The success of a developing technology is often measured by the extent of its applications in industry. There are high expectations in the industrial and business communities that agent technologies can provide solutions for complex problems by transitioning prototype agent systems into robust, capable agents. The goal of the workshop is to illustrate representative cases, to identify key technical issues and promising development approaches to the successful transitioning of laboratory prototypes into industrial agent-based systems.

Our intent is to highlight and start addressing the critical issues concerning industry requirements for agent technology, the difficulties encountered in modeling, developing, and testing agents, and the actual deployment of agents in an industrial setting. We therefore invite papers from both the developer and the potential user communities, that provide insight and ideas on agent development efforts based on industry needs, and on techniques, systems, and frameworks that support the integration of agent technology in industry environments. Submitted papers must either illustrate concepts, experiments and lessons learned from the development and the deployment of fielded agent systems, or should describe technologies that aid in the specification, development, or testing of agents in support of industrial deployment.

The workshop will provide an opportunity for researchers, developers, and users of agent technologies alike to engage in an in-depth, informal discussion about agent development, and exchange ideas on lessons learned from building industrial agent based systems. The workshop will focus on the interface between the customers from manufacturing, health-care, financial, government and other industries and the community that investigates and builds agent technologies to address the needs of these customers. All phases of building agent-based capabilities are of interest - from research prototypes to the implementation and the evaluation of deployed systems.

In order to participate all attendees must submit a one or two page statement of interest or position paper to the workshop organizers prior to the workshop.

TOPICS OF INTEREST include, but are not limited to,

• Agent and multi-agent systems development toolkits, technologies, and components
• Transitioning agents from prototype systems to industry and business environments
• Agent component re-use
• Case studies of successful agent applications in business and industry
• Agent specification and requirements
• Agent learning and adaptation to domain tasks
• Agent verification and validation, criteria for agent reliability and robustness
• Opportunities, constraints, and strategies for agent deployment in the workplace

• Electronic commerce
• Design systems
• Manufacturing systems
• Telecommunications
• Safety-critical systems
• Fraud detection, network intrusion
• Personal assistants (e.g., scheduling, resource allocation)
• Dynamic data warehousing
• Business intelligence
• Web personalization
• Distance learning and training
• Enterprise integration
• Supply chain management

• Information search, filtering, and retrieval
• Domain ontology development and translation
• Collaboration, negotiation, and interactions
• Security management
• Learning, clustering, and data mining
• Decision-making and recommendation
• Cognitive task support
• Systems management

Papers should be formatted according to the ACM SIG style guidelines available at http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html. Paper length should be limited to 6 pages. Accepted submission formats are Postscript and PDF.

All papers will be reviewed by at least two members of the program committee. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop notes available at the conference site. The workshop organizing committee is further exploring the possibility of publishing selected papers as a volume.

Papers should be submitted electronically via e-mail to agentchair@california.sandia.gov.   Position papers should also be submitted to agentchair@california.sandia.gov.
 
 

FURTHER INFORMATION

Up-to-date information on the workshop will be made available on the Autonomous Agents 2000 Conference website (http://www.iiia.csic.es/agents2000 or  http://www.cs.umn.edu/agents2000/).
 
 

IMPORTANT DATES

• Submission deadline: April 7, 2000
• Notification ofacceptance: April 10, 2000
• Camera ready copy: April 13, 2000
• Workshop: June 3, 2000

• Subrata Das (Charles River Analytics Inc., USA); sdas@cra.com
• Dan Grecu (Charles River Analytics Inc., USA); dgrecu@cra.com
• Kutluhan Erol (Brightware Inc., USA); kutluhan.erol@brightware.com
• Nenad Ivezic (National Institute of Standards and Technology and ORNL, USA); nivezic@nist.gov
• Carmen Pancerella (Sandia National Laboratory, USA); carmen@california.sandia.gov

• Nina Berry (Sandia National Laboratory, USA)
• David Brown (Worcester Polytechnic Institute, USA)
• Luis Camarinha-Matos (Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal)
• Neil Christopher (National Institute of Standards and Technology, USA)
• Lorraine Fesq (Massachusetts Institute of Technology and TRW, USA)
• John Fox (Advanced Computing Lab, Imperial Cancer Research Fund, UK)
• Harvey Gray (Lockheed Martin Energy Systems, USA)
• Paul Gonsalves (Charles River Analytics Inc., USA)
• Jim Hendler (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, USA)
• Susan Lander (Knowledge Technologies International, USA)
• Steve Laufmann (US West, USA)
• Renato Levy (Intelligent Automation Inc., USA)
• Maram Nagendra Prassad (Andersen Consulting, USA)
• Jim Odell (Consultant, USA)
• H. Van Dyke Parunak (ERIM, USA)
• Simon Parsons (Queen Mary and Westfield College, UK)
• Tom Potok (Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA)
• Steven Schoepke (Fannie Mae, USA)
• Walt Truszkowski (Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA, USA)
• Doyle Wisshar (GlobalInfotek, USA)

Paul Zetocha (Intelligent Satellite Systems Group, US Air Force Research Lab, USA)