DALT Spring School on Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies - early registration: March 10, 2011

[Paolo Torroni]

DALT School 2011
First International School on Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies

Bertinoro, Italy, April 10-15, 2011 (co-located with ISCL 2011)
http://lia.deis.unibo.it/confs/dalt_school

* EARLY REGISTRATION DEADLINE: MARCH 10, 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 multi-agent 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 multi-agent 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.
The DALT School builds on the success of 8 editions of the international 
AAMAS workshop series. The DALT School aims at giving a comprehensive 
introduction to this exciting research domain and disseminate the 
results of research achieved in this 9-year-long activity with a 
perspective on the future. The school will include sessions dedicated to 
PhD students, mentoring activities, focussed discussions and guided 
brainstorming.

LECTURERS

Francesca Toni is Reader in Computational Logic in the Department of 
Computing at Imperial College London and Leader of the Computational 
Logic and Argumentation research group. She has been Principal 
Investigator of several EU-funded projects in the areas of logic-based 
agents and argumentation. She is one of the main researchers who 
developed the KGP model of agency.

Birna van Riemsdijk is Assistant Professor at TU Delft, where she 
develops techniques for engineering intelligent software systems that 
can support humans in performing complex tasks. Her research focusses on 
the use and development of declarative agent programming languages. She 
is one of the developers of the GOAL language and a member of the DALT 
steering committee.

Peter McBurney is Professor of Computer Science and Head of the ART 
group at the University of Liverpool. He has been leading EU-funded 
research initiatives and managed many research grants for agent-related 
research worldwide and acted as a management consultant for leading IT 
and Telecommunications companies. His research focusses on semantics and 
pragmatics of agent communication and on multi-agent models of economic 
markets and marketing.

Wamberto Vasconcelos is a senior lecturer at the University of Aberdeen, 
where he works on intelligent software agents and on knowledge 
technologies. He has been involved in several international research 
projects on information technologies and service sciences. He is a 
member of the steering committee of the Coordination, Organization, 
Institutions and Norms workshop series (COIN) and an organizer of the 
DALT workshop in 2010 and 2011.

Rafael Bordini is Associate Professor at Universidade Federal do Rio 
Grande do Sul. He is one of the main developers of the Jason framework 
and author of several books on agent programming. His research interests 
cover various aspects of software engineering for autonomous systems, 
including programming, modelling, verification, testing, debugging and 
application deployment.

ACTIVITIES

The programme will include:
- an introductory lecture to give an overview of the school
- 5 topical courses of 6 hours each
- student sessions with focussed brainstorming and organized mentoring 
activities
- a social trip

TARGET AUDIENCE

The school targets graduate students as well as other interested 
researchers, from university, government and industry. It will allow 
students to get a thorough overview of cutting-edge research and 
technologies and get in touch with leading scientists.
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.
An initial list of participants is available on the school Web site.

FINANCIAL AID AND MORE

Grant application is now closed. However, additional support is still 
available to AEPIA, APPIA, ACIA, AIxIA and AISB members. Limited 
personal subscription to selected journals will be offered by John Wiley 
& Sons to all attendees registered before March 25, 2011.

VENUE

The University Residential Center is located in the small medieval 
hilltop town of Bertinoro, 50km east of Bologna at an elevation of 230m 
above sea level. Bertinoro is easily reachable from Bologna and Forli 
airport or train station. The registration includes shuttle bus on April 
10 and April 15. Bertinoro is close to many splendid Italian locations 
such as Ravenna, Rimini on the Adriatic coast, and the Republic of San 
Marino (all within 35km). Bertinoro can also be a base for visiting some 
of the better-known Italian locations such as Padua, Ferrara,Venice, 
Urbino, Florence and Siena.

LECTURES

Agent and Multi-Agent Software Engineering: Modelling, Programming & 
Verification

This course aims at providing an overview of three important parts of 
the practical development of multi-agent systems: modelling, 
programming, and verification. In particular, we will cover approaches 
for multi-agent systems that are based on abstractions, techniques, and 
tools that have been specifically tailored for autonomous agents and 
multi-agent systems. Besides surveying various approaches that appeared 
in the Agents literature for each of the three parts of the development 
process, we will focus the concrete examples of the Programming part on 
the recently put together JaCaMo platform (Lecturer: Rafael Bordini).

