[agents] Final Call for contributions to AEGS-11 workshop at AAMAS 2011 in Taipei

[Beer, Martin]

Final Call for the 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 or 3 2011
In Conjunction with AAMAS 2011
***  Following many requests, the deadline for submission has been extended to Monday 14th February 2011 *****
Web Site
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http://www.windmill-cottage.net/AEGS-11/index.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                   ***** February 14, 2011  ***** UPDATED
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
  Monday 14th February 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)
# Irwin 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<mailto: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<mailto: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<mailto:dignum at cs.uu.nl>