Subject: Call for Papers: Workshop @ Agents99

From: [email-masked] (Omer F Rana)
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 1999 10:29:04 +0000 (GMT)

Hi,

Apologies if you receive multiple copies. 

Agent based computing has gained a huge following in 'information retrieval'
over the last few years. However, the role of 'Mobile Agents' and 'Information
Gathering Agents' within HPC applications is still open. This workshop is aimed
at bringing together practisioners and visionaries in the HPC and Agents community.

Work-in-progress or work-completed is welcome. Please submit your papers to me 
or Kate Stout ([email-masked]). As you will see, visionaries of HPJava are
also part of the programme committee -- is this one of the next possible application
area for HPJava?

I would be glad to answer any queries.

regards
Omer

	======================================================================
                  Agent based High Performance Computing
           ``Problem Solving Applications and Practical Deployment''

                                     at
                          Autonomous Agents 1999
                          Seattle, Washington, USA
                              May 1 to 5, 1999
  ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Workshop Web Site:
http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk/User/O.F.Rana/agents99/ 

Autonomous Agents 1999 Web Site:
http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/agents99/

WORKSHOP OVERVIEW
=================

The workshop will cover the role of agent based technologies in
parallel/high performance computing. The current change in emphasis, from
`high performance parallel' computing to `high performance
parallel/distributed' computing on commodity computing platforms, has meant
new techniques becoming useful (and possible) in scientific computing. The
use of code mobility (using mobile agents), and the use of speech-acts
(through KQML, FIPA) has meant that agent technology has opened up new
research areas in scientific computing, and could potentially lead to new
applications areas, in resource management, commercial applications such as
data mining and data warehousing.

In order to make these problem solving agent applications possible we need
to understand how to deploy agents on a large scale. There are many aspects
of this problem, including mechanisms to support large numbers of agents,
and how a large number of agents function. Agent deployment must be
sufficiently robust and reliable, so that scientists and commercial
organisations will entrust agents with mission critical applications.

This workshop will be organised around two themes:

   * The application of agents to problem solving applications, such as
     scientific computing research or large scale business problems
   * Examination of the practical issues of deploying such problem solving
     systems.

This workshop is particularly aimed at fostering interaction between
researchers and practitioners in the high performance computing and agents
communities. It will allow investigators to demonstrate new work, or new
research results, which apply to these areas.

The workshop includes, but is not restricted to, the following general
areas:

Practical Deployment

   * Performance analysis/modeling of multi-agent systems
   * Performance enhancement methodologies for mobile and multi-agent
     systems
   * Agent communication over MPI/PVM
   * Agents in problem solving environments
   * Recommender agents for scientific problem solving
   * Computational steering using agents
   * Software updates and component distribution via mobile agents
   * Agent based load balancing
   * Agents based network characterisation for high performance computing
   * Agent based resource discovery
   * Agent based real time multimedia and embedded systems

The Practical Deployment Problems part of the workshop will examine issues
related to deploying large, robust, distributed multi-agent systems.
Discussion can include such areas as:

Communication

   * How do agent communication mechanisms scale to support many agents?
   * How does the agent's naming scheme scale to support a huge number of
     systems, services, and agents? How does the name-resolution mechanism
     scale?
   * What is the impact of communication processing on network load when
     many distant agents are communicating?
   * How reliable does communication have to be? What support is needed for
     network disconnection, due to Internet failures or due to purposeful
     disconnection of the host machine?
   * How do the negotiation protocols that lie at the heart of ACL (Agent
     Communications Languages) designs scale? What role can strategies such
     as caching and adaptive searching play in cutting down the time needed
     to perform common actions, such as converge on a common ontology.
   * An agent can perform actions in other locations in several ways. It can
     migrate there, and perform the action. It can communicate with an agent
     located in the appropriate locale, and ask that the other agent to
     perform the action. The agent can remotely invoke code in the other
     locale. Each of these has different costs associated with it, such as
     speed, or network traffic. There are other variables, such as agent
     size, required reliability and state, and access permissions. What are
     the kinds of research we need to know which model is best for various
     different usage scenarios?

Robustness and Persistence

   * How can we move or update agents or agent servers without starting and
     stopping them?
   * Given the possibility of thousands of agents running on a single
     server, what are the mechanisms we need to support agent persistence,
     such as reactivate-on-event and checkpointing? For large (possibly
     intelligent) agents, how can we efficiently handle the persistence of
     long-term data?

