1st Workshop on Actors, Agents, Assistants, Avatars (4A'20)

Sofia, Bulgaria, 6 - 9 September, 2020

Committee

The field of, broadly understood, agent technology is undergoing rapid changes. What was once envisioned, primarily, in research papers becomes reality. Over last few years we observe proliferation of personal assistants and avatars (sometimes considered under a joint umbrella of ChatBots). For instance, consider Siri, Cortana, Amazon Echo, or Google Assistant (to name the most popular). They can help in different activities, but a lot of work remains before they reach full potential. Furthermore, actors start to materialize in real-world applications – as a promising approach to implement large-scale distributed systems. It is also worthy noticing that avatars, humans and smart things can cooperate as a community that instantiates, contributes to and exploits various aspects of collective intelligence. Here, observe that agents can play very relevant role in the context of implementing, for example, intelligence of smart devices, which interact with each other and with humans, by common communication channels and, possibly even, social networks. At the same time, software tools that can be used to realize 4A systems have reached maturity and are surrounded by active user communities.

Topics

To recognize the current trends we have decided to develop a new workshop that will cover all aspects concerning the 4A’s. Therefore, we welcome submissions of original papers concerning the following topics (the list is not exhaustive and deliberately provided on a meta-level):

  • Actors, as an approach to design and (efficiently) implement distributed systems
  • Current perspectives on software agents and multi-agent systems
  • Design and implementation of assistants
  • ChatBot design, implementation and use • Avatars for today and tomorrow
  • Theoretical foundations of 4A-based systems • 4A-based simulations (with application to real-world use cases, in particular)
  •  Case studies, applications and experiences with 4A’s (in real-world, in particular)

Demo Session

A special session devoted to demonstration of working prototypes is planned. Special recognition for the best demo will be given.

Paper submission

  • Authors should submit draft papers (as Postscript, PDF or MSWord file).
  • The total length of a paper should not exceed 10 pages IEEE style (including tables, figures and references). IEEE style templates are available here.
  • Papers will be refereed and accepted on the basis of their scientific merit and relevance to the workshop.
  • Preprints containing accepted papers will be published on a USB memory stick provided to the FedCSIS participants.
  • Only papers presented at the conference will be published in Conference Proceedings and submitted for inclusion in the IEEE Xplore® database.
  • Conference proceedings will be published in a volume with ISBN, ISSN and DOI numbers and posted at the conference WWW site.
  • Conference proceedings will be submitted for indexation according to information here.
  • Extended versions of selected papers presented during the conference will be invited to the Special Issue of:
    • Scalable Computing; Practice and Experience
    • Complex Adaptive Systems Modeling (publication fee waiver for the papers that are going to be selected is expected)
    • Multiagent and Grid Systems
  • Organizers reserve right to move accepted papers between FedCSIS events.

Important dates

Submission of technical session proposals: November 12, 2019
Paper submission (sharp / no extension): July 3, 2020
Position paper submission: July 17, 2020
Author notification: August 1, 2020
Final paper submission, registration: August 14, 2020
Payment: August 28, 2020
Conference date: September 6-9, 2020

FedCSIS 2020 is organized by