Imperial College AISB'02 Convention

3rd - 5th April 2002

With the convention now over, the organisers would like to thank all those who participated. This site will remain active for information purposes only. Please check the SSAISB web-site for additional information.

Hosted by Depts. of Computing and Electrical & Electronic Engineering, Imperial College, UK

Convention Details

Important Dates & Deadlines

The following dates for submission are guidelines: please check individual symposia.

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Formatting Information and Instructions for Authors

Information, formatting instructions and templates for AISB'02 authors are available here.

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Registration

Registration is no longer possible. If you are interested in obtaining copies of proceedings, please look here.

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Convention Timetable

The table below shows the timetable of events for AISB'02:

The colour-coding above indicates which symposia took place (in parallel) on each day. The colour-codes correspond to those of the schedule summary below. Times in brackets indicate alternative scheduling arrangements which applied to individual symposia.

The following schedule summarises the dates and venues of each symposium:

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Abstracts of Symposia

Second Symposium on Adaptive Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS-II)

Chairs: Eduardo Alonso (City University), Daniel Kudenko and Dimitar Kazakov (University of York)

In recent years, intelligent agents and multi-agent systems have become a highly active area of AI research. Intelligent Agents have been developed and applied successfully in many domains, such as e-commerce, human-computer interaction, entertainment, process management and traffic control.

When designing agent systems, it is impossible to foresee all the potential situations an agent may encounter and specify an agent behaviour optimally in advance. Agents therefore have to learn from and adapt to their environment. This task is even more complex when nature is not the only source of uncertainty, and the agent is situated in an environment that contains other agents with potentially different capabilities, goals, and beliefs. Multi-Agent Learning, i.e., the ability of the agents to learn how to co-operate and compete, becomes crucial in such domains.

In spite of its importance there has been relatively little research on this topic, and so there is a great need to stimulate and promote work in this area. Areas of interest are (but are not limited to):

• Learning and adaptation in multi-agent systems

• Logic-based learning

• Learning and communication

• Natural selection, language and learning

• Evolutionary agents and emergent multi-agent structures

• Industrial applications of learning agents

• Distributed learning

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The 9th Workshop on Automated Reasoning

Chair: Toby Walsh (University of York)

This workshop provides an informal forum for the automated reasoning community. It will be the 9th in a a highly successful series of workshops on automated reasoning, many of which have been held as part of AISB symposia. This workshop series aims to bring together researchers from all areas of automated reasoning in order to foster links and facilitate cross-fertilisation of ideas among researchers from various disciplines; among researchers from academia, industry and government; and between theoreticians and practitioners.

The workshop will cover the full breadth and diversity of automated reasoning and will include topics such as:

• Theorem proving in classical and non-classical logics;

• Equational reasoning;

• Unification;

• Induction;

• Verification;

• Specification;

• Constraint solving;

• Decision procedures;

• Formal methods;

• Interactive theorem proving;

• Non-monotonic reasoning;

• Abduction;

• Logic-based knowledge representation, in particular description logics;

• Implementation;

• Experiments

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AI and Creativity in Arts and Science

Chairs: Amilcar Cardoso (University of Coimbra) and Geraint Wiggins (City University)

Until recently, creativity and creative behaviour were not generally considered to be serious targets for AI study. However, recent developments have begun to suggest that some worthwhile inroads into the computational study of the creative mind can indeed be made. This was reflected in the successful AISB symposia on creative and creativity-related topics at AISB'99 (Edinburgh), AISB'00 (Birmingham) and AISB'01 (York).

This symposium aims to bring together researchers interested in all forms of creative reasoning. The aim is to allow work focussed on different aspects of creative behaviour to be compared and contrasted. To this end, the programme committee invites the submission of extended abstracts covering creative behaviour in the arts and the sciences, including, but not restricted to, computational support for creative people, computational models of creative processes, the philosophy of computational creativity, and AI systems which can be argued to exhibit creativity.

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AI and GRID Computing

Chairs: Omer Rana (Cardiff University) and Michael Schroeder (City University)

Many recent advances in information technology and its use, such as:

1. Component based software development

2. High speed networks

3. Standardisation of interfaces to databases and data repositories

4. Virtual machines and cluster computing

5. Public domain and community software licensing arrangements

6. On-demand (on-use) software payment schemes

7. Network aware interfaces and visualisation

have the potential to transform the capability and modalities of scientific research by providing transparent, intuitive, timely, effective and efficient access to distributed, heterogeneous and dynamic resources. These resources include computational facilities, applications, visualisation, data and experimental facilities, integrated and accessible as a single resource over the Internet - the Grid.

To make effective utilisation of resources across a Gird that spans organisational boundaries, it is imperative that the underlying infrastructure support intelligence. Intelligent software is required to undertake resource and service management, service discovery, service aggregation/decomposition, and support performance management. Commercial systems will also require the underlying infrastructure to respect site autonomy, and particular site specific policies on usage.

The objective of this symposium is to bring together researchers in computer science and AI, to discuss issues in managing Grid services and resources. Topics of interest include:

• Infrastructure for Grids - agents, peer-2-peer systems, distributed object based systems - and how such infrastructure can effectively utilise AI approaches

• AI paradigms to support service management

• Service discovery and description schemes

• Broker services

• Novel paradigms for resource and service management - ant algorithms, virtual economies, etc.

