DAI-List Digest Monday, 27 April 1992 Issue Number 77 Topics: Talk on Belief Modeling of Agents CFP for 1993 International Workshop on Intelligent User Interfaces CFP for Workshop on DAI at GWAI-92 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. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ From: Robert Goldman Date: Tue, 21 Apr 92 21:20:59 CDT Subject: Talk on Belief Modeling Modeling the Belief State of Observed Agents Anthony S. Maida Center for Advanced Computer Studies University of Southwestern Louisiana Presented by the Computer Science Department, Tulane University Thursday, April 23rd This talk surveys the author's research on modeling the belief state of observed agents. An agent is any kind of knowledge-based system that interacts with the world. As background, we will discuss ontologies for belief representation focusing on the syntactic ontology. We will also review issues associated with the interactions of belief, equality, and quantification, highlighting unsolved problems. We shall call these beq problems. We will link beq problems to the author's research on causal connections. Causal connections are concerned with the relationship between the data structures or symbolic structures in an agent's knowledge base and the external objects these structures represent. We show that beq problems occur when an observed agent has existential misconceptions--that is, misconceptions about the existence of objects. Existential misconceptions can be detected, classified, and corrected by modeling the agent's causal connections. Because of the relationship between existential misconceptions and beq problems, the latter can be solved by systematically modeling the agent's causal connections. This talk will also discuss a hypothesis that explains how one agent may acquire the ability to model the belief state of a second agent. Specifically, we propose that an agent who can introspect and reason by analogy should be able to acquire the ability to model the belief state of other agents. The long-term significance of this is that it may not be necessary to design computer programs specifically to reason about the belief state of other agents. If they can introspect and reason by analogy, then they should be able to acquire this ability on their own. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ From: ii-Workshop93.chi@xerox.com Subject: 1993 International Workshop on Intelligent User Interfaces Date: Thu, 23 Apr 92 14:17:08 EDT CALL FOR PARTICIPATION 1993 INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON INTELLIGENT USER INTERFACES Sponsored by ACM SIGCHI and SIGART, in cooperation with AAAI and British HCI Group January 4-7, 1993 Buena Vista Palace Hotel, Walt Disney World Village, Orlando, Florida OBJECTIVES Advances in multidisciplinary research are creating a new generation of intelligent interfaces that use computers to facilitate the interaction of people with information, knowledge, tasks and situations. These interfaces rely on advanced computational techniques and cognitive science theories to build systems that enhance user performance. Such systems can help users to accomplish complex tasks by interpreting ambiguous input, phrasing multimodal output in ways sensitive to users' abilities and situations, and providing effective advice and assistance. This new event stems from a prior successful workshop in 1988 on Architectures for Intelligent Interfaces (sponsored by AAAI/ACM SIGCHI). The 1993 International Workshop will focus on a diversity of approaches to human-computer interaction, from those employing advanced computational techniques to those incorporating cognitive and user models to amplify human cognitive abilities. GOAL The goal of the workshop is to explore ways in which techniques for knowledge representation, inferencing, modeling, and presentation can provide the adaptability and reasoning capabilities required for more intelligent human-computer interaction. We aim to stimulate high quality discussion amongst participants from different countries and from disciplines such as cognitive science, human-computer interaction, computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. The workshop will bring together researchers and practitioners with an interest in methods, techniques, tools, and technology for constructing and evaluating intelligent systems. FORMAT The intimate size, single track, and comfortable surroundings make this workshop an ideal opportunity to exchange research results and implementation experiences. Attendance will be limited to 100 participants with presentations spread over three days. The format is split into two and a half days of presentations with one half day of working sessions, enhanced by three thought-provoking plenary speakers. SCOPE Interested participants should submit an original paper for review. Submissions addressing theory, system building, or evaluation issues are welcomed. Papers may address human-computer interaction or artificial intelligence/computational perspectives on (but not limited to) the following topics: -- Intelligent User Interfaces in a diverse range of application areas including tutoring and advisory systems; natural language processing; generation and understanding of nonverbal media; planning and explanation; information retrieval; computer-supported cooperative work, decision support and supervisory control. -- Interface-Building Tools and Techniques: knowledge-based and user modelling techniques for intelligent interface design, including plan and intent recognition, automatic presentation, explanation, user aiding (aids, critics, tutors), knowledge representation