Third AAMAS Workshop on Cognitive Agents and Virtual Environments (CAVE)

[Koen Hindriks - EWI]

[Apologies for cross-posting]

NEWS! *** Submission DEADLINE EXTENDED to February 20, 2015 ***

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CAVE2015: Third AAMAS Workshop on Cognitive Agents and Virtual Environments (CAVE)

Workshop website: http://comp.mq.edu.au/~richards/CAVE15/index.htm

Extended Submission deadline: February 20, 2015
Notification of acceptance:    March 10, 2015
Camera-ready copy of papers:  March 19, 2015

Co-located with AAMAS 2015 (http://www.aamas2015.com) Workshop date: May 4 or 5, 2015, Istanbul, Turkey

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This is the Third AAMAS Workshop on Cognitive Agents and Virtual Environments (CAVE) where the main issue has been to incorporate elements of agent technology in games and similar virtual environments such as 3D training and educational applications to create more flexible and realistic game play. This workshop builds upon previous AAMAS workshops (including AGS 2009/10, EduMAS 2009/10, AEGS 2011, MASEIE 2011 and CAVE 2012/13). Although some of the technical issues have been overcome and middleware (such as Pogamut, EIS and CIGA) has been developed to connect agent platforms to games like Unreal Tournament there are a number of fundamental challenges both on the technical as well as on conceptual and design level. This is particularly true when agent-based games are used in the educational context and need to provide motivation, support and ensure certain outcomes are achieved by the human.

We intend to bring people working on virtual characters together with those working on agent platforms and languages and cognitive architectures. All three communities have important parts of solutions for creating agents for games and similar applications, but very little is currently being done to combine these solutions. Thus the workshop will encourage all submissions that connect the different communities and show the benefits from this combination.

This workshop directly supports the special track on Virtual Agents and Humans and will allow researchers to discuss current issues in more depth than is possible in the main conference. Also, there is an option to submit rejected AAMAS papers for fast track reviewing for presentation only at the workshop, allowing discussion of the ideas at an AAMAS venue without publication. Areas (from the main conference
CFP) that will be emphasized include:
Human-agent interaction
Teamwork in human-agent mixed networks
Virtual agents in games and education
Virtual agents for improving human activities Competitions among agents and humans

There is a wide range of activity within the agent community considering various aspects of multi-agent systems, both theoretical as well as practical. This includes communication, team work, coordination and cooperation of agents. We want to explore how these results might be used in the context of games and other virtual applications that require interaction with real users and perhaps identify any additional requirements that should be imposed for these contexts. In particular, we seek to better understand the constraints imposed when agents are used in virtual learning environments and serious games and how the balance between learning, motivation and enjoyment can be achieved. To gain this understanding we also want to explore similarities between solutions developed within the agent community with those used by people studying cognitive architectures.

Finally, we would like to promote the testing and evaluation of suitable frameworks such that it will be clear which works best for the various types of game or application of gaming. To this end, creation of a testbed or environment for developing and evaluating games and simulations with agents will be explored at the workshop.

Issues of concern at this workshop include:
•          How can we create in a principled and effective way agents
that are able to react to events in the environment in real time. This mean that they need to balance reactive and pro-active behavior in a realistic way.
•          Which (cognitive) agent architectures are particularly
suited for Real Time Systems(RTS)? Can we build them on BDI architectures or are cognitive architectures like ACT-R more suitable?
Do these architectures allow us to create complex agents for real time systems and games i.e. agents that can reason about their mental states and the mental states of other agents and the user, agents that have emotions, social awareness and that can learn from their experiences?
•          Can we use the theories about teamwork produced by agent
research to create effective teams of agents in real time systems and games? What aspects, such as communication, are important in this environment and how can solutions integrate with existing work?
•          How do we evaluate the use of agent platforms in games? Can
we create test beds? If different tools and languages are used to support different aspects of real time systems and games with agents, how programmable is the combination?
•          What technical advances are made to make it easier to use
agent platforms for games? i.e. is the middleware ready to support the connection or should more work be done? What techniques are suitable for agents that are incorporated in educational contexts, games and simulations and what are the issues for information flow and long term interactions? How do we balance intelligence (e.g. believability and
sociability) and efficiency (learning)?
•          How to handle scalability issues when applying agent
technology e.g. how to use a kind of cognitive Level of Detail approach such that agents that are not currently in the focus of the game or simulation take less processing power.  How do we manage the transition into and out of focus so that the allocation of processing power and other resources is optimized and what are the criteria to be used for such optimization?

