Third International Workshop on Self-Explaining Agents (SEA)

The workshop will be held in conjunction with the 44th Annual Conference of the German Computer Science Association (INFORMATIK 2014) in Stuttgart, Germany, 22th - 26th September, 2014.

Call for Paper

Self-Explaining systems have the ability to describe their functionality in a context depending and structured way. Self-explanatory descriptions thus help reasoners to better understand these systems. Becoming more self-explanatory requires not only work on the descriptions, the used languages and description paradigms but also on the reasoners, which utilize such descriptions and tools to create them. This places the research questions of this workshop in between the Service, the Agent and the Artificial Intelligence community.

Services and their descriptions have been well researched and researchers investigated languages like OWL and OWL-S. Such languages are used to describe functionality which enables reusability and adaptability of service oriented architectures with reasoners like FACT++ or Pellet. This is one reason why service descriptions become more self-explanatory these days.

Agents on the other hand use less self-explanatory description. The agent community focus on developing more sophisticated planning algorithms (e.g., Fast Downward Stone Soup) and heuristics to select the right functionality to become part of the plan.

Both paradigms cope with situations where complex systems are build upon descriptions of functionalities, which are more or less self-explanatory. Artificial Intelligent reasoners are used to analyze those descriptions and reason whether the functionality satisfies a given requests or preconditions and effects. Combining the strong suits of both research areas, bear opportunities for self-explaining agents.

This workshop analyzes state-of-the-art in regards to the use of self-explanatory descriptions used by service matcher, agent planner as well as how to extract heuristics by reasoning upon self-explanatory descriptions and semantic description language with the goal of building more loosely coupled, dynamic and adaptive software. Thus we welcome practical applications as well as theoretical foundations as contributions for this workshop.

Thus self-explanations rises the following questions:
- How to describe a functionality to become more self-explaining?
- How to improve AI reasoners to better understand self-explaining functionality descriptions?
- What are requirements to languages used to create more self-explaining descriptions of functionality?

Evaluation frameworks for such approaches are represented by research contests like the Semantic Service Selection Contest (http://www-ags.dfki.uni-sb.de/~klusch/s3/) or the International Planning Competition (http://helios.hud.ac.uk/scommv/IPC-14/).


Goals of the Workshop:

This workshop deepen (but is not limited to) the following research areas:
- Reasoning on Semantic Descriptions
- Languages for Semantic Descriptions
- AI Methods on Adaption and Semantic Reasoning
- IOPE/OWL-S and other Description Paradigms
- Semantic Service Matchmaking
- Service Planning
- AI Planning using semantic descriptions
- Reinforcement Learning on functionality descriptions
- Requirements of Self-Explaining Systems
- Self-Configuration through Self-Explanation

The workshop will consist of paper presentation of the accepted papers and a follow up discussion on the research questions of the workshop.

Goals of the Workshop:

This workshop deepen (but is not limited to) the following research areas:
– Reasoning on Semantic Descriptions
– Languages for Semantic Descriptions
– AI Methods on Adaption and Semantic Reasoning
– IOPE/OWL-S and other Description Paradigms
– Semantic Service Matchmaking
– Service Planning
– AI Planning using semantic descriptions
– Reinforcement Learning on functionality descriptions – Requirements of Self-Explaining Systems
– Self-Configuration through Self-Explanation

The workshop will consist of paper presentation of the accepted papers and a follow up discussion on the research questions of the workshop.

Important Dates:

– Paper submission: 15th May 2014
– Notification: 20th May 2014
– Camera-ready: 23th June 2014
– Workshop date: 22th - 26th September 2014

Submission and Proceedings:

All accepted papers will be scheduled for oral presentations and will be included in the proceedings of the INFORMATIK 2014. At least one author of each accepted paper is required to register and attend the conference to present the work.
The submitted paper must be formatted according to the guidelines of the Springer Lecture Notes in Informatics (LNI) template. The submitted papers must be no longer than 12 pages in length, including all figures, tables and ref- erences. Authors are requested to submit their papers electronically using the online conference management system4 in PDF format before the deadline (see important dates). Paper submission is electronic. To submit, please prepare a
Self-Explaining Agents (SEA)
PDF file of your paper, a short abstract in plain text, and a list of two to five keywords.
The submission processes will be managed by easychair.org. If you have used this system before, you can use the same username and password. If this is your first time using EasyChair, you will need to register for an account by clicking ”I have no EasyChair account” button. Upon completion of registration, you will get a notification email from the system and you are ready for submitting your paper. You can upload and re-upload the paper to the system by the submission due date.
All papers will be reviewed by at least 2 reviewers. Criteria for selection of papers include the relevance to topics, innovation, soundness, overall quality and readability.

Registration:

Please visit: http://www.informatik2014.de/registration.html for more information.
Please visit: http://www.informatik2014.de/ort.html for more information.

Organizing Commitee:

– Johannes Fähndrich: DAI-Labor, Technische Universität Berlin
– Sebastian Ahrndt: DAI-Labor, Technische Universität Berlin
– Benjamin Hirsch: EBTIC, Khalifa University

Program Commitee:

- David B. Leake, Indiana University
- Katia Sycara, Carnegie Mellon University
- Birgitta König-Ries, University of Jena
- Maria Ganzha, University of Gdańsk
- Maltese Vincenzo, University of Trento
- Stefan Schulten University Of Newcastle
- Nils Masuch, DAI-Labor
- Michael Kaisers, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica
- Marco Lützenberger, Technische Universität Berlin

Conference management system: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sea20140