[agents] CFP for the AEGS workshop at AAMAS

[Frank Dignum]

AAMAS-2011 Workshop on the uses of Agents for Education, Games and 
Simulations
============================================================================== 


at the Taipei International Convention Center (TICC) in Taipei, Taiwan 
on May 2 2011
In Conjunction with AAMAS 2011

Web Site
========
http://www.windmill-cottage.net/AEGS-11.html

Rationale and technical description
===================================
Training for complex situations in human societies such as in education, 
business transactions, military operations, medical care and crisis 
management can be provided effectively using serious games and 
simulations. In these types of games and simulations the role of agents 
to model and simulate naturally behaving characters becomes more and 
more important. Especially in situations where the games are not just 
meant to provide fun, but are used to support the learning process it is 
important that the games achieve their goal and do not just distract (or 
entertain) the trainee.
A major aim of this workshop is to discuss how to model rational (or 
non-rational, but natural) behaving agents who are embedded in a social 
context with other characters and humans. This is especially important 
when both characters and humans can be pro-active but also have to react 
to the behaviour of others in their environment. Thus these characters 
should have some social conscience of themselves and others and base 
their decisions for actions on this knowledge. Of course social 
knowledge may consist of detailed knowledge such as that some person has 
been your long time friend and thus can be trusted to help you, but also 
general knowledge such as that society looks bad at people that cheat 
but adores people that grasp opportunities. Thus we aim to model also 
different levels of action and interactions. Both the operational ones 
such as gestures and general way of animating characters, the tactical 
decisions such as negotiation tactics when trying to get some help and 
long term strategies such as behaving cooperative towards your boss in 
order to secure a promotion. One of the interesting questions is how 
these should be modelled and how they interact? And how do current agent 
architectures support these models?
In general the technologies used in game engines and multi-agent 
platforms are not readily compatible due to some inherent differences of 
concerns. Where game engines focus on real-time aspects and thus 
propagate efficiency and central control, multi-agent platforms assume 
autonomy of the agents. And while the multi agent platforms offer 
communication facilities these can or should not be used when the agents 
are coupled to a game. So, although increased autonomy and intelligence 
may offer benefits for a more compelling game play and may even be 
necessary for serious games, it is not clear whether current multi agent 
platforms offer the facilities that are needed to accomplish this.
In this workshop we want to bring people together that address the 
particular challenges of using agent technology for games and 
simulations in particular for educational contexts.
The workshop will have four main themes:

1. Technical
What techniques are suitable for agents that are incorporated in 
educational contexts, games and simulations. How to balance intelligence 
and efficiency? How to couple the agents to the game/simulation and 
manage this coupling’s information flow? How to deal with the inherent 
real time nature of the game engine environment? How to couple long and 
short time interactions?
2. Conceptual
What information is available for the agents' use, either through the 
educational context, or from the system, through for example, the game 
or simulation engine? How can reaction to events be balanced with goal 
directed behaviour? How are ontological differences between information 
used by agents and information from the domain handled? How do we choose 
the actions of an agent? Too high level gives little control; too low 
level makes the agent inefficient.
3. Design
How do we design interactive systems containing intelligent agents? How 
do we determine what agents should do and should not do, such that local 
autonomy and story line are well balanced. How do we design the agents 
themselves that are embedded in other (possibly diverse) systems 
(including the behaviour authoring tools and methodologies)?
4. Education
It is also important that we introduce both the design and construction 
of these collaborative autonomous systems into the computer science 
curriculum and develop ways of encouraging their effective utilisation 
across the curriculum. Contributions to the workshop will be welcomed 
that provide a mixture of relevant theoretical and practical 
understanding of both the teaching and use of multi-agent systems in 
educational and entertainment research, together with practical examples 
of the use of such systems in real application scenarios. These will be 
written for students, teachers, producers, directors and other 
professionals who want to improve their understanding of the 
opportunities offered by the use of multi-agent systems in teaching and 
entertainment scenarios of all types.

Important Dates
===============

Deadline for receiving papers January 30 2011
Notification to authors February 27, 2011
Camera ready paper March 7, 2011
Workshop May 2, 2011

Submission Procedure
====================

The workshop welcomes submissions of original works relevant to the 
topics described above. This year, the workshop will accept submissions 
of both full papers (maximum 16 pages, LNCS format) and short papers 
(maximum 8 pages, LNCS format).
Short papers are encouraged as a mechanism for the timely reporting of 
interesting but preliminary work, that may not as yet have the level of 
evaluation or detail that would be expected for a regular paper. The 
program chairs may, at their discretion, accept papers that were 
submitted as regular papers as short papers, if the authors have 
explicitly agreed to this when registering their papers.
All accepted regular papers will receive a slot for oral presentation in 
the conference. The accepted short papers will serve as the basis for 
discussions during the workshop. If warranted they may be converted to 
regular papers for the post-proceedings by incorporating the results of 
these discussions.
Submissions will be peer reviewed rigorously and evaluated on the basis 
of adherence, originality, soundness, significance, presentation, 
understanding of the state of the art, and overall quality of their 
technical contribution. More details about the review process can be 
found in the conference page.
The papers should be formatted according to LNCS specification and 
submitted as PDF files. Instructions and templates can be found at

http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html.