Applied Technology: Problem Solving Agents
------------------------------------------

Implementations in particular scientific computing domains will also be
considered, and submission of work-in-progress, or work completed, is
encouraged. Possible application domains include:

   * Molecular dynamics
   * BioInformatics and protein sequence processing
   * Fluid dynamics
   * Collaborative virtual reality for science and engineering
   * Climate modeling
   * Computational cosmology
   * Geological modeling

Related applications in finance:
--------------------------------

   * Financial forecasting over large data sets
   * Agent based scalable data warehousing
   * Electronic commerce
   * Enterprise wide intranet applications

PAPER SUBMISSION
================

Papers should report new work and should be printable on 8.5x11 paper using
12 point type (10 characters per inch for typewriters). Each page must have
no more than 38 lines and an average of 75 characters per line. (This
corresponds to LaTeX article style, 12 point.) Paper bodies should be no
longer than 5000 words, including references and figures (assumed to
represent the number of words they replace on the manuscript page).
Over-length papers will either be rejected or penalised in the review
process. All papers will be reviewed by the programme committee, and
selected on their originality, timeliness, relevance and clarity.

Electronic submission is preferred. Please email a PostScript or PDF copy of
your submission to Omer Rana ([email-masked]) before February 15, 1999.
You may also send paper copies to Omer Rana, Department of Computer Science,
Cardiff University, PO Box916, Cardiff CF2 3XF, UK or Kate Stout
([email-masked]), Sun Microsystems, 2 Elizabeth Drive, Chelmsford, MA
02124, USA.

Papers will be posted on the workshop web site prior to the workshop, to
allow attendees to read materials before the workshop.

Submission Deadline: February 15, 1999

PAPER PRESENTATION
==================

All presentations must be between 20 to 25 minutes. This will be followed by
a directed discussion of the presentation. The discussion will be lead by
some members of the program committee.

Towards the end of the workshop, the general issues generated from the
workshop will be examined.

WORKSHOP CHAIRS
===============

      Professor David Walker             Kate Stout
      Department of Computer Science,    Agent Research Team, Sun Labs
      Cardiff University,                Sun Microsystems,
      PO Box 916,                        2 Elizabeth Drive,
      Cardiff CF2 3XF, UK                Chelmsford, MA 02124, USA
      email: [email-masked]           phone: 978-442-0948
                                         email: [email-masked]

WORKSHOP ORGANISERS
===================
                                     Omer Rana
  Professor David Kotz               Parallel and Scientific Computing
  Department of Computer Science,    Group,
  Dartmouth College,                 Department of Computer Science,
  Hanover,                           Cardiff University,
  New Hampshire 03755, USA           PO Box 916,
  email: [email-masked]        Cardiff CF2 3XF, UK
                                     email: [email-masked]
                                     phone: +44 1222 875 542

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
===================

   David Walker          	Cardiff University, UK
   David Kotz            	Dartmouth College, USA
   Omer Rana             	Cardiff University, UK
   Kate Stout            	Sun Microsystems, Massachusetts, USA
   Philippe De Wilde     	Imperial College, London, UK
   Mark Baker            	Portsmouth University, UK
   Siamek Hasanzadeh     	Sun Microsystems, Palo Alto, USA
   Geofferey Fox         	Syracuse University, USA
   Vladimir Getov        	University of Westminster, UK
   Lyndon Lee            	BT Labs, UK
   Anupam Joshi          	University of Maryland, USA
   Jean-Louis Pazat      	EuroTools and IRISA, France
   Serge Chaumette       	LaBRI, University of Bordeaux, France
   Elias Houstis         	Purdue University, USA
   Micheal Fisher        	Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
   Giovanna Di Marzo Serugendo 	Teleinformatics Group, 
				University of Geneva, Switzerland               
   Jeremy Baxter         	DERA, UK                   
   Paolo Petta           	Austrian Research Institute 
                         	for Artificial Intelligence
   Erann Gat             	JPL, Caltech, USA
   Katia Sycara          	Carnegie Mellon, USA
   Danny Lange           	General Magic, USA
   Luciano Serafini      	Centro per la Ricerca Scientifica 
				e Tecnologica, Italy
   Jan Treur             	Informatics, Vrije University, Netherlands
   Anna Ciampolini       	University of Bologna, Italy
   Kurt Rothermel        	IPVR, Universitaet Stuttgart, Germany
   Naren Ramakrishnan    	Department of Computer Science, 
			 	Virginia Tech, USA
   Hyacinth Nwana        	BT Labs, UK
   Piyush Mehrotra       	ICASE, NASA Langley, USA
   Hillol Kargupta       	Washington State University, USA
   Jeffrey Bradshaw      	Intelligent Agent technology, Boeing, USA
   Bent Thomsen          	ICL, UK
   Denis Caromel         	INRIA, Sophia Antipolis, France
   Maria Gini            	University of Minnesota, USA
  ------------------------------------------------------------------------