ATAL-99

Intelligent agents are one of the most important developments in computer science in the 1990s. Agents are of interest in many important application areas, ranging from human-computer interaction to industrial process control. The ATAL workshop series aims to bring together researchers interested in the agent-level, micro aspects of agent technology. Specifically, ATAL-99 will address issues such as theories of rational agency, software architectures for intelligent agents, methodologies and programming languages for realising agents, and software tools for applying and evaluating agent systems. Papers that consider macro-level, societal issues of agent-based systems are welcome only if they explicitly relate to the workshop themes.

ATAL-99 will be held over the three days immediately preceding the AAAI-99 conference, also being held in Orlando. Note, however, that there is no formal connection between AAAI-99 and ATAL-99: they are entirely separate events. The ATAL-99 proceedings will be formally published as volume six of the Intelligent Agents series from Springer-Verlag.

As the title suggests, the workshop has three main themes:

• Agent theories: What approaches (e.g., game theory, temporal/modal logic) are appropriate for agent theory? How do these approaches relate to one another?
• Agent architectures: What architectures are appropriate for autonomous agents? How can such architectures be given a formal semantics? How can different agent architectures be evaluated and compared? What methodologies can be used to build agent-based applications? How close are these methodologies to existing formal specification languages or object-oriented analysis and design methods?
• Agent languages: What programming paradigms are most suitable for agents? How do agent-oriented languages differ from object-oriented and logic programming languages? What are efficient implementation mechanisms for these languages?

In addition, ATAL-99 will include two special paper tracks, and
submissions are particularly welcome on these (more details on the
web pages):

• The evaluation of agent architectures
  • This track seeks insights on the strengths of various architectures in different task domains.  Relevant issues include: Which types of architectures work best in uncertain, dynamic or real-time environments?  How can the effectiveness of architectures be evaluated?  When should a hybrid reflective-reactive architecture be deployed?  What are benchmark tasks for various types of environmental niches?  What benchmark tasks require cognitive capabilities?
• Agent-oriented software engineering
  • This track seeks to examine the credentials of agent-based approaches as a serious software engineering paradigm.  Relevant issues include: What does an agent-based approach buy a developer over an object-oriented approach?  How do agents help in building complex software systems?  When is an agent-based approach most appropriate or best avoided?  How can an agent-oriented approach be used at various stages of the software design/maintenance process?  What are appropriate methodologies for this?