Final Papers must be submitted on A4 in PDF format.
Your paper should not include page numbers.
All final manuscripts should be uploaded to easychair no later than

Sunday 30th January 2011
========================

The submission web site is 
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=AEGS-11
Submissions violating the formatting guidelines will be excluded from 
the reviewing process.
At least one author of all accepted papers is expected to attend the 
Workshop.
All accepted papers will be informally published in the Workshop 
proceedings, and the organisers intend to organize a LNCS publication of 
the workshop proceedings.

PC Committee
============
# Elisabeth Andre (DFKI, Germany)
# Juan Carlos Augusto (University of Ulster, UK)
# Paul Shueh-Min Chang, (National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan)
# Shu-Heng Chen, (National Cheng-Chi University, Taiwan)
# Bill Clancey (NASA, USA)
# Rosaria Conte (ISTC-CNR, Italy)
# Vincent Corruble (LIP6, France)
# Yves Demazeau (CNRS-LIG, Grenoble)
# Virginia Dignum (Technical University Delft, The Netherlands)
# Alexis Drogoul (LIP6, France)
# Bruce Edmonds (MMU, UK)
# Corinna Elsenbroich (University of Surrey, UK)
# Klaus Fischer (DFKI, Germany)
# Rachel E. Goshorn(Naval Postgraduate School, USA)
# Hiromitsu Hattori (Kyoto University, Japan)
# Annerieke Heuvelink (TNO, The Netherlands)
# Dirk Heylen (Univ of Twente, The Netherlands)
# Koen Hindriks (Delft University, The Netherlands)
# Jane Hsu (National Taiwan University, Taiwan)
# Toru Ishida (Kyoto University, Japan)
# Wander Jager (Groningen University, The Netherlands)
# Lewis Johnson (Alelo Inc., USA)
# Gal A. Kaminka (Bar Ilan University, Israel)
# Petros Kefalas (CITY Institute/Sheffield University GR)
# Irving King (Chinese University of Hong Kong, HK)
# Yasuhiko Kitamura (Kwansei Gakuin University)
# Stefan Kopp (University of Bielefeld, Germany)
# Mike van Lent (SOAR technology, USA)
# Michael Lewis (University of Pittsburg, USA)
# MeiYii Lim (Heriot-Watt University, UK)
# Chin-Yew Lin (Microsoft Research Asia, China)
# Shou-De Lin, (National Taiwan University, Taiwan)
# Simon Lynch (Univ. of Teeside, UK)
# Eleni Mangina (Phelan, University College Dublin, Ireland)
# Stacy Marsella, (ISI, Univ of Southern California, USA)
# Michael Mateas, (University of California at Santa Cruz, USA)
# Riichiro Mizoguchi (Osaka University, Japan)
# Toni Moreno (Univ. Rovira i Virgili, ES)
# Hector Munoz-Avila (Lehigh university, Bethlehem, USA)
# Emma Norling (MMU, UK)
# Anton Nijholt (UT, The Netherlands)
# Gregory O'Hare (University College Dublin, Ireland)
# Joost van Oijen (VSTEP, The Netherlands)
# Jeff Orkin (MIT, USA)
# Julian Padget (University of Bath, UK)
# Ana Paiva (IST, Portugal)
# Agostino Poggi (Univ degli Studi di Parma, Italy)
# Colin Price (University of Worcester, UK)
# Michal Pechoucek (CTU, Czech rep.)
# David Pynadath (USC, USA)
# Geber Ramalho (UFPE, Brazil)
# Gopal Ramchurn (University of Southampton, UK)
# Debbie Richards(Macquarie University, Australia)
# Avi Rosenfeld (JCT, Israel)
# Ilias Sakellariou (UOM, GR)
# David Sarne (Bar Ilan University, Israel)
# Maarten Sierhuis (NASA, USA)
# Barry Silverman (UPenn, USA)
# Von-Wun Soo (National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan)
# Pieter Spronck (Tilburg University, The Netherlands)
# Demosthenes Stamatis (TEIHE, GR)
# Ioanna Stamatopoulou (South-East European Research Centre, 
Thessaloniki, GR)
# Katia Sycara (CMU, USA)
# Duane Szafron (U of Alberta, Canada)
# Rainer Unland (University of Duisburg-Essen, GER)
# Harko Verhagen (Stockholm University/Royal Institute of Technology, SWE)
# Joost Westra (UU, The Netherlands)
# Uri Wilensky (Northwestern University, USA)
# R. Michael Young (North Carolina State University, USA)


Organizers
==========

1 Dr Martin Beer
Communications and Computing Research Centre
ACES
Sheffield Hallam University
Email: m.beer at shu.ac.uk

2 Cyril Brom
Department of Software and Computer Science Education
Faculty of Mathematics and Physics
Charles University in Prague
email: brom at ksvi.mff.cuni.cz

3 Von-Wun Soo,
Department of Computer Science
Institute of Information Systems and Applications
National Tsing Hua University
email:soo at cs.nthu.edu.tw

4 Frank Dignum
Department of Information & Computing Sciences
Utrecht University
The Netherlands
e-mail: dignum at cs.uu.nl


-- 

**********************************************************************
Frank Dignum                         *
Utrecht University                   * Knowledge is only one point,
The Netherlands                      * the ignorant have multiplied it
e-mail: dignum at cs.uu.nl              *
webpage: www.cs.uu.nl/people/dignum/ *                   (Baha'u'llah)
telephone: +31-30-2539109            *
**********************************************************************