DALT School 2011

DALT is a well-established forum for researchers interested in sharing their experiences in combining declarative and formal approaches with engineering and technology aspects of agents and multiagent systems. Building complex agent systems calls for models and technologies that ensure predictability, allow for the verification of properties, and guarantee flexibility. Developing technologies that can satisfy these requirements still poses an important and difficult challenge. Here, declarative approaches have the potential of offering solutions satisfying the needs for both specifying and developing multiagent systems. Moreover, they are gaining more and more attention in important application areas such as the semantic web, service-oriented computing, security, and electronic contracting. For instance, some convergence points between the areas of formal methods for dealing with web services and formal methods for agents are emerging and gaining more and more attention.

The DALT School builds on the success of 8 editions of the international AAMAS workshop series. Past editions of the DALT workshop series were held in Toronto, Budapest, Estoril, Honolulu, Hakodate, Utrecht, New York, and Melbourne. The DALT School aims at giving a comprehensive introduction to this exciting research domain and disseminate the results of research achieved in this 8-year-long activity with a perspective on the future.

The DALT School will allow graduate students to get a thorough overview of cutting-edge research and technologies, obtain feedback from leading scientists, and to participate in valuable discussions that will likely contribute in shaping and focussing their research interests.

The school aims to be truly international with a strong participation from regions all around the world. This will help students make connections with international participants and set the base for potentially long-term cooperations.

Thanks to the generous support of the Artificial Intelligence Journal, the "Agreement Technologies" COST Action IC0801, the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents, the Spanish Association for Artificial Intelligence,the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence, the British Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour, the Catalan Association for Artificial Intelligence, the Portuguese Association for Artificial Intelligence and SICStus Prolog, the DALT School is proud to help the participation of students at all levels.