DM: IAT'99 Workshop on Agents in E-Commerce

[IAT99 Conference]

[Apologies if you receive multiple copies of this email.]



    First Asia-Pacific Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology 
(IAT'99)
                      Hong Kong,  December 14-17, 1999
                                           
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             |                                                 | 
             |        WORKSHOP on  AGENTS IN E-COMMERCE        |
             |                                                 |
             |          Hong Kong,  December 14, 1999          |
             |                                                 |
             |       http://www.comp.hkbu.edu.hk/IAT99/        |
             |                                                 |
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             |                  Organized by                   | 
             |         IBM T.J. Watson Research Center         |
             |          Hong Kong Baptist University           |
             |                                                 |
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                       C A L L   F O R   P A P E R S
                     =================================

**************
INTRODUCTION
**************

The pervasive connectivity of the Internet and the powerful 
architecture of WWW are changing many market conventions and creating
a tremendous opportunity for conducting business on Internet. 
Intelligent agents will play a crucial role in electronic commerce 
where dynamic and heterogeneous interactions between tens of thousands 
of organizations and tens of millions of individuals are involved. So
far, we have already witnessed the involvement of e-commerce agents 
in traditional business settings. For example, shopping agents are 
now available at Excite and Yahoo. Furthermore, the involvements of 
agents in e-commerce are re-shaping the ways business is conducted in 
areas such as pricing, negotiation, auction, and brokerages, to
name a few. The automation brought by e-commerce agents dramatically 
reduces certain types of frictional costs and time incurred in 
trading.


The purpose of this workshop is to bring researchers and 
practitioners to identify and explore the issues, opportunities, and 
solutions for e-commerce agents. It will provide a forum for free 
exchange of ideas and will be featured by invited talks and refereed 
paper presentations.  Authors are invited to submit regular papers, 
reports on work in progress, and position papers.  Topics for 
submission include but are not limited to:

     - Architectures, environments and languages for e-commerce agents
     - Action planning for e-commerce agents
     - Adaptation and learning for e-commerce agents
     - Human and agent interaction in e-commerce
     - Interface agents in e-commerce
     - The dynamic and global behavior of e-commerce agents
     - Mobile e-commerce agents
     - Performance measurement of e-commerce agents
     - Rational information agents and electronic commerce
     - Virtual agent-based marketplaces
     - E-commerce agents in uncertain environment
     - The personalization and privacy issues for e-commerce agents
     - Real-time scheduling protocols for e-commerce agents
     - Web data mining for e-commerce agents
     - Integration of e-commerce agents with legacy systems
     - Auction and negotiation for e-commerce agents
     - Automated shopping and trading agents
     - Agent-oriented middleware services
     - Computational markets for e-commerce agent services
     - Cryptographic techniques for e-commerce agents
     - Languages for describing goods, services, and contracts for 
       e-commerce agents
     - Payment and exchange protocols
     - Visualization of e-commerce agent activities
     - Social implications for agent oriented e-commerce
     - Credit authentication, access control for e-commerce agents
     - Conceptual modeling and design of Ontologies for e-commerce 
agents
     - Agent-based brokering and trade-mediating services
     - Virtual trading institutions
     - Role of trust

***************
INVITED TALKS 
***************
                      Anthony Hall
                      Director, NORTEL NETWORKS
                      
                      Wlodek Zadrozny
                      Manager, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

************
ORGANIZERS
************

             Chair:   Yiming Ye, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, USA

Program Committee:   Takeshi Furuhashi, Nagoya University, Japan
                      Pinar Keskinocak, IBM T.J. Watson Research 
Center, USA
                      Alexandros Moukas, MIT Media Lab, USA
                      John Muller, IBM Santa Teresa Laboratory, USA
                      Eric Yu, University of Toronto, Canada


******************
PAPER SUBMISSION 
******************

Four (4) hardcopies of the completed paper should be submitted by
October 5, 1999 to:

                     Dr. Yiming Ye
                     IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
                     P.O. Box 704
                     Yorktown Heights, NY 10598
                     USA

Each submitted paper must include a title, an abstract, the name, 
mailing address, and email address of the author(s), and the 
main body. The length of submitted paper should NOT exceed ten 
(10) single-spaced, single-column pages including all figures, 
tables, and bibliography.

All manuscripts are expected to be formatted using the World 
Scientific's style files for proceedings. The style files can be 
found at:

www.wspc.com/others/style_files/proceedings/proceedings_style_files.html
-- use the style files appropriate to a page size of 8.5"x6".

Submitted papers will be reviewed on the basis of technical soundness,
relevance, originality, significance, and clarity.


**************
PUBLICATIONS 
**************

All accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings. A 
selected subset of the workshop papers will be extended/revised and
published as a book entitled "Agents in E-Commerce" by an 
International Publisher.


*****************
IMPORTANT DATES 
*****************

  Four (4) copies of full paper due by:               October 5, 1999
  Notification of paper acceptance:                  November 1, 1999
  Camera ready version of accepted papers due by:   November 15, 1999
  Workshop:                                         December 14, 1999


*********
CONTACT 
*********

Contact Dr. Yiming Ye at yiming@watson.ibm.com for suggestions and 
questions.