[agents] 2nd CFP: AGERE! @ SPLASH 2012

[Rafael H Bordini]

                  2nd CALL FOR PAPERS

                 AGERE! @ SPLASH 2012

          2nd Int. Workshop on Programming based on
          Actors, Agents, and Decentralized Control

     Workshop held at the ACM SPLASH Conference 2012
                   Tucson, Arizona (US)
                     October 21-22, 2012

              http://agere2012.apice.unibo.it

Deadlines:

Abstracts: August 5, 2012
Papers: August 12, 2012

+ special issue on Science of Computer Programming

                              ăgo ăgo, ăgis, egi, actum, ăgĕre
                              latin verb meaning to act, to lead, to do,
                              common root for actors and agents

The fundamental turn of software into concurrency and distribution is 
not only a matter of performance, but also of design and abstraction. It 
calls for programming paradigms that, compared to current mainstream 
paradigms, would allow us to more naturally think about, design, 
develop, execute, debug, and profile systems exhibiting different 
degrees of concurrency, autonomy, decentralization of control, and 
physical distribution.

The AGERE! workshop is dedicated to focusing on and developing the 
research on programming systems, languages and applications based on 
actors, agents and any related programming paradigm promoting a 
decentralized control mindset in solving problems  and in developing 
systems to implement such solutions.

The workshop is designed to cover both the theory and the practice of 
design and programming, bringing  together researchers working on the 
models, languages and technologies, and practitioners developing 
real-world systems and applications.

The first edition of AGERE! was organized in SPLASH 2011, drawing 
significant interest and attendance (see program at 
http://agere2011.apice.unibo.it). The workshop
is now scheduled to take place also at SPLASH 2012 and, related to this 
event, a special issue on the journal Science of Computer Programming is 
scheduled for the end of the year.

=== Organizers

Gul Agha, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
Rafael Bordini, FACIN–PUCRS, Brazil
Assaf Marron, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel
Alessandro Ricci, University of Bologna, Italy

=== Program Committee (partial list, other names are to be confirmed)

Gul Agha, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
Joe Armstrong,  SICS / Ericsson, Sweden
Saddek Bensalem, Verimag, France
Rafael  H. Bordini, FACIN–PUCRS, Brazil
Gilad Braha, Google, USA
Rem Collier, UCD, Dublin
Tom Van Cutsem,  Vrije Universiteit, Brussel, Belgium
Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni,  LIP6 - Univ. P and M. Curie, Paris, France
Philipp Haller, Typesafe, Switzerland
Jurgen Dix, Technical University of Clausthal, Germany
Tom Holvoet, Dept. Computer Science K.U.Leuven, Belgium
Einar Broch Johnsen, University of Oslo, Norway
Hillel Kugler, Microsoft, USA
Assaf Marron, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel
Mark Miller, Google, USA
Olaf Owe, University of Oslo, Norway
Jens Palsberg, UCLA, Los Angeles, USA
Ravi Pandya, Microsoft, USA
Arnd Poetzsch-Heffter, University of Kaiserslautern, Germany
Alessandro Ricci, University of Bologna, Italy
Birna van Riemsdijk, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Giovanni Rimassa, Whitestein Technologies, Switzerland
Munindar Singh, North Carolina State University, USA
Gera Weiss, Ben Gurion University, Israel
Guy Wiener, HP, Israel
Akinori Yonezawa, University of Tokyo, Japan

=== Main topics

The topics of interest for the workshop include:

- Programming languages and frameworks
+ theory and practice about languages and frameworks based on agents,
   actors, and decentralized control.

- Foundations
+ ideas, concepts, formalization of the computation and programming
   models for agents, actors and decentralized control.

- Design
+ design principles underlying the paradigms and bridging the gap
   between design to programming

- Validation and verification
+ theory and tools about testing, debugging, profiling, verifying and
   validating software systems based on such paradigms

- Applications
+ design and development of real-world applications

- Teaching
+ experiences and reflections about using these paradigms in teaching
   (concurrent and distributed) programming

=== Contributions & deadlines

AGERE! welcomes three kinds of contributions:

- full-papers
+ length up to 10 pages; covering new research, per the above topics,
   not previously published.

