[agents] 2CFP AEGS workshop at AAMAS 2011

[Frank Dignum]

Second Call For Papers

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/index.html

Rationale and technical description
===================================

Nowadays, complex situations in human societies such as education, 
business transactions, military operations,

medical care and crisis management can be trained 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 first 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 modeled 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 from the educational 
context, game or simulation engine? How to

balance reaction to events with goal directed behavior. How to handle 
ontological differences between information

used by agents and information from the domain? 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 to 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 to design the agents themselves that

are embedded in other (posibly diverse) systems (including the behavior 
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
====================

Paper Submission


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 maybe converted to regular papers for the postproceedings by 
incoprorating 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 
proceeedings, and the organisers intend to
organize a LNCS publication of the workshop proceedings.

PC Committee
============
# Elisabeth Andre (DFKI, Germany)
# 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)
# Hiromitsu Hattori (Kyoto University, Japan)
# Annerieke Heuvelink (TNO, The Netherlands)
# Koen Hindriks (Delft University, The Netherlands)
# Wander Jager (Groningen University, The Netherlands)
# Stefan Kopp (University of Bielefeld, Germany)
# Mike van Lent (SOAR technology, USA)
# Michael Lewis (University of Pittsburg, USA)
# MeiYii Lim (Heriot-Watt University, UK)
# Stacy Marsella (USC, USA)
# Hector Munoz-Avila (Lehigh university, Bethlehem, USA)
# Emma Norling (MMU, UK)
# Anton Nijholt (UT, The Netherlands)
# Joost van Oijen (VSTEP, The Netherlands)
# Jeff Orkin (MIT, USA)
# Ana Paiva (IST, Portugal)
# Michal Pechoucek (CTU, Czech rep.)
# David Pynadath (USC, USA)
# Geber Ramalho (UFPE, Brazil)
# Gopal Ramchurn (University of Southampton, UK)
# Avi Rosenfeld (JCT, Israel)
# David Sarne (Bar Ilan University, Israel)
# Maarten Sierhuis (NASA, USA)
# Barry Silverman (UPenn, USA)
# Pieter Spronck (Tilburg University, The Netherlands)
# Katia Sycara (CMU, USA)
# Duane Szafron (U of Alberta, Canada)
# Joost Westra (UU, The Netherlands)


Organizers
==========

1 Dr Martin Beer
Communications and Computing Research Group
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            *
**********************************************************************