[robocup-rescue-s] ATDM Workshop (deadline approaching)

Dear all,

We very much welcome papers from the Robocup Rescue community to the
workshop on Agent Technology for Disaster Management we are organising
in Japan (co-located with AAMAS 2006-
http://www.fun.ac.jp/aamas2006/main.html).

This will be a great occasion to showcase your work in this area and
share your experience in devising mechanisms to deal with/simulate
disaster management scenarios.

The deadline is the 1st of February. Note that we also welcome position
papers (2 pages) about projects dealing with this field. See the CFP
below.

Kind regards,

Gopal Ramchurn
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

First International Workshop on:
Agent Technology for Disaster Management(ATDM)

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~sdr/atdm/

8th May 2006, Hakodate, Japan

Description
===========

In the light of recent events throughout the world, ranging from natural
disasters such as the Asian Tsunami and hurricane Katrina in New
Orleans, to the man-made disasters such as the London terrorist attacks,
the topic of disaster management (also known as emergency response)
become a key concern and there is now an overwhelming need for better
information technology to help support their efficient and effective
management.

Disaster management requires that a number of actors, each with their
own aims, objectives, and resources, be able to coordinate their efforts
in a number of ways to prevent or manage the aftermath of a disaster.
The techniques involved may involve both centralized and decentralized
coordination mechanisms that need to operate in environments prone to
uncertainty given the dynamic nature of disasters. More specifically,
the technical issues that agent-based technologies can deal with
include:

- Machine learning algorithms that are efficient and effective in
dynamic, multi-actor environments that are uncertain and incomplete.
- Coordination mechanisms that ensure desirable overall properties
emerge based on local actions and views.
- Coordination mechanisms that enable collectives to plan and act
collaboratively in order to achieve common goals.
- Techniques that enable an actor to effectively balance acting and
information gathering in dynamic, uncertain, multi-actor environments.
- Methods for modelling and predicting the system behaviour that will
ensue from specifications of the local behaviour of the individual
actors.
- Techniques that enable an actor to fuse, in a decentralised manner,
inter-related information that is uncertain, incomplete, imprecise and
ambiguous.
- Decentralised system architectures that can operate effectively in
uncertain and dynamic environments and that are robust, scaleable and
flexible in their operation.
 

Against this background, this workshop invites works from different
strands of the multi-agent systems community that pertain to
technologies that can be applied in disaster management scenarios. In so
doing, this workshop aims to provide a forum for the discussion of
issues arising in designing, implementing, or simulating agent-based
disaster management systems.

Keywords
========

Papers should target applications of agent-based technology to the area
of disaster management. Also, position statements from ongoing projects
concerned with the application of information technology to disaster
management are also welcome. There are plans to invite authors of
selected best papers to resubmit in a special issue of a relevant
journal (more details will be posted soon). Relevant topics include but
are not limited to the following:

- Teamwork, Coordination, and Planning Mechanisms in dynamic and
uncertain environments.
- Decentralised agent-based architectures.
- Mechanism Design.
- Market Mechanisms.
- Multi-agent learning.
- Decision making under uncertainty.
- Autonomous robots and robot teams.
- Agent-based simulation
- Distributed constraint optimisation.

Submission Instructions
=======================

Papers should be formatted using the ACM conference style file and
should be in pdf format. All submissions must be emailed to sdr AT ecs
dot soton dot ac dot uk.

Paper lengths: Position statements should not be more than 2 pages and
Full papers should not be more than 8 pages.

 
Important Dates:
================

February 1, 2006 (NEW DATE!): Deadline for submitting contributions to
workshops.

February 19, 2006: Acceptance notification to workshop authors.

May 8, 2006:Workshop takes place in conjunction with AAMAS 2006.

Paper review process
====================

Papers will be reviewed by 2 PC members each.

Organising Committee
====================
Prof. Nicholas R. Jennings (University of Southampton, UK)
Prof. Milind Tambe (University of Southern California, USA)
Prof. Toru Ishida (Kyoto University, Japan)
Dr. Sarvapali D. Ramchurn (University of Southampton, UK)

Programme Committee
===================
Prof. Austin Tate (AIAI, University of Edinburgh, UK)

Dr. Alessandro Farinelli (Università di Roma ''La Sapienza', Italy)

Dr. Frank Fiedrich (George Washington University, USA)

Dr. Alex Rogers (University of Southampton, UK)

Prof. H. Levent Akin (Bogaziçi University, Turkey)

Prof. Hitoshi Matsubara (Future University, Japan)

Dr. Itsuki Noda (AIST, Ibaraki, Japan)

Dr. Jeff Bradshaw (IHMC, USA)

Dr. Lin Padgham (RMIT, Australia)

Dr. Paul Scerri (Robotics Institute, CMU, USA)

Dr. Ranjit Nair (Honeywell, USA)

Dr. Stephen Hailes (University College London, UK)

Prof. Victor Lesser (University of Massachusetts, USA)

Prof. Tomoichi Takahashi (Meijo University, Japan)

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Received on Thu Jan 26 12:07:39 2006