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September 2003 The summer has flown because we have have been busily involved in the Conference season. The early starters were in April. A paper by Gulden Uchyigit and Keith Clark on A Personalised Multi-Modal Electronic Program Guide was presented at European Conference on Interactive Television at Brighton in April, another on A Multi-Agent Architecture for Dynamic Collaborative Filtering presented at the 5th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems at Angers, France. They have a third on Dynamic Collaborative Filtering for the World Wide Web in the WWW/Internet IADIS International Conference in Algarve, in November, so we are now expecting a thesis from Gulden. In June, Theodore Hong defended a thesis on Grammatical Inference for Information Extraction and Visualization on the Web. It was word perfect, so congratulations. Some work by Alexander Yip and Jim Cunningham on Ontological Issues in Agent Ownership was presented at LEA2003: The Law and Electronic Agents Workshop, co-hosted with ICAIL03, the main AI and Law Conference in in Edinburgh. Also in June, at UNIF03, the 17th International Workshop on Unification, Adrian Williams presented a joint paper with Jim Cunningham on A Prefix Notation and Unification Algorithm for Encoding Modal logics. In July, Keith Clark, Jim Cunningham, and Shamima Paurobally attended AAMAS03, The Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems Conference in Melbourne, Australia. This has has become a large event, with 466 papers submitted and four parallel sessions over three days, preceded by 2 days of 21 Workshops and 7 Tutorials. Lest this be thought just a holiday, July is winter in Melbourne. It was like crisp English autumn weather during the event, but we still had an Aussie winter barbecue on the concluding Saturday. For those who stayed around the following week there was wind, rain and snow. Software agents are now pervasive, giving a perspective on many familiar branches of Artificial Intelligence, Software Engineering and Electronic Commerce. Because of the size of the conference, our view was mainly focused on areas where we had papers. We had two conference papers and three workshop papers so were quite busy. Titles of these papers give a flavour of some group work: Ensuring Consistency in the Joint Beliefs of Interacting Agents is joint work arising from Shamima Paurobally's recent PhD thesis, Go! for MultiThreaded Deliberative Agents is a short paper on application of Keith Clark and Frank McCabe's new programming language. A full paper of the same title was also presented in the Workshop on Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies (DALT) Two other joint papers arose from Shamima's thesis: Developing Agent Interaction Protocols using Graphical and Logical Methodologies, was presented at the workshop on programming Multi-agent Systems. This work is to be developed further by Hywel Dunn-Davies. Achieving Common Interaction Protocols in Open agent Environments, was a contribution to the Agentcities Challenges workshop. Agentcities.rtd is a project that we have contributed to over the past two years, and by some measures the largest Multi-Agent System in existence - the Department host the London April Agent Platform - see http://www-agentcities.doc.ic.ac.uk/. Johnny Knottenbelt, Gulden Uchyigit, and Alexander Yip have made significant contributions to our demonstrator for this project. Dorian Gaertner, and Jaspreet Shaheed, two MEng students on industrial placement at the Fujitsu Laboratories of America at Sunnyvale, California have contributed as part of FLA. In August, Jeremy Forth had a short paper on on Indirect and Conditional Sensing in the Event Calculus at IJCAI-03, the International Joint Conference on artificial Intelligence. Simon Rizzello attended the Advanced Courses in AI RobCup Camp in Bremen, because of his work on Co-ordination of Communication in Multi-Threaded Robots. In September Luc Schneider and Jim Cunningham presented a paper on Ontological Foundations of Natural Language Communication in Multi-Agent Systems in an invited session on Ontology and Multi-agent systems Design at KES2003, the Knowledge Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems Conference held in Oxford. Last but not least, Jim Cunningham and Lloyd Kamara have a paper on Comprehension and Rational Design of a Multi-Threaded Agent in ESAW03, A workshop on Engineering Societies in the Agent World to be held at Imperial College later this month. Jeremy Pitt is the local organiser. Note that AAMAS04 will be held in New York, 19th July 2004. Deadline for abstracts/proposals is 16th January. |