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6th International Workshop on
Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies (DALT 2008)

12 or 13 May 2008

Estoril, Portugal
(held in conjunction with AAMAS 2008)

URL: http://www.di.unito.it/~baldoni/DALT-2008/

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CALL FOR PAPERS
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The workshop on Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies
(DALT), in its sixth 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 en-
sure predictability, allow for the verification of properties,
and guarantee flexibility. Developing technologies that can sat-
isfy these requirements still poses an important and difficult
challenge. Here, declarative approaches have the potential of of-
fering solutions satisfying the needs for both specifying and de-
veloping multiagent systems. Moreover, they are gaining more and
more attention in important application areas such as the seman-
tic web, service-oriented computing, security, and electronic
contracting. For instance, some convergence points between the
areas of formal methods for dealing with web services and formal
methods for agents are emerging and gaining more and more atten-
tion.

DALT 2008 will be held as a satellite workshop of AAMAS 2008, the
7th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Mul-
tiagent Systems, in May 2008 in Estoril, Portugal. Following the
success of five previous editions, DALT will again aim at provid-
ing 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 re-
searchers working on declarative languages and technologies.

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

General themes:
* specification of agents and multiagent systems
* declarative approaches to engineering agent systems

Formal techniques:
* (constraint) logic programming approaches to agent systems
* distributed constraint satisfaction
* modal and epistemic logics for agent modelling
* verification of agents and multiagent systems
* formal semantics for agent programming languages and frameworks

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

Applications of declarative techniques to:
* agents and the semantic web
* service-oriented multiagent systems
* agent communication and coordination languages
* protocol specification and conformance checking
* description of contracts and negotiation policies
* security and trust in multiagent systems

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

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SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS
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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.

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WORKSHOP PROCEEDINGS
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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), and DALT 2007
(LNAI 4897) have been or will be published by Springer-Verlag in
the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series.

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IMPORTANT DATES
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* Paper submission deadline: 25 January 2008
* Notification of authors: 25 February 2008
* Final versions due: 5 March 2008
* Workshop: 12 or 13 May 2008

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PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
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* Thomas Agotnes (Bergen University College, NO)
* Marco Alberti (University of Ferrara, Italy)
* Natasha Alechina (University of Nottingham, UK)
* Grigoris Antoniou (University of Crete, Greece)
* Matteo Baldoni (University of Torino, Italy) -- co-chair
* Cristina Baroglio (University of Torino, Italy)
* Rafael Bordini (University of Durham, UK)
* Federico Chesani (University of Bologna, Italy)
* Amit Chopra (North Carolina State University, USA)
* Keith Clark (Imperial College London, UK)
* Francesco M. Donini (University of Tuscia, Italy)
* Benjamin Hirsch (Technical University Berlin, Germany)
* Shinichi Honinden (National Institute of Informatics, Japan)
* John Lloyd (Australian National University, Australia)
* Viviana Mascardi (University of Genova, Italy)
* Nicolas Maudet (Univ. Paris-Dauphine, France)
* John-Jules Meyer (University of Utrecht, Netherlands)
* Enrico Pontelli (New Mexico State University, USA)
* Birna van Riemsdijk (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen,
Germany) -- co-chair
* Chiaki Sakama (Wakayama University, Japan)
* Tran Cao Son (New Mexico State University, USA) -- co-chair
* Wamberto Vasconcelos (University of Aberdeen, UK)
* Mirko Viroli (University of Bologna, Italy)
* Marina De Vos (University of Bath, UK)
* Michael Winikoff (RMIT University, Australia) -- co-chair
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ORGANISING COMMITTEE
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* Matteo Baldoni (University of Torino, Italy)
* Tran Cao Son (New Mexico State University, USA)
* M. Birna van Riemsdijk (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet
Muenchen, Germany)
* Michael Winikoff (RMIT University, Australia)

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STEERING COMMITTEE
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* João Leite (New University of Lisbon, Portugal)
* Andrea Omicini (University of Bologna-Cesena, Italy)
* Leon Sterling (University of Melbourne, Australia)
* Paolo Torroni (University of Bologna, Italy)
* Pinar Yolum (Bogazici University, Turkey)

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