DAI-List Digest Monday, 13 April 1992 Issue Number 75 Topics: CFP for Special Issue of AI Journal Please send submissions to DAI-List@mcc.com. Send other requests, such as changes in your e-mail address, to DAI-List-Request@mcc.com. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Subject: AI Journal - CFP From: Phil Agre Date: Thu, 26 Mar 92 15:58:07 -0800 Stan Rosenschein and I are editing a special issue of the AI Journal on "Computational Theories of Interaction and Agency". We started from the observation that a wide variety of people in AI and cognitive science are using principled characterizations of interactions between agents and their environments to guide their theorizing and designing and modeling. Some connectionist projects I've heard about fit this description as well, and people engaged in such projects would be most welcome to contribute articles to our special issue. I've enclosed the call for papers. Please feel free to pass it along to anyone who might be interested. And I can send further details to anyone who's curious. Thanks very much. Phil Agre, UCSD Artificial Intelligence: An International Journal Special Issue on Computational Theories of Interaction and Agency Edited by Philip E. Agre (UC San Diego) and Stanley J. Rosenschein (Teleos Research) Call for Papers Recent computational research has greatly deepened our understanding of agents' interactions with their environments. The first round of research in this area developed `situated' and `reactive' architectures that interact with their environments in a flexible way. These `environments', however, were characterized in very general terms, and often purely negatively, as `uncertain', `unpredictable', and the like. In the newer round of research, psychologists and engineers are using sophisticated characterizations of agent-environment interactions to motivate explanatory theories and design rationales. This research opens up a wide variety of new issues for computational research. But more fundamentally, it also suggests a revised conception of computation itself as something that happens in an agent's involvements in its world, and not just in the abstractions of its thought. The purpose of this special issue of Artificial Intelligence is to draw together the remarkable variety of computational research that has recently been developing along these lines. These include: * Task-level robot sensing and action strategies, as well as projects that integrate classical robot dynamics with symbolic reasoning. * Automata-theoretic formalizations of agent-environment interactions. * Studies of "active vision" and related projects that approach perception within the broader context of situated activity. * Theories of the social conventions and dynamics that support activity. * Foundational analyses of situated computation. * Models of learning that detect regularities in the interactions between an agent and its environment. This list is only representative and could easily be extended to include further topics in robotics, agent architectures, artificial life, reactive planning, distributed AI, human-computer interaction, cognitive science, and other areas. What unifies these seemingly disparate research projects is their emerging awareness that the explanation and design of agents depends on principled characterizations of the interactions between those agents and their environments. We hope that this special issue of the AI Journal will clarify trends in this new research and take a first step towards a synthesis. The articles in the special issue will probably also be reprinted in a book to be published by MIT Press. The deadline for submitted articles is 1 September 1992. Send articles to: Philip E. Agre Department of Communication D-003 University of California, San Diego La Jolla, California 92093-0503 Queries about the special issue may be sent to the above address or to pagre@weber.ucsd.edu. Prospective contributors are encouraged to contact the editors well before the deadline.