This bi-conference workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from the Information Systems and Agents communities who will be shaping the future of information systems engineering.

Important Dates  Topics of Interest   Workshop Format  Submission  Organising Committee

Important dates:

Workshop Description and motivations

Agent-Orientation is emerging as a powerful new paradigm in computing. Concepts and techniques from the agent paradigm could well be the foundations for the next generation of mainstream information systems, which we might term "active computing".

Information systems have become the backbone of all kinds of organizations today. In almost every sector —manufacturing, education, health care, government, and businesses— large and small information systems are relied upon for everyday work, communication, information gathering, and decision-making. Yet the inflexibilities in current technologies and methods have also resulted in poor performance, incompatibilities, and obstacles to change. As many organizations are reinventing themselves to meet the challenges of global competition and e-commerce, there is increasing pressure to develop and deploy new technologies that are flexible, robust, and responsive to rapid and unexpected change.

Agent concepts hold great promise for responding to the new realities of "active information systems". They offer higher level abstractions and mechanisms which address issues such as knowledge representation and reasoning, communication, coordination, cooperation among heterogeneous and autonomous parties, perception, commitments, goals, beliefs, intentions, etc. On the one hand, the concrete implementation of these concepts can lead to advanced functionalities, e.g., in inference-based query answering, transaction control, adaptive workflows, brokering and integration of disparate information sources, and automated communication processes. On the other hand, their rich representational capabilities allow more faithful and flexible treatments of complex organizational processes, leading to more effective requirements analysis and architectural and detailed design. The workshop will focus on how agent concepts and techniques will contribute to meeting information systems needs today and tomorrow.

The workshop encourages submissions on all topics related to AOIS, including (but not limited to) the following:

To foster greater communication and interaction between the Information Systems and Agents communities, we are organizing the workshop as a bi-conference event. It is intended to be a single "logical" event with two "physical" venues. It is hoped that this arrangement will encourage greater participation from, and more exchange between, both communities. The first part of the bi-conference event in 2004 will be held in June at the 16th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE 2004 – http://www.cs.rtu.lv/caise2004/).

The technical program will include invited talks by leading experts in the field, contributed papers and poster sessions. Authors of accepted papers who present their paper at one location will also be invited to present their papers as a poster in the other location.

To mitigate the geographic and temporal separation of the two parts of the workshop, electronic discussion will be strongly encouraged. Accepted papers will be posted on the workshop website. There will be designated discussants for each paper. Discussants' comments will also be posted on the website.

All papers submitted to the special track will be discussed by designated discussants and panels at the CAiSE2004 workshop. Authors for the special track are expected to present their papers at the CAiSE2004 workshop, and be discussants for other papers.

Post-Proceedings
The proceedings of the previous workshop edition s being published by Springer-Verlag
(P. Giorgini, B. Henderson-Sellers, and M. Winikoff (Eds.)  Agent-Oriented Information Systems - LNAI 3030), and there are similar plans for AOIS-2004.

In addition to full length, refereed papers, we are also seeking position papers. These can be submitted by email to Michael Winikoff (winikoff@cs.rmit.edu.au), only in pdf format, following the instructions given above for the regular submissions, except for the length.
A position paper should not exceed 2 pages. It must either:

1. discuss a specific problem, or
   
2. attack a specific position, or
   
3. articulate a specific technology forecast.

The author must indicate in the accompanying email message under which of these three categories the position paper falls. A problem discussion must begin with a section called Problem Statement and must conclude with a section called Research Questions. An attack must first describe the position to be attacked in neutral language before it presents reasons why it should be rejected. A technology forecast should consist of one or more forecast statements with additional explanation.

Please have a look at our list of research questions at http://www.aois.org/2004/CfPP.html

Organization commitee

Co-chairs:

Paolo Giorgini
Department of Information and communication Technology
University of Trento, Italy
http://www.dit.unitn.it/~pgiorgio

Michael Winikoff
School of Computer Science and Information Technology
RMIT University
http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/~winikoff

Steering Committee:

Yves Lesperance
Department of Computer Science
York University, Canada
http://www.cs.yorku.ca/~lesperan

Gerd Wagner
Department of Information & Technology,
Eindhonven University of Technology, The Netherlands
http://tmitwww.tm.tue.nl/staff/gwagner

Eric Yu
Faculty of information Studies,
University of Toronto, Canada
http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~eric


Program Committee: 
(to be confirmed)

• Brian Blake (Georgetown University Washington, DC, USA)
• Hans-Dieter Burkhard (Humboldt Univ., Germany)
• Luca Cernuzzi (U. Catolica Nuestra Senora de la Asuncian, Paraguay)
• Luiz Cysneiros (York University, Toronto)
• Frank Dignum (Univ. of Utrecht, Netherlands)
• Paolo Donzelli (University of Maryland, USA)
• Bernard Espinasse (Domaine Universitaire de Saint-Jerme, France)
• Behrouz  H. Far (University of Calgary, Canada)
• Iannes A. Ferguson (B2B Machines, USA)
• Timothy W. Finin  (UMBC, USA)
• Avigdor Gal (Technion - Israel Institute of Technology)
• Uma Garimella (Andra Pradesh Govt., MSIT, India)
• Aditya K. Ghose (Univ. of Wollongong, Australia)
• Elizabeth A. Kendall (Monash University, Australia)
• Manuel Kolp (Universite catholique de Louvain, Belgium)
• Gerhard Lakemeyer (RWTH Aachen, Germany)
• Yves Lesperance (York University, Canada)
• Fangzhen Lin (Hong Kong Univ. of Science and Technology, Hong Kong)
• Haralambos Mouratidis (University of East London, UK)
• Joerg P. Mueller (Siemens, Germany)
• Daniel E. O'Leary (Univ. of Southern California, USA)
• James Odell (James Odell Associates, USA)
• Omer F. Rana (Cardiff University, UK)
• Arnon Sturm (Israel Institute of Technology, Israel)
• Nick Szirbik (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands)
• Gerd Wagner (Univ. of Technology, NL)
• Carson Woo (Univ. British Columbia, Canada)
• Michael Wooldridge (University of Liverpool, UK)
• Bin Yu (North Carolina State University, USA)
• Eric Yu (Univ. of Toronto, Canada)
• Franco Zambonelli (University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy)

This web page at  http://www.AOIS.org  was last updated on 23-March-2004.