AGENTLINK UPDATE # 70 – 28th February 2005 This is the email newsletter of AgentLink -- Europe's Co-ordination Action for Agent-based Computing. The AgentLink WWW site is http://www.AgentLink.org/ IMPORTANT: Please take the time to ensure that every member of your group receives a copy of the AgentLink update. If you have a group mail alias, why not get this alias to be added to the mailing list? To subscribe/unsubscribe to this mailing list simply send a request to mailto: coordinator@agentlink.org ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ * AAMAS Industry Track paper submission open (Submission deadline: 28th February, 2005) * AgentcitiesUK.net Challenge Day 2: e-Government and e-Democracy (4th-5th May, 2005 – Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK) * Standards Activities: - 13th Global Grid Forum (GGF13) meeting (13th-16th March, 2005 - Seoul, Korea) - OMG Workshop on MDA, SOA and Web Services (21st-24th March, 2005 - Orlando, FL) - W3C holds its Technical Plenary Week (28th February-4th April, 2005 - Boston, MA) * Agentlink sponsored events - Socially Inspired Computing Joint Symposium (12th-14th April, 2005 - Hatfield, England) * AgentLink Roadmap Consultation Report * AgentLink III: Call for Research Event Support Proposals ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ * AAMAS Industry Track paper submission open (Submission deadline: 28th February, 2005) AAMAS 2005 Industry Track (http://www.aamas2005.nl/industry_track.php) has been open for submission. The AAMAS Industry Track is a special track at the AAMAS-05 conference that will run in parallel to the regular AAMAS scientific track. It will feature presentations and demonstrations from industrial participants, giving them an opportunity to showcase the state of the art in technology and industrial application of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems to AAMAS delegates and to publish associated papers in a high quality, formal proceedings. The industry track aims to foster mutually beneficial links between those engaged in foundational scientific research and those working to make autonomous agents and multi-agent systems a commercial reality. This enables industrially-based software agent developers and practitioners to participate in AAMAS in a meaningful way and to present their technology and applications to both their peers and the associated scientific community. The deadline for submission: February 28th http://www.aamas2005.nl/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ * AgentcitiesUK.net Challenge Day 2: e-Government and e-Democracy (4th-5th May, 2005 – Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK) The second AgentcitiesUK.net challenge day will be held on the 4th and 5th of May 2005 at Sheffield Hallam University. The purpose of a "Challenge Day" is both to extrapolate from current research and to brainstorm on completely new possibilities for the use of agents. The focus is on how agents can help us do tasks that we can't right now -- not just automating existing practices. The aims are to identify real agent added-value and develop sustainable arguments that autonomy is an opportunity not a threat. The goal of the second agentcitiesUK challenge day is to take this approach to the application of agent technologies in e-Government and e-Democracy in the UK. The meeting participants will include researchers and postgraduate students from the agents community, problem owners and people who work in both sectors. To apply for a place and read the details of financial support provided please visit: http://agentcitiesuk.net/ and fill out the event registration form. Important Dates: 8th April 2005 - Registration Deadline 12th April 2005 - Notification of places and grants 45h/5th May 2005 - Challenge Day. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ * Standards Activities: - 13th Global Grid Forum (GGF13) meeting (13th-16th March, 2005 - Seoul, Korea) Registration is still open for the the Thirteenth Global Grid Forum meeting in Seoul, Korea. Details for registration, hotel reservation, and information about the meeting venue and localities can be found at at: http://www.gridforum.org/Meetings/GGF13/reg.htm ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ * Standards Activities: - OMG Workshop on MDA, SOA and Web Services (21st-24th March, 2005 - Orlando, FL) The Integrated Enterprise is a complex structure but Web Services, Service-Oriented Architecture, and the Model Driven Architecture (MDA), working together, let architects, designers, and developers visualize, build, and integrate the suite of applications that keep a business running. This four-day workshop will examine the architectural, technical, and developmental foundations of these IT enablers, showing how they combine synergistically to enable distributed computing on the scale required by today’s Internet-connected enterprise. One and one-half days of tutorials will cover the basics of service-oriented architectures and the tools used to design and build enterprise integrated applications – WSDL, SOAP, modeling including UML 2.0, the MDA, integrated environments and the development tools built around them by software vendors