issues:
  • What is the status of your work? What has been done and what is planned next?
  • What (knowledge, advice, technical support) do you think you need?
  • When do you plan to graduate?
  • What are your plans after obtaining your PhD?

A CV (max. 2 pages) that covers background (name, university, supervisor), education (degree sought, year/status in degree, previous degrees), employment, and relevant experience in research (e.g. publications, presentations, conferences attended, etc).

Dates:

  • 20.08.2012 - Application Deadline
  • 29.08.2012 - Notification of acceptance
  • 10-12.10.2012 - DC@MATES 2012

Program:

Michael Kaisers, Maastricht UniversityLearning against Learning Evolutionary dynamics of reinforcement learning algorithms in strategic interactions
Sebastian Ahrndt, TU-BerlinExploring Self-Explanation: The Human Side
Johannes Fähndrich, TU-BerlinExploring Self-Explanation: The System Side
Stefan Kehl, TU ClausthalA Decentralised Constraint-Based Approach for Evolutionary Collision Detection in Collaborative Product Development
Mohammad Taghi Saffar, University of TehranSharing Mental Models for Effective Teamwork in Heterogeneous MAS through Argumentation
Tomás Bálint, TU Kosice Modelling of Electronic Financial Services
Nils Masuch, TU Berlin Development of a distributed, semantic mobility platform for automated user planning within the urban traffic domain
Break
Individual Discussions

 Important Dates

Abstracts due: EXTENDED May 7, 2012 (April 21, 2012)
Full papers due: EXTENDED May 14, 2012 (April 28, 2012)
Notification: June 19, 2012
Doctoral mentoring: July 13, 2012
Camera-ready submission: July 13, 2012
Early registration: August 5, 2012
Conference: October 10-12, 2012

Conference Officials

Conference Chairs

  • Christian Guttmann (IBM Research Melbourne, Australia - former Etisalat British Telecom Innovation Centre (EBTIC), UAE and Monash University, Australia)
  • Ingo J. Timm (University of Trier, Germany)

Doctoral Consortium Chair

  • René Schumann (University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland, Sierre, Switzerland)

Exhibition Chair

  • t.b.a

Steering Committee

  • Matthias Klusch (DFKI, Germany)
  • Winfried Lamersdorf (University of Hamburg, Germany)
  • Jörg P. Müller (Technische Universität Clausthal, Germany)
  • Paolo Petta (University of Vienna, Austria)
  • Rainer Unland (University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany)