Call for Participation in
                     Agent Based Social Simulation
                        SIG Meeting in Barcelona
                      20th - 22nd September, 1999

                     (This call is also available at
              http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/abss/meeting2.html)

The next meeting of the Agent Based Social Simulation special interest
group will be held at the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute
(IIIA), a center of the Spanish Scientific Research Council (CSIC) in
Barcelona.

Applications to participate (by online form) are due by 28th July.

This meeting is organized jointly by the four special interest groups
for agent based social simulation (ABSS), Agent-mediated electronic
commerce (AmEC),  Methodologies and software engineering for agent
systems (MSEAS) and  Intelligent information agents (I2A).  Issues
relating to the overlaps and interconnections among the research areas
covered by the four SIGs will be explored in a plenary meeting on the
afternoon of  Tuesday, 21st September.  There will also be a joint
meeting with the AmEC SIG on the morning of Wednesday, 22nd September,
to explore specifically the lessons to be drawn from the ABSS community
in the development of electronic commerce systems and personal software
assistants.

There is a web page for the joint meeting at http://www.iiia.csic
.es/Agentlink/Barcelona.html.

The ABSS SIG will meet on its own in three half-day sessions: the
morning and afternoon of Monday, 20th September and the morning of the
21st September.  To participate in the ABSS sessions, you must submit
the online registration application form which includes space for a
statement of the contribution you intend to make to one or more of the
planned sessions.  The form does not ask for information previously
given (apart from your name and institution, for obvious reasons).  It
must be submitted on or before Wednesday, 28th July.

Please note that, in comparison with the London meeting, a much smaller
number of participants will be invited to the Barcelona meetings --
about 25 instead of more than 40.  There will also be much more emphasis
on discussion with a small number of presentations -- perhaps 6 in all.


Purpose of the ABSS meeting

The purpose of the ABSS meeting will be to devise the technological
roadmap for the development of agent based social simulation in Europe.
The "roadmap" entails the definition of where we are, where we want to
be in a few years and how to get from where we are and where we want to
be.

The purpose of the first meeting, in London last April, was to define
where we are.  One view was that the presentations at that meeting
reported four broad areas of interest:

   * The development of foundational aspects (including agent
     representations and architecture, e.g., cellular  automata, BDI
     systems etc.) of social theory
   * The application of formalisms to the analysis of social
     institutions
   * The development of agent specifications to support models of
     observed or desired social systems including artificial societies
     of, for example, information and e-commerce agents

Drawing on the presentations at the London ABSS meeting, the following
examples of work in each of these areas might be useful:

     The first area is concerned with the application of simulation
     and artificial societies to working out theoretical
     instruments for social theory, and is typified by work on
     norms and normative agents using BDI, deontic and similar
     logics ­ for example, the presentations  by Treur, by
     Paolucci, Castelfranchi and Conte and by Coehlo on the
     emergence of norms in multi agent systems

     The second area was well represented by the presentations of
     Jones and Sergot using logical formalisms to analyse issues
     relating to rights, duties and responsibiliites as mandated by
     legal systems and by custom as in organizations.

     The third area is concerned with the representation of social
     systems and issues and the specification of agents to
     represent the behaviour of real actors important in
     understanding such real issues as sustainable development
     (Doran, Bousquet) or the interaction between physical and
     social systems in the process of climate change and its
     consequences (Pahl-Wostl, Downing and Moss)

The purpose of the Barcelona ABSS meeting will be to evaluate the
respective roles of these three areas of interest, whether they provide
a complete and constructive basis for the further development of social
simulation research, how they relate to one another presently and how
that set of relationships will usefully be pursued.

NB:

      The meeting is not concerned with the particular examples
     given above except insofar as they (and others) help to focus
     discussion on the developmental issues

      Attendance at the London meeting last April is neither
     necessary nor sufficient for attendance at the Barcelona
     meeting in September.

The currently intended format of the meeting is to devote a period of
time to each of the three areas of research interest and to have a final
session concerned with the development of an overview informed by the
previous discussions. Each of the sessions will have one or two
introductory presentations but will be devoted primarily to open
discussion.

Because of his work and reputation in the application of logical
formalisms, Marek Sergot has been drafted in to help organize the
Barcelona meeting.

If you feel strongly that some alternative or additional research areas
should be included, let the organizers (Rosaria, Scott and Marek) know
as soon as possible.  In order that the SIG meeting successfully
reflects the interests and needs of the participants, it is essential
that you propose topics within these sections.  Discussion about topics,
both to define what is wanted and to inform the discussions in London
will be appropriately conducted on the ABSS email list.




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