Call for papers: Emerging Artificial Societies

14 -15 April 2005
AISB Symposium
University of Hertfordshire, England

Human societies are self-organising and probably emerged in parallel
with the evolution of language and development of cultural artefacts.
This symposium will take as its topics:
â–ª current research about the processes and preconditions for
the
emergence of human societies;
â–ª experiments on artificial (i.e. computational) societies
designed
to shed light on generic processes of the emergence of societies;
â–ª the application of anthropological and sociological
knowledge to
the design of emergent societies of artificial agents
â–ª research on self-organising societies of embedded
computational
agents
â–ª architectures for computational agents capable of inhabiting
such
societies

By 'society', we mean here a collection of interacting (human or
computational) agents that share an external symbolic system (e.g. a
'language' and cultural symbols) and which possesses social structure
(e.g. normatively enforced and shared rules of behaviour). Thus,
contributions which consider for example the evolution of language; the
development and imposition of norms; the emergence of patterned
activity and their recognition by agents; and the design of socially
responsive agents will be welcomed.

The symposium will last two days (14 - 15 April) and will immediately
follow a related symposium on 'Socially inspired computing -
engineering with social metaphors', as parts of a convention on Social
Intelligence and Interaction in Animals, Robots and Agents organised by
the AISB (the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the
Simulation of Behaviour) at the University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield.
The AISB convention as a whole will include 15 individual symposia of
different lengths and topics at the same site. All meals and facilities
are shared by the convention in common. More details about the
convention can be found at their website,
http://aisb2005.feis.herts.ac.uk/ . All symposium participants will
have to register for the convention.

Programme Committee
â–ª Gusz Eiben (Free University Amsterdam)
â–ª Nigel Gilbert (University of Surrey)
â–ª Andras Lorincz (Budapest)
â–ª Ben Paechter (Napier University, Edinburgh)
â–ª Paul Vogt (Tilburg University, University of Edinburgh)

Contributing

Papers of about 6 - 8 pages that respond to the topics listed above are
invited. Papers should include an abstract of not more than 200 words
and should be submitted as an anonymous PDF file (i.e. with name and
affiliation details omitted) by email (including your name and contact
details) to the Symposium organiser, Nigel Gilbert, at
n.gilbert@..., by 31 October 2004. Submissions will be
acknowledged within 7 days.

Expressions of interest in attending the symposium (but without giving
a paper) are also invited, in the form of an abstract of not more than
200 words indicting your background and interest in the subject of the
symposium. Send these as plain text emails to the organiser.

Impotant dates

31 October 2004 Submissions due
22 November 2004 Notification of acceptance
17 December 2004 Camera ready copies due
14 January 2005 Early registration deadline
12-15 April 2005 AISB 2005 convention

It is likely that a selection of the papers will be published as a
special section in the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social
Simulation, http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/JASSS.html


Symposium URL:
http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/newties/emerging-art-soc.html



_______________________________________________________________________
Professor Nigel Gilbert, Editor, Journal of Artificial Societies and
Social Simulation, <http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/JASSS/>
Centre for Research on Social Simulation (CRESS)
Department of Sociology, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK.
Tel:+44 1483 689173 N.Gilbert@...
<http://cress.soc.surrey.ac.uk/>