The topics of the workshop include but are not limited to:
•          Methodologies for designing agent-based game environments
•          Real-time reactive behaviour
•          Balancing reactive and pro-active behaviour
•          Cognitive approaches to agents for real-time systems (RTS) and games
•          BDI-based agents for RTS and games
•          Cognitive architectures used in the context of RTS and games
•          Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA)
•          Spatial and Cognitive maps for games
•          Ontologies for RTS and games
•          Episodic memory for agents in games and RTS
•          Interfacing agent platforms and cognitive architectures to
real-time systems and games
•          Design of Level of Detail of agent-gaming interfaces
•          Scalability of agent technology and cognitive architectures
•          Integrating agent architectures, cognitive architectures
and IVA architectures
•          Gaming middleware
•          Approaches and methods for evaluating the agent platforms
for RTS and games
•          Benchmarks and test beds for evaluating agent technology for games
•          Programmability of complex systems of agents interfaced
with RTS and games
•          Development and Design tools for engineering agents for RTS and games
•          Teamwork approaches for agents in RTS and games
•          Management and achievement of pedagogical goals and shared
human/agent goals in the context of an educational or serious game
•          Communication and coordination approaches for multi-agent
systems for RTS and games

We welcome both theoretical papers that indicate how the theory can be used in practice as well as practical and empirical papers that provide solutions for theoretical issues. However, theoretical papers should indicate how the theory discussed can be actually used in practice and practical and empirical papers should indicate the theoretical issues solved or learned.

We also welcome in particular any papers that discuss experiences and lessons learned related to the application of agent technology in real-time systems and games. Both successes and "failures" are welcome as they both can help us to better understand the key issues in combining agents with real-time systems and games.

Papers will undergo the normal review process and are selected on the basis of quality. However, when choices have to be made we will try to spread the accepted papers over the main themes of the workshop.
Interesting ideas are more important in this respect than detailed results on fringe topics.

We aim to publish the proceedings as an LNCS volume as in previous years. Depending on the quality and number of submissions we might additionally publish a special issue of a journal in game technology.

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Formatting guidelines for publishable papers:
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We encourage participants to submit a paper (15 pages max), describing their work on one or more of the topics mentioned above. All submissions must include the author's name(s), affiliation, complete mailing address, phone number, fax number and email address. Please use the LNCS format for formatting your paper. All accepted submissions and position statements will be published in the workshop proceedings.

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Presentation-only papers:
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You may submit your rejected AAMAS paper for fast-track review for consideration for presentation only at the workshop. Please retain the AAMAS formatting to indicate this choice.

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Submission procedure:
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Submissions should be made through the EasyChair system at
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=CAVE2015 in PDF format.

The deadline for receipt of submissions is February 20, 2015 (extended). -------------------

Workshop Organizers
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1          Deborah Richards, Macquarie University, Australia
2          Frank Dignum, Utrecht University,The Netherlands
3          Koen Hindriks, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
4          Martin Beer, Sheffield University, United Kingdom

Please direct any questions concerning this Call for Papers or the workshop to deborah.richards at mq.edu.au
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Program Committee:
Ruth Aylett, Heriot-Watt University (UK) Martin Beer, Sheffield Hallam University (UK) Cyril Brom, Charles University (Czech Republic) Andre Campos, UFRN (Brazil) Lawrence Cavedon, RMIT University Vincent Corruble, LIP6, Universite Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris 6) Yves Demazeau, CNRS - Laboratoire LIG (France) Frank Dignum, Utrecht University (NL) Hiromitsu Hattori, Kyoto University (Japan) Koen Hindriks, Delft University of Technology (NL) Stefan Kopp, University of Bielefeld (Germany) Simon Lynch, University of Teesside (UK) Joost Van Oijen, Utrecht University (NL) Michael Papasimeon Orkin DSTO (Australia) Rui Prada, Superior Tecnico, Universidade de Lisboa Deborah Richards, Macquarie University (Australia) Avi Rosenfeld, Jerusalem College of Technology (JCT) (Israel) Ilias Sakellariou, University of Macedonia (Macedonia) David Sarne, Bar-Ilan University (Israel) Demosthenes Stamatis, Alexander TEI of Thessaloniki (Greece) Ioanna Stamatopoulou, CITY College, University of Sheffield (UK)