[agents] AAMAS EMAS 2020 CFP -- extended deadline

[Jomi Fred Hubner]

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CFP - 8th International Workshop on Engineering Multi-Agent Systems (EMAS 2020)
Co-located with AAMAS 2020
9-10 May 2020, Auckland, New Zealand / Aotearoa
https://emas.in.tu-clausthal.de/2020
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NEW submission deadline: *23 Feb, 2020*
Notification: 10 March, 2020
Camera-ready deadline: 1 April, 2020


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NEW: EMAS 2020 will offer a remote participation option, allowing people to
participate remotely, in the event that they are unable to attend physically. 


A main unifying theme underlying Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
is the idea of an intelligent agent able to reason, act, interact, and learn.
This metaphor has stimulated much research in AI and particularly in Autonomous
Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), giving rise to research in agent-oriented
software engineering, programming multi-agent systems, and declarative agent
languages and technologies.

Despite the substantial body of knowledge and expertise developed in the design
and development of multi-agent systems (MAS), the systematic development of
large-scale and open MAS still poses many challenges. Even though various
languages, models, techniques and methodologies have been proposed in the
literature, researchers and developers are still faced with fundamental
questions attaining MAS engineering, such as:
* How to specify, design, implement, verify, test, validate and evolve MAS?
* Which architectures are most suitable for MAS of different domains?
* How to seamlessly integrate MAS engineering with mainstream engineering
 models, languages, frameworks and tools?
* How to seamlessly integrate AI and machine learning techniques into
 design/programming languages and tools for agent-based systems?
* How to enable agent-based systems to deal with continuous change, for example
 in the operating environment or user requirements?
* What are the implications of MAS engineering in the context of continuous
 development and deployment?
* How to ensure and control global behaviour of decentralised, open and
 large-scale MAS?
* How to express the requirements for large-scale and open MAS and how to
 translate these requirements into agent goals?
* How to scale with the complexity of real-world application domains?
* How can MAS help developing Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet-of-Things?
 Which development tools and frameworks are available/needed?
* Which processes and methodologies can integrate the above and provide a
 disciplined approach to rapid yet high-quality development of MAS?
* How to engineer agent and multi-agent systems that are secure and protect the
 privacy concerns of users?

EMAS 2020 aims to gather researchers and practitioners in the domains of
agent-oriented software engineering, programming multi-agent systems,
declarative agent languages and technologies, artificial intelligence, and
machine learning to present and discuss their research and emerging results in
MAS engineering. The overall purpose of this workshop is to facilitate the
cross-fertilisation of ideas and experiences in the various fields to: 
1. Enhance our knowledge and expertise in MAS engineering and improve the state
  of the art;
2. Define new directions for MAS engineering that are useful to practitioners,
  relying in results and recommendations coming from different but continuous
  research areas;
3. Investigate how practitioners can use or need to adapt established
  methodologies for the engineering of large-scale and open MAS;
4. Encourage masters and PhD students, to become involved in and contribute to
  the area.

EMAS 2020 will appeal to any researcher and practitioner who is interested in
the theoretical and practical aspects of agents and MAS engineering.


TOPICS

The main topics include but are not limited to:
- Software engineering methodologies and techniques, and development concerns
 for MAS
- Formal methods and declarative technologies for specification, verification,
 and engineering of MAS
- Programming frameworks, languages, models and abstractions for all aspects of
 MAS
- Tools and testbeds
- Empirical studies and (industrial) experience reports on engineering MAS
 applications 

For a detailed list of subtopics, see the website:
https://emas.in.tu-clausthal.de/2020

SUBMISSIONS

We solicit four types of submission: 

1. Regular papers should (1) clearly describe innovative and original research,
or (2) report a survey on a research topic in the field, or (3) explain how
existing techniques have been applied to a real-world case. (16 pages
(excluding references) in LNCS format).

2. Short papers should either (a) describe novel and promising ideas and/or
techniques that are in an early stage of development; or (b) present a vision
for some part of the field, including challenges, and research opportunities -
see the AAMAS Blue Sky Track CFP (*) for more information on these sort of
papers. To that end, short papers will be reviewed under specific review
guidelines (8 pages (excluding references) in LNCS format). 
(*) https://aamas2020.conference.auckland.ac.nz/blue-sky-track/

3. Doctoral project papers should describe a research effort of an MSc student
or the dissertation research of a PhD student in the field of engineering
multi-agent systems. The paper should clearly describe the problem tackled, a
justification why this problem is important, the research method, the
(expected) contributions of the research, and the evaluation. This paper can be
co-authored by the student and their supervisor(s) only (6 pages (excluding
references) in LNCS format). 

4. Tool, testbeds and demo papers should describe a novel tool or demonstration
in the field of engineering multi-agent systems. Submission may range from
early prototypes to in-house or pre-commercialised products. Authors of other
EMAS 2020 papers are also welcomed to submit an accompanying tool/demo paper.
The paper should provide a link to supplementary material that allows the
reviewers to evaluate the submission such as website or movie link (4 pages
(excluding references) in LNCS format).

Submission policy: all papers should be original and not be submitted
elsewhere. The review process is single blind: submissions should not be blind,
reviewers will be.

The LNCS formatting style is available via: 
http://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines

The Easychair submission page can be found here: 
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=emas2020 

Authors of accepted papers will be invited to submit revised and extended
versions of the EMAS papers for inclusion in the post-proceedings that we intend
to publish as a volume in Springer's Lecture Notes in Artificial
Intelligence.


COMMITTEES 

Organising Committee

Cristina Baroglio, Università di Torino (Italy)
http://www.di.unito.it/~baroglio/
cristina.baroglio at unito.it

Jomi Fred Hübner, Federal University of Santa Catarina (Brazil)
http://jomi.das.ufsc.br
jomi.hubner at ufsc.br

Michael Winikoff, Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand / Aotearoa)
http://michaelwinikoff.com
michael.winikoff at vuw.ac.nz


EMAS Steering Committee

Matteo Baldoni
Rafael Bordini 
Mehdi Dastani 
Jürgen Dix 
Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni 
Brian Logan
Jörg P. Müller  
Ingrid Nunes  
Alessandro Ricci  
M. Birna Van Riemsdijk 
Danny Weyns 
Michael Winikoff  
Rym Zalila-Wenkstern