DM: Second Call for Papers+Participation: Workshop @ Agents99

[Omer F Rana]

                  Agent based High Performance Computing
           ``Problem Solving Applications and Practical Deployment''

                                     at
                          Autonomous Agents 1999
                          Seattle, Washington, USA
                              May 1 to 5, 1999
  
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Workshop Web Site:
http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk/User/O.F.Rana/agents99/ 

Autonomous Agents 1999 Web Site:
http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/agents99/


WORKSHOP OVERVIEW
=================

The workshop will cover the role of agent based technologies in
parallel/high performance computing. The current change in emphasis, 
from
`high performance parallel' computing to `high performance
parallel/distributed' computing on commodity computing platforms, has 
meant
new techniques becoming useful (and possible) in scientific 
computing. The
use of code mobility (using mobile agents), and the use of speech-acts
(through KQML, FIPA) has meant that agent technology has opened up new
research areas in scientific computing, and could potentially lead to 
new
applications areas, in resource management, commercial applications 
such as
data mining and data warehousing.

In order to make these problem solving agent applications possible we 
need
to understand how to deploy agents on a large scale. There are many 
aspects
of this problem, including mechanisms to support large numbers of 
agents,
and how a large number of agents function. Agent deployment must be
sufficiently robust and reliable, so that scientists and commercial
organisations will entrust agents with mission critical applications.

This workshop will be organised around two themes:

   * The application of agents to problem solving applications, such 
as
     scientific computing research or large scale business problems
   * Examination of the practical issues of deploying such problem 
solving
     systems.

This workshop is particularly aimed at fostering interaction between
researchers and practitioners in the high performance computing and 
agents
communities. It will allow investigators to demonstrate new work, or 
new
research results, which apply to these areas.

The workshop includes, but is not restricted to, the following general
areas:

Practical Deployment

   * Performance analysis/modeling of multi-agent systems
   * Performance enhancement methodologies for mobile and multi-agent
     systems
   * Agent communication over MPI/PVM
   * Agents in problem solving environments
   * Recommender agents for scientific problem solving
   * Computational steering using agents
   * Software updates and component distribution via mobile agents
   * Agent based load balancing
   * Agents based network characterisation for high performance 
computing
   * Agent based resource discovery
   * Agent based real time multimedia and embedded systems

The Practical Deployment Problems part of the workshop will examine 
issues
related to deploying large, robust, distributed multi-agent systems.
Discussion can include such areas as:

Communication

   * How do agent communication mechanisms scale to support many 
agents?
   * How does the agent's naming scheme scale to support a huge 
number of
     systems, services, and agents? How does the name-resolution 
mechanism
     scale?
   * What is the impact of communication processing on network load 
when
     many distant agents are communicating?
   * How reliable does communication have to be? What support is 
needed for
     network disconnection, due to Internet failures or due to 
purposeful
     disconnection of the host machine?
   * How do the negotiation protocols that lie at the heart of ACL 
(Agent
     Communications Languages) designs scale? What role can 
strategies such
     as caching and adaptive searching play in cutting down the time 
needed
     to perform common actions, such as converge on a common ontology.
   * An agent can perform actions in other locations in several ways. 
It can
     migrate there, and perform the action. It can communicate with 
an agent
     located in the appropriate locale, and ask that the other agent 
to
     perform the action. The agent can remotely invoke code in the 
other
     locale. Each of these has different costs associated with it, 
such as
     speed, or network traffic. There are other variables, such as 
agent
     size, required reliability and state, and access permissions. 
What are
     the kinds of research we need to know which model is best for 
various
     different usage scenarios?

Robustness and Persistence

   * How can we move or update agents or agent servers without 
starting and
     stopping them?
   * Given the possibility of thousands of agents running on a single
     server, what are the mechanisms we need to support agent 
persistence,
     such as reactivate-on-event and checkpointing? For large 
(possibly
     intelligent) agents, how can we efficiently handle the 
persistence of
     long-term data?

Applied Technology: Problem Solving Agents
------------------------------------------

Implementations in particular scientific computing domains will also 
be
considered, and submission of work-in-progress, or work completed, is
encouraged. Possible application domains include:

   * Molecular dynamics
   * BioInformatics and protein sequence processing
   * Fluid dynamics
   * Collaborative virtual reality for science and engineering
   * Climate modeling
   * Computational cosmology
   * Geological modeling

Related applications in finance:
--------------------------------

   * Financial forecasting over large data sets
   * Agent based scalable data warehousing
   * Electronic commerce
   * Enterprise wide intranet applications


PAPER SUBMISSION
================

Papers should report new work and should be printable on 8.5x11 paper 
using
12 point type (10 characters per inch for typewriters). Each page 
must have
no more than 38 lines and an average of 75 characters per line. (This
corresponds to LaTeX article style, 12 point.) Paper bodies should be 
no
longer than 5000 words, including references and figures (assumed to
represent the number of words they replace on the manuscript page).
Over-length papers will either be rejected or penalised in the review
process. All papers will be reviewed by the programme committee, and
selected on their originality, timeliness, relevance and clarity.