and open-source projects. This sets the stage for two and one-half days of presentations by leading modelers, architects, system vendors, IDE suppliers, open-source projects, developers, and end-users on the state-of-the-art: recent developments in tools and techniques, and real-world implementations of model-based, service-oriented distributed applications. Details on this event can be found at at: http://www.omg.org/news/meetings/mda-soa-ws/index.htm ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ * Standards Activities: - W3C holds its Technical Plenary Week (28th February-4th April, 2005 - Boston, MA) http://www.w3.org/News/2005#item32 W3C holds its Technical Plenary Week from 28 February - 4 March in Boston, Massachusetts, USA where 30 W3C Working Groups and Interest Groups hold face-to-face meetings. Participants and invited guests attend plenary day for talks and demos on extensibility and versioning, XML, test suites, Web applications, Web site usability and design, multimodal interaction and voice. Learn how to join W3C and read about W3C. Related Documents: - Tech Plenary Meeting Home Page http://www.w3.org/2004/12/allgroupoverview.html - Joining the W3C http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Prospectus/Joining - About the W3C http://www.w3.org/Consortium/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ * Agentlink sponsored events - Socially Inspired Computing Joint Symposium (12th-14th April, 2005 - Hatfield, England) Ideas from biology have been successfully applied to the design, construction and adjustment of computer systems. This workshop aims to focus on work which contributes to doing the same with ideas and metaphors originating in social phenomena. Social systems are complex self-organising and self-regulating systems that emerge certain kinds of properties that would appear to be very useful if they could be instantiated in computer systems. For example, the emergence and maintenance of roles, institutions, power-relations, exchange and trust systems are very much current engineering issues in distributed (network based) decentralised systems. Historically, these kinds of issues have been studied by the social sciences in the context of human societies. More recently, the emerging discipline of computational social science has begun to formalise concepts about social mechanisms algorithmically - i.e. using (often agent-based) simulation. It would appear that there is a great potential for cross fertilisation between researchers trying to solve difficult engineering problems and those producing computational models of complex social phenomena. We hope to foster this process by the exchange of relevant ideas, techniques and problems. For more details, go to http://cfpm.org/sic/sic.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ * AgentLink Roadmap Consultation Report As part of its roadmapping activities, AgentLink has produced a consultation report outlining the current situation with respect to the status of agent technologies and indicating key directions for future development of the field. The document is an interim report that seeks to draw inputs from the community as part of the detailed development of the AgentLink III roadmap. You can find the report at http://www.agentlink.org/roadmap Now, we are seeking inputs from the general community as listed below. Please take some time to contribute to the specific requests for information and help make the roadmap a valuable resource. 1. Specific comments and constructive criticism of the Consulation Report. 2. Contribution to roadmapping for sub-areas within the field of agent-based computing. 3. Identification of relevant national and international activites to map current efforts, including but not limited to: a) standards activities; b) relevant projects; c) key events; and d) deployed systems and infrastructure. 4. Please help us with the roadmapping process by completing the questionnaire attached. The questionnaire can also be downloaded at: http://www.agentlink.org/roadmap/RMQuestionnaire.doc You may also take part in our survey concerning current and future prospects for agent technology at http:www.agentlink.org/survey We expect a more substantial version of the roadmap to be available in the summer of 2005, taking into account the inputs received. You can help by providing information in the above areas, and mailing them to Michael Luck at mml@ecs.soton.ac.uk ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ * AgentLink III: Call for Research Event Support Proposals (Call open March 2004 October 2005) The Agentlink III project is committed to supporting European Research activities in the area of Agent Technology and under its research coordination action is able to provide various types of support for research and scientific events related to Agent technology. The objective of this support is to pump-prime research in strategically important areas, support emerging new areas, encourage inter-disciplinary links and support access to leading events in particular for students from under-resourced regions. Further information on event support can be found at: http://www.agentlink.org/activities/eventsupport/index.html