Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies (DALT 2012)

            10th International Workshop on
             Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies
                             (DALT 2012)

                          4 or 5 June 2012

                           Valencia, Spain
                (held in conjunction with AAMAS 2012)

         URL: http://www.di.unito.it/~baldoni/DALT-2012/

----------------------------------------------------------------------
                           CALL FOR PAPERS
----------------------------------------------------------------------

The workshop  on Declarative Agent Languages  and Technologies (DALT),
in  its tenth  edition this  year,  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  multiagent 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   multiagent  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.

DALT 2012 will be held as a satellite workshop of AAMAS 2012, the 11th
International  Joint Conference  on Autonomous  Agents  and Multiagent
Systems,  in June  2011 in Valencia, Spain.   Following the  success of
nine previous editions, DALT will again aim at providing a discussion
forum to  both (i) support  the transfer of declarative  paradigms and
techniques  to   the  broader  community  of   agent  researchers  and
practitioners, and (ii) to bring  the issue of designing complex agent
systems  to  the  attention  of  researchers  working  on  declarative
languages and technologies.

DALT 2012 will have as a special interest topics those future trends of
the web, where declarative languages and technologies for multiagents
systems will play an effective role: in particular, social computing
(models of social interactions, trust, commitments, and contracts;
social  environments based on declarative technologies) and its related
semantic issues (explicit representation of knowledge and mechanisms for
allowing societies of agents to reason on that).

----------------------------------------------------------------------
                          TOPICS OF INTEREST
----------------------------------------------------------------------

DALT topics of interest include, but are not limited to:


DALT 2012 special topic: declarative approaches for agent-based social
computing
* models of social interactions among agents
* models of buiness interactions among agents
* models of trust, commitments, and reputation for agents
* declarative description of contracts and negotiation policies
* social environments based on declarative technologies
* Semantic Web-aware declarative agents

General themes:
* specification of agents and multi-agent systems
* declarative approaches to engineering agent-based systems

Formal techniques:
* (constraint) logic programming approaches to agent systems
* distributed constraint satisfaction
* modal and epistemic logics for agent modeling
* game theory and mechanism design for multi-agent systems
* semantics of agent communication
* model checking agents and multi-agent systems
* agent communication and coordination languages
* protocol specification, verification, and reasoning

Declarative models:
* declarative models of agent beliefs, goals and capabilities
* declarative models of bounded rationality
* declarative approaches for agent-based grid computing
* declarative paradigms for the combination of heterogeneous agents
* declarative approaches to organizations and electronic institutions
* agent-inspired declarative approaches to Web services and
service-oriented computing

Applications of declarative techniques to:
* multi-agent systems for service-oriented computing
* agent-based grid computing
* security and trust in multi-agent systems
* e-health, e-commerce, e-learning, sociotechnical systems, social
networks, virtual organizations.

Evaluation of declarative approaches:
* experimental analysis of declarative agent technologies
* industrial experiences with declarative agent technologies

----------------------------------------------------------------------
                       SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS
----------------------------------------------------------------------

We  welcome and  encourage  the submission  of high-quality,  original
papers, which  are not being submitted  simultaneously for publication
elsewhere.  Papers  should be written in  English, formatted according
to the Springer LNCS style,  and not exceed 16 pages. Paper submission
is electronic via the conference website.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
                         WORKSHOP PROCEEDINGS
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Printed copies of  the proceedings will be available  at the workshop.
Assuming a sufficient number of high-quality submissions, we are again
going to  consider the publication of formal  post-proceedings with an
international  publisher.   The post-proceedings  of  DALT 2003  (LNAI
2990), DALT 2004  (LNAI 3476), DALT 2005 (LNAI  3904), DALT 2006 (LNAI
4327),  DALT 2007 (LNAI  4897), DALT  2008 (LNAI  5397),  DALT 2009
(LNAI  5948), and DALT 2010 (LNAI 6619) have  been published  by
Springer-Verlag  in the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
                           IMPORTANT DATES
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Paper submission deadline:                    28 February 2012
Notification of acceptance/rejection:         27 March 2012
Camera-ready copies due:                      10 April 2012
Workshop Date:                                4 or 5 June     2012

