Call for Papers
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TOOLS
World-Scientific

Special Issue on
Intelligent Information Agents in the Internet and the WWW Age

EDITORS:

Tim Finin
Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland Baltimore County
finin@umbc.edu

Manolis Koubarakis
Deptartment of Electronic and Computer Engineering
Technical University of Crete
manolis@ced.tuc.gr

Yannis Labrou
Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland Baltimore County
jklabrou@cs.umbc.edu

The emergence of the digital information society, fuelled by the development of the Internet and the WWW, has given rise to unprecedented challenges and opportunities. Every day people working with computers (or other digital devices) are faced with an enormous amount of information that must be assimilated, understood and used effectively in their activities. Intelligent information agents have recently been proposed as the most promising paradigm for facing the challenges, overcoming the difficulties, and exploiting the opportunities associated with the emerging information society. If intelligent agent technology is going to survive, it has to be able to deal effectively with the most important characteristics of the global information infrastructure: it is large, distributed, heterogeneous, open and constantly evolving. The technical challenges raised by these characteristics should not be overestimated. Technical solutions will probably utilise revolutionary new ideas, but also draw on insights and technical results from many traditional research areas such as Artificial Intelligence, Databases, Information Retrieval and Human-Computer Interaction. In this special issue we welcome original research papers concentrating on theories, architectures and applications of intelligent information agents. Relevant topics include but are not limited to:

* Theoretical foundations of Intelligent Information Agents
* Intelligent Information Agent Prototypes
* Agents for Information Brokering
* Scalability in Intelligent Information Agents
* Learning and Adaptation in Information Agents
* Applying information agents to the problem of information overload
* Information agents in the Enterprise
* Information agents and E-commerce
* Information agents and WWW efforts (XML, RDF, Semantic Web, etc.)
* Comparisons of Information Agent Technologies and other related technologies (e.g., Intelligent Databases)

State-of-the art survey papers on any of the above areas are also welcome. Electronic or hard-copy submissions should arrive by May 31, 2001 at the following address:

Prof. Manolis Koubarakis
Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering
Technical University of Crete
University Campus - Kounoupidiana
73100 Chania, Crete GREECE
Tel: +30 821 37222
Fax: +30 821 37202
E-mail: manolis@ced.tuc.gr

Notification of acceptance or rejection will be sent to authors by August 31, 2001. Final version of the papers should be ready by October 31, 2001. The special issue is scheduled for the first quarter of 2002.