International Workshop
on
Emergent Languages for Multi-Agent Systems

(ELMAS-2006)

Call For Papers

May 8, 2006

Future University Hakodate, Japan
(conjunction with AAMAS-2006)
http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/amag/elmas06/

Recent years have witnessed an explosion of interest in the problem of
language emergence and evolution, with most of the scientific light
shining on issues in development and change in human language. (See,
e.g., http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/amag/langev, the Language Evolution and
Computation information repository maintained at the University of
Illinois.) This general rise in interest is reflected specifically in
the growing number of papers related to this topic at many
conferences, including AAMAS. This growth in interest has been
accompanied, in MAS, by a growing sense that known approaches to
developing, using, and coordinating communication representations,
standards, conceptual ontologies, and collective semantics for
MAS---currently significant segments of the AAMAS conference---have
serious limitations of brittleness, rigidity, and lack of both
scalability and openness.

The science of emergent language and communication promises to shed
new light on these central MAS problems. Equally interesting,
techniques and models for emergent language, when addressed in MAS,
have many potential applications in other emerging and related fields
such as bioinformatics, genetic regulatory networks and cell
signaling, description/discovery regimes for web services, information
systems interoperability, and more. Such wide "external" relevance of
a core MAS issue will broaden the impact of MAS research, and will
bring new scientific problems and new researchers into the realm of
MAS, helping to grow the field and its importance.

As the number of researchers, the rate of publication, and the
recognition of relevance has increased, the need for community
building and knowledge sharing specifically in the area of emergent
languages for artificial, computational agents has also grown. The
time is ripe for a workshop on this topic, aiming to assemble
researchers who have recently been making important advances on
aspects of the problems, to have thorough discussions on their work,
to initiate new collaborations, and build new syntheses.

The ELMAS-2006 Workshop will bring together researchers working on
automated emergence and evolution of language for multi-agent systems
(MAS): how open MAS can autonomously create, converge, and
continuously adapt the concepts and languages they use for
representing and communicating critical information, such as that used
in planning, reasoning, coordination, and joint activity.

Papers are invited that address issues of emergent language in the
context of artificial, computational MAS, in any of the following
broad areas:

- Precursors for collective language emergence

- Collective emergence of concepts, symbols, and ontologies
representing both objects and events

- Language compositionality and structure

- Language convergence and coherence

- Utility of emergent language

- Interactions between language emergence and planning, learning, and
coordination

- Language emergence/evolution as a general model and practical
foundation for adaptive information systems

See the ELMAS-06 Workshop website at
http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/amag/elmas06/ for more suggestions and
details on technical topics for the workshop.

ELMAS06 Submission Instructions

The language of the workshop in English and all materials submitted
must be written in English. Three types of submssions are encouraged:

1. Full papers (up to 8 pages) presenting mature work.

2. Extended Abstracts (up to two pages) presenting either early-stage
or mature work.

3. Short Abstracts (up to one page) describing proposed work or
possible applications.

The field is new and developing, and serious conceptual papers are
welcome in any of these categories.

All material should be submitted in PDF, formatted according to the
ACM style guidelines found here:
http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html (Same as AAMAS-06
papers). Please identify which type of submission you are making.

Submissions should be sent via email to the workshop email address:
"elmas06@...". Papers will be reviewed by Organizers and
Program Committee Members. A Proceedings will be published and
available at the workshop, and a followup publication such as LNAI or
a special journal issue is being pursued.

At least one author of any accepted submission must register and
attend the workshop.

Organizers (Alphabetically):

Les Gasser, University of Illinois/Urbana-Champaign, US (gasser@...)
Piotr Gmytrasiewicz, University of Illinois/Chicago, US (piotr@...)
Claudia Goldman, University of Haifa, Israel (clag@...)
Takashi Hashimoto, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
(hash@...)
Samarth Swarup, University of Illinois/Urbana-Champaign, US (swarup@...)

Important Dates:

Deadline for all submissions: January 15, 2006
Notification: February 19, 2006
Submission of final camera-ready version: March 6, 2006
Workshop: May 8, 2006 in Hakodate, Japan