Subject: WORKSHOP: Novel E-Commerce Applications of Agents
From: Bruce Spencer (bspencer@unb.ca)
Date: Fri Nov 17 2000 - 12:09:12 MET
We apologize if you receive multiple copies of this announcement.
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The AI-2001 Workshop on
Novel E-Commerce Applications of Agents
to be held at AI 2001
June 7-9, 2001, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
http://www.cs.unb.ca/~bspencer/NECAA
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Economic activity, accelerated via Internet connections between human
buyers and sellers, is accelerated further with software agents acting
on behalf of the humans. Before this agent-mediated economic activity
can be adopted and used successfully by non-expert humans,
technologies of different types must be advanced. Existing AI
techniques are often applicable.
* Search techniques must find products and services that match the
user's needs, where the offerings may be described in different
terms than the requirements, or not explicitly described.
Internet search, user modeling, learning and natural language
understanding are applicable.
* Products and services must be combined into packages that meet the
users needs. The package may be a simple combination with some
interdependence, such as reservations for dinner and a movie in an
evening. Or the package can be a coordinated set of products and
services that, when performed in a specified order, achieves some
goal, such as a manufacturing supply chain.
Relevant technologies include combinatorial search, planning and
scheduling, temporal and spatial reasoning and reasoning about
actions.
* Trust must be established, and negotiating techniques are needed
to achieve a fair exchange of resources.
Logics of beliefs, and optimization techniques are applicable.
This workshop aims to attract researchers concerned with incorporating
AI techniques into the software agents that undertake commercial
activities over the Internet.
Topics
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
* negotiations: bargaining, auctions
* emergent behaviour of agent societies: congestion, starvation
* belief logics
* description logics
* distributed reasoning by agents
* collaborative and competitive behaviour of multiple agents
* planning and scheduling by agents
* mobility of agents
* privacy and agents
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Workshop format
The workshop will consist of some short introductory remarks by the
organizers and then mostly of presentations of submitted works,
followed by an open discussion session, where the state of the field,
current problems and new directions will be considered.
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Participation and Submissions
Participation in this workshop is by invitation only and invitees must
be registered for the AI-2001 conference. Also attendance is limited.
Therefore, in case that a selection becomes necessary, we ask
researchers that just want to attend the workshop without contributing
a paper to send a short email to bspencer@unb.ca expressing their
particular interest in the workshop.
Researchers interested in contributing a paper should send it to
bspencer@unb.ca (please send a uuencoded gzipped postscript file).
Papers should not exceed 8 pages. Papers may be submitted in either
the ACM format or the Springer-Verlag Lectue Notes format.
The papers will be reviewed by the organization committee (and some
additional referees) and all papers of sufficient quality will be
included into the workshop notes (and their authors invited to the
workshop, of course). Out of these papers several will be selected for
presentation at the workshop. The main criteria of this selection will
be to cover a broad variety of both application areas and
parallelization and distribution concepts and the contribution to the
goals stated above. To facilitate a lively and interesting discussion,
we will try to make all the papers available to the participants of
the workshop before the workshop takes place.
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After workshop activities
We plan two activities after the workshop:
1. Adding to this web page, links to all participants (that agree to
this) and their projects related to parallel and distributed
search, hopefully, as a result of the workshop, indexed with
respect to several criteria. This should provide people who are
interested in the specific problems of AI agents for e-commerce
with a web-based resource.
2. A resubmission of the papers for a formal collective publication.
We are negotiating with an international journal to form a special
issue. (More details will follow.)
_________________________________________________________________
Important dates
* Deadline for Submissions/Requests for Participation:
January 31, 2001
* Invitations will be sent out: March 15, 2001
* Workshop: June 7, 8 or 9, 2001
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Organizing Committee
Virendra Bhavsar Jörg Denzinger
Faculty of Computer Science Department of Computer Science
University of New Brunswick, Fredericton University of Calgary
Email: bhavsar@unb.ca Email: denzinge@cpsc.ucalgary.ca
Ali Ghorbani Steve Marsh
Faculty of Computer Science Institute for Information Technology
University of New Brunswick, Fredericton National Research Council, Ottawa
Email: ghorbani@unb.ca Email: steve.marsh@iit.nrc.ca
Bruce Spencer
Faculty of Computer Science
University of New Brunswick, Fredericton
Email: bspencer@unb.ca
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