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                          Autonomous Agents 2000
                           Second Call for Papers

	  Communicative Agents in Intelligent Virtual Environments 

	The forth International Conference on AUTONOMOUS AGENTS (Agents 2000) 
				will be held in 

		Barcelona, Spain from  June 3-7, 2000. 



    [You may find it easier to read this information on the Web at
	http://coli.lili.uni-bielefeld.de/allgemein/agents2000/]


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	Communicative Agents in Intelligent Virtual Environments 

Description: 

When designing an Intelligent Virtual Environment (IVE) know how of at
least three current research areas has to be combined: artificial
intelligence, agent-oriented approaches and virtual reality techniques.

An IVE  may be thought of in a variety of ways including: an
environment  in which the user is represented by a partially 
autonomous avatar; one containing intelligent agents separate from the
user; one which adapts to the requirements of the user; 
one which provides knowledge to direct or assist the user rather than
relying entirely on the user's knowledge 
and skills, and so on.

A communicative agent in an IVE should to be able to guide the user, be able to
autonomously perfom actions in the virtual environment, be able to
delegate tasks to appropiate specialized agents and present
information to the user. 

To do so, the agents design has to include the ability to communicate
at a satisfactory level (including language, gaze, gestures, body
postures) but also to be able to perceive the simulated
world and perform actions in it; the communicative agent has to be an
embodied system.

The workshop is planned as a combined follow up event of  the
successful Agents 1999 workshop on ''Communicative Agents'', the 
UK-VR-SIG-99 workshop on ``Intelligent Virtual Agents'' and the 
KI-99 workshop on ``Intelligent Virtual Environments''. 

While the Agents 1999 workshop focused on  the communicative qualities of
single agents, the proposed workshop  tries to focus on how to
integrate communicative agents and intelligent virtual environments. 

The workshop aims to discuss communicative agents which inhabit their
particular virtual environments. The target audience for this workshop
includes researchers and practitioners working on 

	- autonomous agents which display natural language capabilities,  
	- design and implementation of intelligent virtual environments
	- virtual societies of (communicating) agents

Topics of interest, but not limited to:

- All aspects of NLP in agents, e.g. including  speech processing, language understanding, language production and generation, text generation
- Communicative agents in 3D multi-user environments
- Multimodal Human/Agent Interaction, e.g. integrating language and gestures
- Inter agent communication
- NLP and social interaction: expression and verbalization of emotions and mental states  
- Verbalizing internal concepts, goals or sensor data
- Evolution of language in embodied systems
- Theories and architectures for communicative agents
- Virtual assistants, avatars, believable agents
- Model-based, spatial, and multi-modal reasoning about virtual environments
- Web-based virtual reality

Potential Participants are asked to submit electronically a max. 4-page
extended abstract. From among the submissions a number of papers will
be accepted for inclusion in the working notes. Participants who do
not intend to contribute a paper for the working notes are asked to
submit a one-page statement of interest.  Depending on the quality of
the selected papers a printed publication will be considered. 

The following formats are acceptable: either four hardcopies (any A4
or US Letter format, max. 4 pp.) via post, electronic submission in
Postcript, PDF, RTF or plain ASCII. Please mail your electronic submission
to : 

		milde@coli.uni-bielefeld.de
		
		electronic submission is preferred !!!


Workshop organizers:

- Dr. Jan-Torsten Milde, Faculty of linguistic and literate studies, computational linguistics and text-technology group, University of Bielefeld, Germany

- Ruth Aylett, The Centre for Virtual Environments, University of Salford, Salford UK

- Dr. Bernhard Jung, Faculty of Technology, Knowledge based systems group, Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality Lab, University of Bielefeld, Germany


Program Commitee

Paolo Petta, 
James Lester,
Marc Cavazza,
Patrick Doyle,
Michael Luck,
Kerstin Dautenhahn,
Simone Strippgen,
Christian Geiger,
Jan-Torsten Milde,
Ruth Aylett, 
Bernhard Jung,

Contact: 

	Dr. Jan-Torsten Milde, Universit"at Bielefeld,
	Faculty for linguistics and literate studies,
	Universitaetsstr. 25,
	33501 Bielefeld, Germany,
	email: milde@coli.uni-bielefeld.de, 
	Tel.: (0)521 106 3678, FAX: (0)521 106 2996

Important dates

   * Monday, 17. March 2000: submission deadline for extended 4 pages abstract
   * Friday, 31. March 2000: notification of accepted papers
   * Friday, 14. April 2000: deadline for camera ready version
   * Sunday, 5th of June: Workshop in Barcelona

Up to date information on this workshop can be found at

	http://coli.lili.uni-bielefeld.de/allgemein/agents2000/