- short-papers & position papers
+ length up to 4 pages, these papers are meant to introduce a
   contribution (an idea, a viewpoint, an argument, work in progress...)
   which may be in its initial stage and not fully developed but which
   is worth to be presented given its relevance to the AGERE! topics,
   triggering discussions and interactions.

- reviews & surveys
+ up to 10 pages, these papers are meant to provide a good synthesis &
   reflections about some aspect (specific or general) which is relevant
   for the workshop, contributing then to workshop discussions on the
   state of the art and open issues

- demo
+ length up to 4 pages, these contributions are about a
   technology/system that will be demonstrated during the workshop.


Deadlines:

Abstracts     August 5, 2012
Papers (*)    August 12, 2012

Papers can be submitted here

https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ageresplash2012

in PDF format. Submissions should use the ACM format, following the 
guidelines in http://www.sigplan.org/authorInformation.htm.

(*) including full-papers, short/position papers, reviews & surveys,
     and demo papers

=== Publication channels

Accepted papers (full, short/position, surveys/reviews, demo) will be 
included in the ACM DL proceedings after the conference.

Besides, a selected set of papers will be invited to be extended and 
included in a special issue which is being organized for the end of the 
year in the journal Science of Computer Programming.  The special issue 
will be about actor-oriented and agent-oriented programming, and - more 
generally - on programming systems, languages, and applications based on 
actors, agents, and decentralized control abstractions.


Read more on AGERE! web site: http://agere2012.apice.unibo.it


=== SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

* To “set the frequency”

[1] Actors and Agents as Programming Paradigms - An Overview. AGERE! 
2011 introductory talk.  A. Ricci. 
http://apice.unibo.it/xwiki/bin/download/AGERE/WebHome/opening.pdf

[2] H. Sutter and J. Larus. Software and the concurrency revolution. ACM 
Queue: Tomorrow’s Computing Today, 3(7):54–62, Sept. 2005.

[3] M. Resnick. Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams. Explorations in 
Massively Parallel Microworlds. MIT Press, 1994.

[4] A. Kay. Programming and programming languages, 2010. VPRI Research 
Note RN-2010-001.

[5] Howell R. Jordan, Goetz Botterweck, Marc-Philippe Huget, Rem 
Collier: A feature model of actor, agent, and object programming 
languages. SPLASH Workshops 2011: 147-158

* Actors & OO Concurrent Programming approaches

[1] G. Agha. Actors: a model of concurrent computation in distributed 
systems. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 1986.

[2] C. Hewitt. Viewing control structures as patterns of passing 
messages. Artif. Intell., 8(3):323–364, 1977.

[3] G. Agha, I. A. Mason, S. Smith, and C. Talcott. A Foundation for 
Actor Computation. Journal of Functional Programming, 7(01):1–72, 1997.

[4] J.P. Briot, R. Guerraoui, and K.P. Lohr. Concurrency and 
distribution in object-oriented programming. ACM Comput. Surv., 
30(3):291–329, 1998.

[5] G. Agha. Concurrent object-oriented programming. In in 
Communications of the ACM, Association for Computing Machinery, vol. 33, 
no. 9, pp 125-141, September, 1990.

[6] G. Agha, P. Wegner, and A. Yonezawa, editors. Research directions in 
concurrent object-oriented programming. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 1993.

[7] R. K. Karmani, A. Shali, and G. Agha. Actor frameworks for the JVM 
platform: a comparative analysis. In PPPJ ’09: Proceedings of the 7th 
International Conference on Principles and Practice of Programming in 
Java, pages 11–20, New York, NY, USA, 2009. ACM.

[8] A. Yonezawa, editor. ABCL: an object-oriented concurrent system. MIT 
Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 1990.

[9] J. Armstrong. Erlang. Commun. ACM, 53(9):68–75, 2010.