Agent Reasoning: Knowledge, Plans & Flexible Control Cycles

I will present the KGP (Knowledge, Goals and Plan) model of agency. This 
model allows the specification of heterogeneous agents that can interact 
with each other, and can exhibit both proactive and reactive behaviour 
allowing them to function in dynamic environments by adjusting their 
goals and plans when changes happen in such environments. The KGP model 
provides a highly modular agent architecture that integrates a 
collection of reasoning and physical capabilities, synthesised within 
transitions that update the agent's state in response to reasoning, 
sensing and acting. Transitions are orchestrated by cycle theories that 
specify the order in which transitions are executed while taking into 
account the dynamic context and agent preferences, as well as selection 
operators for providing inputs to transitions. Cycle theories are means 
to program the control of agents in a flexible and adaptable manner. I 
will also present an argumentative variant of the KGP model, where 
reasoning capabilities are supported by argumentation. (Lecturer: 
Francesca Toni).

Agent Reasoning: Goals & Preferences

In this course we will investigate how motivational attitudes like 
desires, goals and intentions have been and are being used to represent 
and program agent reasoning. We will consider both theoretical 
approaches for investigating these notions and their interplay, as well 
as ways of using these notions to develop cognitive agents. The GOAL 
agent programming language in which the notion of goal is important will 
be used for illustration. Recent results from empirical studies on how 
GOAL is used to program agents that control bots in Unreal Tournament 
will be presented. (Lecturer: Birna van Riemsdijk).

Organisation, Coordination & Norms for Multi-Agent Systems

This course will introduce organisation theory concepts for agents and 
multi-agent systems; some of these concepts are objectives, roles and 
their relations, power, and capabilities, to name a few. We shall then 
use organisation concepts to create/synthesise stereotypical agents 
which will "embody" aspects of the organisation: these agents will 
coordinate efforts in order to find and enact a joint plan to achieve 
individual and organisational objectives. We explicitly represent norms, 
that is, permissions, prohibitions and obligations, as means to 
"fine-tune" the coordination/planning effort, ruling out certain courses 
of actions or giving preference/priority to other courses of actions. 
The course will make use of the tools and methodology of the EU-funded 
ALIVE project. (Lecturer: Wamberto Vasconcelos).

Agent Interaction: Languages, Dialogues & Protocols

In this course we will explore the design and engineering of artificial 
communications languages and protocols to enable autonomous, intelligent 
software agents to communicate with one another. The design of these 
languages and protocols draws on human linguistics, on the philosophy of 
language and dialog, on formal logic, and on the theory of computer 
programming languages. We will look at the syntax, semantics, and 
pragmatics of multi-agent languages and protocols, and consider related 
issues such as dynamic (run-time) composition of protocols and the 
efficient storage and retrieval of protocols. (Lecturer: Peter McBurney).

FEES

Standard registration is 700 euro until March 10, 2011.

Standard registrations are ALL-INCLUSIVE and cover access to all 
lectures and exams, mentoring program and student session, lodging (5 
nights) in double room (subject to availability), welcome cocktail, 
breakfasts, coffee breaks, lunches and canteen/restaurant dinners, 
social trip (including dinner), Internet access. Daily registrations are 
also possible, as well as separate fees for accompanying person, 
upgrades to single room, and B&B accommodation for early arrivals and 
late departures at convenient rates.

SPONSORS

AI Journal, COST Action IC0801 "Agreement Technologies", Foundation for 
Intelligent Physical Agents, Spanish Association for AI, Catalan 
Association for AI, Portuguese Association for AI, The British Society 
for the Study of AI and Simulation of Behaviour, Italian Association for 
AI, Italian Association for Logic Programming, SICStus Prolog, John 
Wiley & Sons, Bertinoro International Center for Informatics.

ORGANISATION

School Organisers
   Paolo Torroni, DEIS, University of Bologna
   Andrea Omicini, DEIS, University of Bologna

Student Session Organiser
   Federico Chesani, DEIS, University of Bologna

Local Organisers
   Marco Prandini, DEIS, University of Bologna
   Eleonora Campori, Bertinoro Center for Informatics
   Manuela Schiavi, Bertinoro Center for Informatics

INQUIRIES

For all visa-related and administrative concerns such as payment, 
registration, lodging, and local logistics, contact Eleonora Campori, 
ecampori at ceub.it.

Direct all other inquires to dalt.school.2011 at gmail.com. We will answer 
in 2 working days.