----------------------------------------------------------------------
                         WORKSHOP ORGANISERS
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Matteo Baldoni (University of Torino, Italy)
Louise Dennis (University of Liverpool, UK)
Viviana Mascardi (University of Genova, Italy)
Wamberto Vasconcelos (University of Aberdeen, UK)
_______________________________________________

Programming Multi-Agent Systems (ProMAS'12)

Tenth International Workshop on Programming Multi-Agent Systems (ProMAS'12)


ProMAS'12 is a satellite workshop at AAMAS 2012 Valencia, Spain, 4-5 June 2012


Over the last decade, the ProMAS workshop series has provided a venue
for state-of-the-art research in programming languages and tools for
the development of multi-agent systems. With the increasing commercial
application of multi-agent systems, the need for development tools and
platforms capable of supporting "professional" or "industrial
strength" MAS development has only increased. Such languages and tools
must be developed in a way that is principled and and at the same time
practical, and ProMAS aims to address both theoretical and practical
issues related to developing and deploying multi-agent systems.

Now in its 10th edition, ProMAS has proved to be an invaluable venue
for bringing together leading researchers from both academia and
industry to discuss key issues in the design of programming languages
and tools for multi-agent systems. In particular, the workshop
promotes the discussion and exchange of techniques, concepts,
requirements and principles central to multi-agent programming
technology. These include the theory and application of agent
programming languages, how to effectively implement a multi-agent
system specification or design, the verification and analysis of agent
systems, as well as the implementation of social structures in
agent-based systems (e.g., organisations, coordination, and
communication in multi-agent systems).

We encourage the submission of papers describing proposals for
programming languages and tools that provide specific programming
constructs to facilitate the implementation of multi-agent system
concepts (e.g., mental attitudes, distribution, and social
interaction). We also welcome submissions describing significant
multi-agent applications, as well as agent programming tools that
allow the integration of agents with legacy systems. We are
particularly interested in approaches or applications that show
clearly the added-value of multi-agent programming, and explain why
and how this technology should be adopted by designers and programmers
both in academia and industry.

TOPICS OF INTEREST

Specific topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

- Programming languages, models and abstractions for MAS
- Extensions of traditional languages for multi-agent programming
- Programming mobile agents
- Semantics for multi-agent programming languages
- Computational complexity of MAS
- Algorithms, techniques, or protocols relevant to multi-agent
programming (e.g., coordination, cooperation, negotiation)
- Agent communication issues in multi-agent programming
- Programming social, organizational, and normative aspects of MAS
- Interoperability and standards for MAS
- Safety and security for mobile MAS deployment
- Fault tolerance and load balancing for mobile MAS
- Generic tools and infrastructures for multi-agent programming
- High-level executable multi-agent specification languages
- Formal methods and tools for specification and verification of MAS
- Agent/environment/interaction/organization development tools and platforms
- Benchmarks and testbeds for comparing multi-agent programming
languages and tools
- Applications of multi-agent programming languages including: legacy
systems, pervasive applications, multi-robot systems, autonomous
software (e.g., UAVs), (Semantic) Web and Grid-based applications, and
deployed (industrial-strength) multi-agent systems
- Integration of multi-agent and mainstream technologies

IMPORTANT DATES

Paper submission deadline:                    28  February 2012
Notification of acceptance/rejection:         27  March    2012
Camera-ready copies due:                      10  April    2012
Workshop Date:                                4-5 June     2012

SUBMISSION DETAILS

Authors should submit their papers via the easychair conference
management system:


Papers should be formatted using Springer LNCS style

and should be less than 16 pages in length.

PUBLICATION

Accepted papers will be appear in informal proceedings to distributed
among participants during the workshop. As was the case with previous
editions of the ProMAS workshop, we are planning to publish extended
versions of selected and invited papers as a volume of the Lecture
Notes in Computer Science series by Springer-Verlag.


ORGANISING COMMITTEE

- Mehdi Dastani (Utrecht University, Netherlands)
- Brian Logan (University of Nottingham, UK)
- Jomi Hubner (Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil)


STEERING COMMITTEE

- Rafael H. Bordini (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil)
- Mehdi Dastani (Utrecht University, Netherlands)
- Juergen Dix (Clausthal University of Technology, Germany)
- Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni (University of Paris VI, France)