www.ijcai-03.org
EIGHTEENTH INTERNATIONAL JOINT CONFERENCE ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

August 11, 2003

Workshop on
Issues in Designing Physical Agents for Dynamic Real-Time Environments: World modeling, planning, learning, and communicating

Description

Recent developments in multiagent systems (MAS) have been promising by achieving autonomous, collaborative behavior between agents in various environments. However, most of the agents, both software agents and physical agents, still have problems if the environment is dynamic and the agents have to act in real time. Examples are obstacle avoidance with moving obstacles or world models which are composed from egocentric views of numerous agents. Another aspect is the need for quick responses. In an environment where a number of agents build a team and both single agent decisions and team collaborative decisions have to be made methods have to be fast and precise. This workshop addresses various problems that occur with respect to these issues.

Topics of Interest

The main focus of this workshop will be methods from various areas such as world modeling, planning, learning, and communicating with agents in dynamic and real-time environments. Within this general theme we aim to bring together researchers to discuss the following topics:

  • World modeling (quantitative, qualitative)
  • Coaching (one agent gives advice to a group of agents)
  • Planning with resources (especially time)
  • Cooperation between agents (robot and/or humans)
  • Communication between agents (implicit, non-verbal, or verbal one)
  • Real-time systems software issues (often ignored but important if serious about real-time issues in robotics)
  • Scalability and robotics interfacing issues (demands a great deal of support from the initial design of the system)

Why and to whom is this workshop of interest?

In the last decade, a lot of effort has been invested to develop methods that can be used with multi-agent systems. The language development in the area of communication between agents (ACL) might act as the first example. Speech acts serve as the basic principle and various protocols have been invented (e.g. auctions, contract-nets, etc.). Can we transfer these results to enviroments where quick decisions have to be made? Consider planning as another example: there are promising methods for path planning, but do they still hold if the observed obstacles are moving? Learning is another example: we need on-line learning in a real-time scenario to give agents the option to learn more about their environment. Usually, learning takes a fair amount of time but sometimes this time is not available. Can we find methods which will consider these restrictions?

This workshop addresses researchers from various areas in AI who want to discuss the mentioned issues from their point of view. How can we develop new methods or adapt existing methods to meet these demands?

Preliminary workshop agenda

The workshop will be held on ? August 2003, starting at 9am and finishing at 6pm. Paper presentation will be 20 minutes with 10 minutes of discussion. There will be an open discussion to reflect the talks and to discuss further developments. Depending on the contributions we consider creating extra time slots after each "block" to give attendents of the workshop time for discussion.

Submission Instructions

TBA

Note: Participants are expected to register for the main IJCAI conference in addition to the workshop.

Important Dates and Deadlines

  • Deadline for the submission of papers: March 7th, 2003
  • Notification of acceptance/rejection: March 21st, 2003
  • Deadline for the receipt of camera-ready papers: May 23rd, 2003

Organizing Committee

Ubbo Visser (Chair)
TZI, Center for Computing Technologies
Artificial Intelligence Group
Universität Bremen
Universitätsallee 21-23, D-28359 Bremen, GERMANY
visser@informatik.uni-bremen.de
http://www.tzi.de/~visser

Patrick Doherty
Department of Computer and Information Science
Artificial Intelligence and Integrated Computer Systems Division
Linköping University
S-581 83 Linköping, SWEDEN
pdy@ida.liu.se
http://www.ida.liu.se/~patdo

Gerhard Lakemeyer
Department of Computer Science V
Aachen University of Technology
Ahornstr. 55, D-52056 Aachen, GERMANY
gerhard@informatik.rwth-aachen.de
http://www-i5.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/gerhard

Manuela Veloso
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh PA 15213-3890, USA
Manuela_Veloso@school.coral.cs.cmu.edu
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~mmv

Program Committee

Minoru Asada

Andreas Birk

Hans-Dieter Burkhard

Thomas Christaller

Greg Dudek

Dieter Fox

Uli Furbach

Malik Ghallab

Otthein Herzog

Sven König

Gal Kaminka

Paul Levi

Elena Messina

Daniele Nardi

Bernhard Nebel

Rolf Pfeifer

Thorsten Schmitt

Peter Stone

Sebastian Thrun