AOIS'04 @ AAMAS CFP

             Sixth International Bi-Conference Workshop on  
                  Agent-Oriented Information Systems
                              (AOIS-2004)
                          http://www.aois.org/

                            to be held at the
        The Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous
        Agents & Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 2004) New York, USA
     
                           19 or 20 July 2004
                           ------------------


Workshop Description 
--------------------
Agent-Orientation is emerging as a powerful new paradigm in computing.
Concepts and techniques from the agent paradigm could well be the
foundations for the next generation of mainstream information systems,
which we might term "active computing".  

Information systems have become the backbone of all kinds of
organizations today.  In almost every sector-manufacturing, education,
health care, government, and businesses large and small-information
systems are relied upon for everyday work, communication, information
gathering, and decision-making.  Yet the inflexibilities in current
technologies and methods have also resulted in poor performance,
incompatibilities, and obstacles to change.  As many organizations are
reinventing themselves to meet the challenges of global competition
and e-commerce, there is increasing pressure to develop and deploy new
technologies that are flexible, robust, and responsive to rapid and
unexpected change.  

Agent concepts hold great promise for responding to the new realities
of active information systems.  They offer higher level abstractions
and mechanisms which address issues such as knowledge representation
and reasoning, communication, coordination, cooperation among
heterogeneous and autonomous parties, perception, commitments, goals,
beliefs, intentions, etc. On the one hand, the concrete implementation
of these concepts can lead to advanced functionalities, e.g., in
inference-based query answering, transaction control, adaptive
workflows, brokering and integration of disparate information sources,
and automated communication processes.  On the other hand, their rich
representational capabilities allow more faithful and flexible
treatments of complex organizational processes, leading to more
effective requirements analysis and architectural and detailed design.
The workshop will focus on how agent concepts and techniques will
contribute to meeting information systems needs today and tomorrow. 

The workshop encourages submissions on all topics related to AOIS,
including (but not limited to) the following:       

* agent-oriented modeling and design methods 
* models and architectures for agent-oriented/active information systems 
* novel information system technologies based on software agents 
* agent-oriented requirements engineering 
* agents and knowledge management 
* agent-oriented approaches to data integration 
* agent-based workflow modeling 
* agent orientation and e-services/web services
* agent orientation in web information systems
* agent-oriented enterprise and business process modeling 
* agent communication languages for business communication 
* ontologies and agents 
* managing trust and reputation
* automated business-to-business interaction (including negotiation and 
contracting) 
 

Workshop Format
---------------

To foster greater communication and interaction between the
Information Systems and Agents communities, we are organizing the
workshop as a bi-conference event.  It is intended to be a single
"logical" event with two "physical" venues. It is hoped that this
arrangement will encourage greater participation from, and more
exchange between, both communities. The first part of the
bi-conference event in 2004 will be held in June at the 16th
International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering
(CAiSE 2004 - http://www.cs.rtu.lv/caise2004/).  

The technical program will include invited talks by leading experts in
the field, contributed papers and poster sessions. Authors of accepted
papers who present their paper at one location will also be invited to
present their papers as a poster in the other location.   
To mitigate the geographic and temporal separation of the two parts of
the workshop, electronic discussion will be strongly
encouraged. Accepted papers will be posted on the workshop
website. There will be designated discussants for each
paper. Discussants' comments will also be posted on the website.  

The proceedings of AOIS 2003 workshop will be formally published by
Springer-Verlag, and there are similar plans for AOIS 2004.  


Submission of Papers
--------------------
Paper submission is possible only by email. Authors have to send a pdf
file attached to an email message to Michael Winikoff:

winikoff-MTgBGfZJYvW7NGdpmJTKYQ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

The message shall contain the paper title, author name(s) and
affiliation(s), contact information of one of the authors, and an
abstract of at most 200 words, in plain text. The abstract has to
clearly identify the main topics of the paper and its main
contribution. Preliminary abstract submission is very appreciated.
Full papers must be at most 15 pages long.

