CFP: PAAMS Special Session on "Assessing Agent Applications"

[Benjamin Hirsch]

------call for papers--------
Assessing Agent  Applications
Special Session at PAAMS 2012
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IMPORTANT DATES
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Paper submission deadline: 	17th November, 2011
Acceptance notification: 	16th December, 2011
Final version submission: 	9th January, 2012
Conference dates: 		28th - 30th March, 2012

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GOALS
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The special session on assessing agent applications focuses on the (lack of) interaction between different groups within the agent community that focus on either theory or practice of multi-agent systems. While it is quite common for practitioners to apply certain theoretical results in a practical setting, the results thereof are seldom fed back to the community. This can be due to a number of reasons, including the impracticability of the theory in practical settings, the (perceived) lack of "novelty" of the work, or the difficulty of expressing results in a way that allows readers to appreciate and learn from the work. Against this background the special session will have two foci:

* Learning from Applications
It is quite common for researchers to take theoretical work of their peers and use it in their (more practical) work. Much less common is the feedback loop, i.e. taking the experience of the application and using it to amend the theory, unless the research was done by the same person. Even if theories are validated in a laboratory setting, they might not behave as expected when applied in the real world. This feedback though is often hard to capture and present in a way that is usable as a basis for further refinement of the applied theory. The goal of this part of the session is to identify how agent applications can be assessed with respect to findings that can be fed back to the (theoretical) agent community, and how a feedback loop between theory and practice can be fostered within the greater community.

Writing about Applications
It is generally agreed that agent technology is a topic mainly confined to the realm of research. In order to help the technology to become more attractive, sophisticated tools and frameworks have to be developed and applied to real world problems. To discuss experiences in applying agent technology is an important matter, be it due to creative solving of unexpected engineering problems which occurred and which have been solved, or be it due to unknown scalability issues which occurred when applying theorems. However, when it comes to conferences, these necessities seem to have a different perception. 
Our analysis has shown that papers that either focus on a particular application that uses agent technology or deal with issues that are close to implementation issues in the context of agents (for example network problems, authorization, or development) are few and far between. However, for the reasons above we consider application papers to be vital for advancing agent technology. 

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Topics
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We invite papers that address any of the following topics
* Experiences with industry projects - challenges, advantages
* Comparative studies of agent and non-agent technology
* Best practise guides for agent based applications
* Integration of agent and software engineering approaches
* Assessing (advantages / disadvatages of) agent applications
* Impact analysis of agents within industry
* Deployed agent systems
* From prototype to product 
* Application of theories to real world problems
* Application of real world solutions to theories

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Committees
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Organising Committee

Benjamin Hirsch, EBTIC / Khalifa University, UAE
Tina Balke, University of Surrey, UK
Marco Luetzenberger, DAI Labor / TU Berlin, Germany

Programme Committee (preliminary)

Huib Aldewereld
Tina Balke
Lars Braubach
Mehdi Dastani
Nirmit Desai
Marc Esteva
Allesandro Farinelli
Maria Ganzha
Jorge Gomez Sanz
James Harland
Benjamin Hirsch
Michael Huhns
Marco Lützenberger
Peter Mcburney
Ingrid Nunes
Rene Schumann
Rainer Unland
Danny Weynes
Michael Winnikoff

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Dr. Benjamin Hirsch
EBTIC / Khalifa University
Abu Dhabi
PO Box 127788
Abu Dhabi
United Arab Emirates
TEL: +971-2-501-8597
MOB: +971-50-4139031