[agents] Preliminary Call for Participation: AAAI Symposium, Adaptive Agents in Cultural Contexts

[Alex Davis]

(Apologies if this posting appears more than once.)

This is a call for expression of interest in attending or proposing in 
the AAAI Fall Symposium, Adaptive Agents in Cultural Contexts.

If you are interested, please reply to me saying so by Friday, February 
1. This is to gauge whether there is sufficient interest to hold the 
symposium. Actual CFP to follow.

Description at http://www.stottlerhenke.com/AAAI08FallSymposium/
is reproduced below.

Thanks,
Alex

------------------------------------
Adaptive Agents in Cultural Contexts

November 7-9, 2008
Arlington, VA

1.   Symposium Description

Computational modeling of the effects of culture on human behavior is a 
vast, nascent, and cross-disciplinary field. The problem of modeling 
decision making by adaptive agents is similarly broad. This workshop 
seeks to focus the problem sets of each field by examining their 
intersection.

Recent experiences of international organizations, NGOs, and military in 
foreign environments, as well as the increasing behavioral complexity of 
recent commercial games, indicate the relevance of two elements of 
cognition that constitute extensions to the conventional 
information-processing model: rapid adaptation and socio-cultural 
specificity of behavior.

The goals of this symposium are to:

- Identify the ranges of meanings described by “adaptive agent” and 
“culturally specific behavior”, and their interrelation

- Determine the range and nature of problems requiring computational 
models of culture and adaptive agents

- Clarify the role of culture and adaptation in human behavior, toward 
architectures, algorithms, and representations for computational modeling

- Bring together researchers and practitioners from varying disciplines, 
to share ideas and results, and establish relationships

- Chart a well-defined research program for this topic


We aim to bring together communities of AI, social science, and 
cognitive science researchers, with developers of military simulations 
and commercial games. We will solicit papers such as:

- Case studies of simulation and game development that contain adaptive 
and/or cultural aspects

- Theoretical work in modeling cultural and adaptive behaviors

- Analysis of human behavior in relevant domains


2.   Symposium Duration and Format

The symposium will last for 2.5 days. The apportionment of sessions will 
depend on the nature of submissions. One potential format is as follows:



Day 1: Invited speaker on culture, and related paper presentations

Day 2: Invited speaker on adaptive agents, and related paper presentations

Day 3 (half day): Integrative paper presentations, and discussion panel

Each paper session will have time allotted for discussion. Depending on 
interest and diversity of submissions, we may also propose a poster 
session for the evenings of the first two days.


3.   Committee Members

Alex Davis (co-chair; Stottler Henke)

Jeremy Ludwig (co-chair; Stottler Henke)

David W. Aha (Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence)

Harold Hawkins (Office of Naval Research)

Lewis Johnson (Tactical Language Training)

Helen Altman Klein (Wright State University)

Michael van Lent (Institute for Creative Technologies)

Glenn Taylor (Soar Tech)

Abbas K. Zaidi (George Mason University)


4.   Contact

davis at stottlerhenke.com

ludwig at stottlerhenke.com


-- 
Alex Davis    davis at stottlerhenke.com     434-977-7856
Stottler Henke Associates, Inc.       fax 309-416-9496
http://www.stottlerhenke.com/