Submitted papers must be formatted using the Springer LNCS
style. Templates (llncs.cls, llncs.sty, or sv-lncs.dot) are available
at: http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html.


Position Papers
---------------
In addition to full length, refereed papers, we are also seeking
position papers.  These can be submitted by email to Michael Winikoff 
winikoff-MTgBGfZJYvW7NGdpmJTKYQ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, only in pdf format, following 
the
instructions given above for the regular submissions, except for the
length. 

A position paper should not exceed 2 pages. It must either:
   1. discuss a specific problem, or
   2. attack a specific position, or
   3. articulate a specific technology forecast.

The author must indicate in the accompanying email message under which
of these three categories the position paper falls. A problem
discussion must begin with a section called Problem Statement and must
conclude with a section called Research Questions. An attack must
first describe the position to be attacked in neutral language before
it presents reasons why it should be rejected. A technology forecast
should consist of one or more forecast statements with additional
explanation.

Please have a look at our  list of research questions at
http://www.aois.org/CfPP.html


Important dates:
----------------

Submissions due:      1 April 2004 
Notifications sent:   1 May 2004
Workshop:             19 or 20 July 2004 (TBD)


Organization commitee:
----------------------

Co-chairs:
----------


Paolo Giorgini 
Department of Information and communication Technology
University of Trento, Italy
http://www.dit.unitn.it/~pgiorgio

Michael Winikoff 
School of Computer Science and Information Technology 
RMIT University 
http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/~winikoff

Steering Committee 
------------------

Yves Lesperance
Department of Computer Science 
York University, Canada
http://www.cs.yorku.ca/~lesperan

Gerd Wagner
Department of Information & Technology, 
Eindhonven University of Technology, The Netherlands
http://tmitwww.tm.tue.nl/staff/gwagner

Eric Yu
Faculty of information Studies,
University of Toronto, Canada
http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~eric


Program Committee
-----------------

- Brian Blake (Georgetown University Washington, DC, USA) 
- Hans-Dieter Burkhard (Humboldt Univ., Germany)
- Luca Cernuzzi (U. Catolica Nuestra Senora de la Asuncian, Paraguay)
- Luiz Cysneiros (York University, Toronto)
- Frank Dignum (Univ. of Utrecht, Netherlands)
- Paolo Donzelli (University of Maryland, USA)
- Bernard Espinasse (Domaine Universitaire de Saint-Jerme, France)
- Behrouz  H. Far (University of Calgary, Canada)
- Iannes A. Ferguson (B2B Machines, USA)
- Timothy W. Finin  (UMBC, USA)
- Avigdor Gal (Technion - Israel Institute of Technology)
- U. Garimella (Andra Pradesh Govt., MSIT, India)
- Aditya K. Ghose (Univ. of Wollongong, Australia)
- Elizabeth A. Kendall (Monash University, Australia)
- Manuel Kolp (Universite catholique de Louvain, Belgium)
- Gerhard Lakemeyer (RWTH Aachen, Germany)
- Yves Lesperance (York University, Canada)
- Fangzhen Lin (Hong Kong Univ. of Science and Technology, Hong Kong) 
- Haralambos Mouratidis (University of East London, UK) 
- Joerg P. Mueller (Siemens, Germany)
- Daniel E. O'Leary (Univ. of Southern California, USA)
- James Odell (James Odell Associates, USA)
- Omer F. Rana (Cardiff University, UK)
- Arnon Sturm (Israel Institute of Technology, Israel)
- Nick Szirbik (Groningen University, The Netherlands)
- Gerd Wagner (Univ. of Technology, NL)
- Carson Woo (Univ. British Columbia, Canada)
- Michael Wooldridge (University of Liverpool, UK)
- Bin Yu (North Carolina State University, USA) 
- Eric Yu (Univ. of Toronto, Canada)
- Franco Zambonelli (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy)


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