• Performance management and analysis using AI approaches

Applications which demonstrate an approach will be especially welcome. Authors will also be encouraged to submit sample source code if available.

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Animating Expressive Characters for Social Interactions

Chairs: Ruth Aylett (University of Salford) and Lola Canamero (University of Hertfordshire)

The ability to express and recognise emotions is a fundamental aspect of social interaction. The importance of endowing artefacts (for example synthetic characters or robots) with these capabilities is nowadays widely acknowledged in different research areas such as affective computing, socially intelligent agents, computer animation, or virtual environments. Researchers in all these areas are however confronted with the problem of how to make the emotional displays of artefacts and characters believable and acceptable to humans. This can involve not only generating appropriate expressions and behavioural displays - explored in animated film for many years - but also endowing artefacts with underlying models of personality and emotions that support the coherence and autonomy of their emotional displays and interactions.

Thus this symposium concerns 'animation' not only from a graphical perspective, but more generally in the human sense: making characters 'life-like', externally but also 'internally': giving them an 'anima'. The aim of this symposium is to bring together researchers from different disciplines (including psychology, animal behaviour, the arts, computer graphics and animation as well as those mentioned above) to reflect on this common problem from different perspectives and to gain new insights from this multi-disciplinary feedback.

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Intelligent Agents in Virtual Markets

Chair: Aspassia Daskalopulu (Kings College London)

Much of recent research in Computer Science has been concerned with the development of theoretical frameworks and practical applications for electronic marketplaces, in which organisations may find opportunities for commercial transactions, identify prospective partners and establish agreements with them and proceed to implement exchanges of goods, data and services subject to such agreements and the broader legal and business norms that govern the e-market. The use of agent technology for such applications is explored with two main types of agents developed: Agents that act on behalf of organisations and informed by their owners' business processes participate in auctions, negotiate agreements and implement the contractual relations they establish; and agents that regulate the activity within an e-market, monitoring the behaviour of other agents and their interactions and the implementation of their transactions subject to the agreements that govern them.

It has become increasingly acknowledged that successful deployment of such systems depends on users' confidence in their performance and that the emergence of useful practical solutions depends on the richness of the interaction between their agents. Many of the assumptions that underlie existing agent models and multi-agent interaction, for example in relation to autonomy, rationality and sincerity are being revised, with input from other disciplines, such as Law, Economics, and the Social and Organisational Sciences. The precise nature and range of services afforded by e-markets as well as the broader legal and business framework appropriate for them are themselves topics of debate and virtual marketplaces serve as experimental platforms for such issues as well.

The symposium aims to provide a forum for the assessment of research outcomes across the disciplines involved and for identifying issues for future investigation. Topics of interest include:

• Analytical and architectural frameworks for e-markets.

• Agent representation and reasoning for e-markets.

• Agent communication languages for agreement negotiation.

• Agent interaction policies for e-markets.

• Conceptual analysis of central notions in e-commerce transactions, such as trust, agency, delegation, liability, risk, reputation, control, confidence and reliability.

• Legal and social aspects of e-markets.

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Invited Speakers

Both talks were given in room 311, Huxley Building.

Ian Horrocks, "The Semantic Web", Wednesday the 3^rd of April, 2:00pm - 3:00pm.

Stephen Muggleton, "Uncertainty, Logic and Learning", Friday the 5^th of April, 1:30pm - 2:30pm.

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Delegate List

A list of those who attended the convention is available here.

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Travel

The convention was held in Imperial College, London. Instructions on how to get there are available here.

Further information:

• a street-map of the surrounding South Kensington area;

• a map of the campus and its immediate surroundings (PDF Format );

• a detailed map of the campus (the Department of Electronic & Electrical Engineering is marked "11"
  on this map, while the Department of Computing is marked "12").

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Proceedings

There are six proceedings, corresponding to the symposia described above:

• Adaptive Agents and Multi-Agent Systems ISBN 1 902956 28 0

• The Ninth Workshop on Automated Reasoning ISBN 1 902956 26 4

• AI and Creativity in Arts and Science ISBN 1 902956 27 2

• AI and GRID Computing ISBN 1 902956 24 8

• Animating Expressive Characters for Social Interactions ISBN 1 902956 25 6

• Intelligent Agents in Virtual Markets ISBN 1 902956 29 9

More information about the proceedings will appear at http://www.aisb.org.uk.

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Accommodation

Imperial College Conference Accommodation
Earls Court YHA [38 Bolton Gardens, London SW5 0AQ. Phone +44 (0)20 7373 7083, Fax +44 (0)20 7835 2034, E-mail earlscourt@yha.org.uk (£18.50/night)]
IC Residences and hotel list

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Links

If you have any questions about the AISB'02 convention, please contact either one of the convention co-chairs, Jim Cunningham or Jeremy Pitt. If you have specific questions regarding the convention publications or publicity, please direct them to a member of the publications & publicity committee; Keith Clark, Julie McCann, Steve Muggleton, Sunny Bains, Cristina Romano or Lloyd Kamara. Questions concerning individual aspects of the constituent symposia should be directed to the appropriate symposium chair(s).

The Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour (AISB)
Getting to Imperial College
London Transport
Tourism & Transport Plans
London Tourism Guides

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