Electronic submission is preferred. Please email a PostScript or PDF 
copy of
your submission to Omer Rana (omer@cs.cf.ac.uk) before February 15, 
1999.
You may also send paper copies to Omer Rana, Department of Computer 
Science,
Cardiff University, PO Box916, Cardiff CF2 3XF, UK or Kate Stout
(Kate.Stout@sun.com), Sun Microsystems, 2 Elizabeth Drive, 
Chelmsford, MA
02124, USA.

Papers will be posted on the workshop web site prior to the workshop, 
to
allow attendees to read materials before the workshop.

Submission Deadline: February 15, 1999

PAPER PRESENTATION
==================

All presentations must be between 20 to 25 minutes. This will be 
followed by
a directed discussion of the presentation. The discussion will be 
lead by
some members of the program committee.

Towards the end of the workshop, the general issues generated from the
workshop will be examined.


WORKSHOP CHAIRS
===============

      Professor David Walker             Kate Stout
      Department of Computer Science,    Agent Research Team, Sun Labs
      Cardiff University,                Sun Microsystems,
      PO Box 916,                        2 Elizabeth Drive,
      Cardiff CF2 3XF, UK                Chelmsford, MA 02124, USA
      email: david@cs.cf.ac.uk           phone: 978-442-0948
                                         email: Kate.Stout@sun.com


WORKSHOP ORGANISERS
===================
                                     Omer Rana
  Professor David Kotz               Parallel and Scientific Computing
  Department of Computer Science,    Group,
  Dartmouth College,                 Department of Computer Science,
  Hanover,                           Cardiff University,
  New Hampshire 03755, USA           PO Box 916,
  email: dfk@cs.dartmouth.edu        Cardiff CF2 3XF, UK
                                     email: omer@cs.cf.ac.uk
                                     phone: +44 1222 875 542

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
===================

   David Walker                 Cardiff University, UK
   David Kotz                   Dartmouth College, USA
   Omer Rana                    Cardiff University, UK
   Kate Stout                   Sun Microsystems, Massachusetts, USA
   Philippe De Wilde            Imperial College, London, UK
   Mark Baker                   Portsmouth University, UK
   Siamek Hasanzadeh            Sun Microsystems, Palo Alto, USA
   Geofferey Fox                Syracuse University, USA
   Vladimir Getov               University of Westminster, UK
   Lyndon Lee                   BT Labs, UK
   Anupam Joshi                 University of Maryland, USA
   Jean-Louis Pazat             EuroTools and IRISA, France
   Serge Chaumette              LaBRI, University of Bordeaux, France
   Elias Houstis                Purdue University, USA
   Micheal Fisher               Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
   Giovanna Di Marzo Serugendo  Teleinformatics Group, 
                                University of Geneva, Switzerland     
          
   Jeremy Baxter                DERA, UK                   
   Paolo Petta                  Austrian Research Institute 
                                for Artificial Intelligence
   Erann Gat                    JPL, Caltech, USA
   Katia Sycara                 Carnegie Mellon, USA
   Danny Lange                  General Magic, USA
   Luciano Serafini             Centro per la Ricerca Scientifica 
                                e Tecnologica, Italy
   Jan Treur                    Informatics, Vrije University, 
Netherlands
   Anna Ciampolini              University of Bologna, Italy
   Kurt Rothermel               IPVR, Universitaet Stuttgart, Germany
   Naren Ramakrishnan           Department of Computer Science, 
                                Virginia Tech, USA
   Hyacinth Nwana               BT Labs, UK
   Piyush Mehrotra              ICASE, NASA Langley, USA
   Hillol Kargupta              Washington State University, USA
   Jeffrey Bradshaw             Intelligent Agent technology, Boeing, 
USA
   Bent Thomsen                 ICL, UK
   Denis Caromel                INRIA, Sophia Antipolis, France
   Maria Gini                   University of Minnesota, USA
   Giacomo Piccinelli           Hewlett Packard Labs, Bristol, UK
  
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