SIMSOC VI: theoretical and empirical foundations for agent architectures
Friday September 19 to Sunday September 21 2003, Groningen The Netherlands
Site address: http://www.bdk.rug.nl/simsocvi/
Within the SIMSOC (Simulating Societies) community lively discussions have
taken place about the realism of artificial agent architectures (e.g.,
decision rules) and the resulting behaviour (individual and societal) in
comparison to the properties and behaviour of real people and the societies
they take part in (see http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/simsoc.html).
Although simplicity in agent architecture contributes to the experimental
transparency of simulated behaviour, many researchers acknowledge that some
attributes of real human behaviour have to be incorporated in agent
architectures in order to enhance the realism of the simulated behavioural
dynamics. However, frequently ad-hoc ideas of e.g. bounded rationality have
been formalised in agent architectures. These ad-hoc ideas are often not
linked to theories of human behaviour and/or empirical data on the behaviour
of real people in comparable situations. Whereas such architectures may give
rise to interesting macro-level phenomena, and sometimes even mimic
empirical data, the underlying micro-level processes may be far from
realistic. Yet this realism may be important to obtain results that are
relevant to the existing theoretical body of knowledge and to policy making.
The sixth SIMSOC workshop will therefore be devoted to multi-agent
approaches where agent architectures are developed on the foundation of
behavioural theory and/or empirical data. We encourage researchers who are
using behavioural theory and/or empirical data in developing agent
architectures to submit a paper to be presented to this workshop.
The format of SIMSOCVI remains the same as previous SIMSOC workshops. Each
accepted contribution will be allotted a 45-minute slot for presentation and
15 minutes for discussion. As a result, only a limited number of
contributions can be accepted for plenary discussion. There is also the
possibility of a poster presentation. The SIMSOC workshop format provides an
excellent opportunity to exchange ideas about work in progress.
To be considered for the workshop, you should submit an extended abstract of
about one page before April 1, 2003. This abstract should be emailed in
plain text to [log in to unmask] Decisions about acceptance will be
announced by May 15, 2003. A full version of the paper should be submitted
by September 1, 2003.
More information on the workshop and the city of Groningen can be found at:
http://www.bdk.rug.nl/simsocvi/
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