[10] J. Schafer and A. Poetzsch-Heffter. Jcobox: generalizing ¨active 
objects to concurrent components. In Proceedings of the 24th European 
conference on Object-oriented programming,  ECOOP’10, pages 275–299, 
Berlin, Heidelberg, 2010. Springer-Verlag.

[11] P. Haller and M. Odersky. Scala actors: Unifying thread-based and 
event-based programming. Theoretical Computer Science, 2008.

[12] T. Van Cutsem: AmbientTalk: modern actors for modern networks. 
SPLASH Workshops 2011: 227-230

[13] M. S. Miller, Eric Dean Tribble, Jonathan S. Shapiro: Concurrency 
Among Strangers. TGC 2005: 195-229

* Agents and Agent-Oriented Programming

[1] J. J. Odell. Objects and agents compared. Journal of Object 
Technology, 1(1):41–53, 2002.

[2] N. R. Jennings. An agent-based approach for building complex 
software systems. Commun. ACM, 44(4):35–41, 2001.

[3] Y. Shoham. Agent-oriented programming. Artificial Intelligence, 
60(1):51–92, 1993.

[4] R. Bordini, M. Dastani, J. Dix, and A. El Fallah Seghrouchni, 
editors.  Multi-Agent Programming Languages, Platforms and Applications. 
Volume 1 (2005) and 2 (2009). Springer.

[5] A. Ricci, A. Santi. Designing a General-Purpose Programming Language 
based on Agent-Oriented Abstractions: The simpAL Project. SPLASH 
Workshops 2011: 159-170

[6] M. D. Travers. Programming with Agents: New metaphors for thinking 
about computation. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1996.

[7] R. Bordini, J. Hubner, and M. Wooldridge. Programming Multi-Agent 
Systems in AgentSpeak Using Jason. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2007.

[8] M. Dastani. 2apl: a practical agent programming language. Autonomous 
Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 16(3):214–248, 2008.

[9] K. V. Hindriks. Programming rational agents in GOAL. In R. H. 
Bordini, M. Dastani, J. Dix, and A. El Fallah Seghrouchni, editors, 
Multi-Agent Programming: Languages, Platforms and Applications (2nd 
volume), pages 3–37. Springer-Verlag, 2009.

[10] F. Bellifemine, G. Caire, A. Poggi, G. Rimassa: JADE: A software 
framework for developing multi-agent applications. Lessons learned. 
Information & Software Technology 50(1-2): 10-21 (2008)

[11] N. Howden, R. Ronnquist, A. Hodgson, and A. Lucas. JACK intelligent 
agentsTM — summary of an agent infrastructure. In Proceedings of Second 
International Workshop on Infras- tructure for Agents, MAS, and Scalable 
MAS, held with the Fifth International Conference on Autonomous Agents 
(Agents 2001), 2001.

[12] Sean Edward Russell, Howell R. Jordan, Gregory M. P. O'Hare, Rem W. 
Collier: Agent Factory: A Framework for Prototyping Logic-Based AOP 
Languages. MATES 2011: 125-136

[13] A. Pokahr, L. Braubach, Kai Jander: Unifying Agent and Component 
Concepts: Jadex Active Components. MATES 2010: 100-112

* Other Decentralized Control Programming Approaches

[1] D. Harel, Assaf Marron, Gera Weiss: Programming Coordinated Behavior 
in Java. ECOOP 2010: 250-274

[2] S. Bliudze and J. Sifakis. A notion of glue expressiveness for 
component-based systems. CONCUR, 2008.

[3] D. Harel, Assaf Marron, Guy Wiener, Gera Weiss: Behavioral 
programming, decentralized control, and multiple time scales. AGERE! @ 
SPLASH Workshops 2011: 171-182



------------------------------------------------------------------------
   Dr. Rafael H. Bordini                      FACIN-PUCRS
   Associate Professor                        Av. Ipiranga, 6681
   r.bordini at pucrs.br                         90619-900
   http://www.inf.pucrs.br/r.bordini          Porto Alegre, RS - BRAZIL