and modeling of users, systems, tasks. -- Intelligent front-ends to interactive, multimedia, hypermedia, and knowledge-based systems. -- Adaptive and customisable systems. -- Intelligent Agents and agent-based interaction. -- Requirements and architectures for intelligent, cooperative, and multimodal interfaces. -- Methods for analyzing, designing & evaluating users' needs & performance, intelligent interfaces & systems. SUBMISSIONS Papers will be accepted either for presentation as talks or posters. Authors are encouraged to submit work-in-progress to the poster session whilst longer papers should highlight both the general scientific contribution of the research and its practical significance. Six camera- ready copies of original papers written in English should be submitted, as long papers (presented as a talk: 8 pages) or as short papers (interactive poster presentation: 4 pages). Submitted papers must be unpublished, substantively different from papers currently under review and must not be submitted elsewhere before notification date. A book, including revised papers and workshop results, may be published following the meeting. Each paper should have a separate cover page containing the title of the paper; author(s) and affiliation(s), contact address of main author, phone, fax and e-mail address; an abstract (100-200 words) and a list of up to five key words or phrases linked to the submission topics describing its content. Detailed formatting instructions are available (for an example, see the ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, July 1991, pp. 93-96). SCHEDULE July 1, 1992 -- Intention to Participate due July 17, 1992 -- Camera-ready workshop paper due August 25, 1992 -- Student applications due September 25, 1992 -- Notification of acceptance November 1, 1992 -- Early registration deadline December 15, 1992 -- Late registration deadline January 4-7, 1993 -- Workshop You are requested to send notification of intention to participate and potential titles of submissions before July 1, 1992, to iiWorkshop93.chi@xerox.com. Interested participants should forward SIX camera-ready copies of their paper to Wayne Gray, Graduate School of Education, Room 1008, Fordham University, 113 West 60th Street, New York, NY 10023 U.S.A.; +1-212-636-6464. E-mail or fax submissions will not be considered. Papers must be received before July 17, 1992. Authors will be notified by September 25, 1992. For further information, contact the Conference Secretariat at International Workshop on Intelligent User Interfaces c/o Bill Hefley Software Engineering Institute Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890 U.S.A. Internet: ii-Workshop93.chi@xerox.com Fax: +1-412-268-5758 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Mon, 27 Apr 92 09:39:37 +0100 From: bur@b21.uucp (Birgit Burmeister) Subject: CFP for Workshop on "DAI" at GWAI-92 CALL FOR PAPERS Workshop "Distributed Artificial Intelligence" taking place during the German Workshops on Artificial Intelligence GWAI-92 31.8.-4.9.92 Bonn, Germany DAI is established as an important area within Artificial Intelligence. It deals with the theory, specification and implementation of systems of "agents," their interactions, and their coordination of activities for achieving common goals or for satisfying individual intentions. Although research in DAI so far yielded a variety of empirical and formal concepts, it is still in its infancy. Terms like "agent" and "cooperation" are at the stage to become specified. Another trend is to arrive at standards, for instance for agent-architectures and cooperation primitives. Workers in the field also realize the lack of evaluation criteria and systematic engineering methods. Additionally the very first genuine applications are thought of especially in network management, manufacturing control and traffic management. It also is felt that DAI is not only an area for computer scientists but that it should be open to other disciplines like social sciences, management sciences, organizational theories. By this more emphasis can be put on treating "agents in a society" instead of "nodes in a net" as it is the case with conventional distributed processing. The workshop is meant to cover these trends. It is organized as a half day event with an introduction and motivation for the workshop, talks, discussions, and a panel discussion. We think of short talks (20min incl. discussion) for progress reports about current research and long talks (50min incl. discussion) about completed work. We specially invite contributions which either stress the interdisciplinary character of DAI or which describe applications to real life problems. Papers are to be submitted by July, 1st, 1992. Notification of acceptance will occur by August, 1st., 1992. Although, in principle, participation to the workshop is limited to those whose contributions were accepted, we would like to make it open to other people interested in the field. The number of participants is however limited to the size of the room available. At present it is not settled, whether the workshop contributions will be published together with the talks in the main track of the GWAI-92 and with those of other workshops. In any case, participants will receive handouts of the talks given at the workshop. Submission of papers, applications for participation as well as further communications should be directed to Birgit Burmeister or Kurt Sundermeyer at Daimler-Benz AG Systems Engineering Research Alt-Moabit 91a D-1000 Berlin 21 Birgit Burmeister (+30) 39982-202 bur@b21.uucp Dr. Kurt Sundermeyer (+30) 39982-236 sun@b21.uucp fax: (+30) 39982-107