AISB '02 Convention

Citation

Andrew, A.M. (2002), "AISB '02 Convention", Kybernetes, Vol. 31 No. 7/8. https://doi.org/10.1108/k.2002.06731gab.005

AISB '02 Convention

The Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour (SSAISB) held its Imperial College AISB '02 Convention in London, UK, 2-5 April 2002. It was hosted by the Departments of Computing and Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College, UK. The Convention theme was:

"Logic, Language, and Learning", to reflect both traditional and emerging interests. We intend that some of the symposium proposals and keynote lectures will reflect this theme, however, it is emphasised that proposals in all areas of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science are encouraged; we will be proposal driven.

The Convention Chairs were: Jim Cunningham and Jeremy Pitt. Kybernetes was represented at the Convention by its Editor-in-Chief, Professor Rudall.

The SSAISB is a flourishing society and as expected the convention proved to be a showcase for the "state-of-the-art" developments in these fields. To achieve this it was necessary to organise the Convention into 6 serial/parallel symposia on the specialist AI topics featured, as well as to provide invited speakers. The Symposia were complete in themselves and could have each been a "conference" in their own right. Many participants did regard them as such and attended them and socialised only with their specialised fellow symposium participants. This, however, made for a divided meeting, even though delegates must have realised that in a convention it would not be easy to move between the planned symposia/workshop. Several delegates did and surely lost out on the obvious continuity of both the symposium developing theme and the dialogue and interaction which is a natural part of research and development.

Since the convention was in fact made up of six symposia it is necessary in this review to cover each one separately. The symposia proceedings have been published by the AISB and details are included in the references at the end of this section. The organisers' e-mails for each symposia have been included for those readers who may wish to follow-up a particular line of AI research and development. The symposia were as follows:

Second symposium on adaptive agents and multi-agent systems (AAMAS-II)

Chairs: Eduardo Alonso (City University), Daniel Kudenko andDimitar Kazakov (University of York)

In recent years, intelligent agents and multi-agent systems have become a highly active area of AI research. Intelligent Agents have been developed and applied successfully in many domains, such as e-commerce, human–computer interaction, entertainment, process management and traffic control.

When designing agent systems, it is impossible to foresee all the potential situations an agent may encounter and specify an agent behaviour optimally in advance. Agents therefore, have to learn from and adapt to their environment. This task is even more complex when nature is not the only source of uncertainty, and the agent is situated in an environment that contains other agents with potentially different capabilities, goals, and beliefs. Multi-Agent Learning, i.e., the ability of the agents to learn how to co-operate and compete, becomes crucial in such domains.

In spite of its importance there has been relatively little research on this topic, and so there is a great need to stimulate and promote work in this area. Areas of interest were:

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  Learning and adaptation in multi-agent systems;

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  Logic-based learning;

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  Learning and communication;

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  Natural selection, language and learning;

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  Evolutionary agents and emergent multi-agent structures;

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  Industrial applications of learning agents;

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  Distributed learning.

Organisers' e-mails: e.a@cs.york.ac.uk, kudenko@cs.york.ac.uk and kazakov@cs.york.ac.uk

The 9th workshop on automated reasoning

Chair: Toby Walsh (University of York)

This workshop provided an informal forum for the automated reasoning community. It was the 9th in a highly successful series of workshops on automated reasoning, many of which have been held as part of AISB symposia. This workshop series aimed to bring together researchers from all areas of automated reasoning in order to foster links and facilitate cross- fertilisation of ideas among researchers from various disciplines; among researchers from academia, industry and government; and between theoreticians and practitioners.

The workshop covered the breadth and diversity of automated reasoning and included topics such as:

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  Theorem proving in classical and non-classical logics;

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  Equational reasoning;

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  Unification;

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  Induction;

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  Verification;

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  Specification;

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  Constraint solving;

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  Decision procedures;

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  Formal methods;

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  Interactive theorem proving;

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  Non-monotonic reasoning;

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  Abduction;

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  Logic-based knowledge representation, in particular description logics;

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  Implementation;

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  Experiments.

Organisers' e-mail: tw@cs.york.ac.uk

AI and creativity in arts and science

Chairs: Amilcar Cardoso (University of Coimbra) and Geraint Wiggins(City University)

Until recently, creativity and creative behaviour were not generally considered to be serious targets for AI study. However, recent developments have begun to suggest that some worthwhile inroads into the computational study of the creative mind can indeed be made. This was reflected in the successful AISB symposia on creative and creativity-related topics at AISB '99 (Edinburgh), AISB '00 (Birmingham) and AISB '01 (York).

This symposium aimed to bring together researchers interested in all forms of creative reasoning. The aim was to allow work focussed on different aspects of creative behaviour to be compared and contrasted. To this end, the programme committee invited submissions covering creative behaviour in the arts and the sciences, including, but not restricted to, computational support for creative people, computational models of creative processes, the philosophy of computational creativity, and AI systems which can be argued to exhibit creativity.

Organisers' e-mails: amilcar@dei.uc.pt, geraint@soi.city.ac.uk

AI and GRID computing

Chairs: Omer Rana (Cardiff University) and Michael Schroeder(City University)

Many recent advances in information technology and its use, such as:

1. 1.

   Component based software development;

2. 2.

   High speed networks;

3. 3.

   Standardisation of interfaces to databases and data repositories;

4. 4.

   Virtual machines and cluster computing;

5. 5.

   Public domain and community software licensing arrangements;

6. 6.

   On-demand (on-use) software payment schemes;

7. 7.

   Network aware interfaces and visualisation;

have the potential to transform the capability and modalities of scientific research by providing transparent, intuitive, timely, effective and efficient access to distributed, heterogeneous and dynamic resources. These resources include computational facilities, applications, visualisation, data and experimental facilities, integrated and accessible as a single resource over the Internet – the Grid.

To make effective utilisation of resources across a Grid that spans organisational boundaries, it is imperative that the underlying infrastructure supports intelligence. Intelligent software is required to undertake resource and service management, service discovery, service aggregation/decomposition, and support performance management. Commercial systems will also require the underlying infrastructure to respect site autonomy, and particular site specific policies on usage.

The objective of this symposium was to bring together researchers in computer science and AI, to discuss issues in managing Grid services and resources. Topics of interest included:

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  Infrastructure for Grids – agents, peer-2-peer systems, distributed object based systems – and how such infrastructure can effectively utilise AI approaches

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  AI paradigms to support service management

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  Service discovery and description schemes

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  Broker services

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  Novel paradigms for resource and service management – ant algorithms, virtual economies,

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  Performance management and analysis using AI approaches

Applications which demonstrate an approach were especially welcome. Authors were encouraged to submit sample source code if available.

Organisers' e-mails: o.f.rana@cs.cf.ac.uk, msch@soi.city.ac.uk

Animating expressive characters for social interactions

Chairs: Ruth Aylett (University of Salford) and Lola Canamero(University of Hertfordshire)

The ability to express and recognise emotions is a fundamental aspect of social interaction. The importance of endowing artefacts (for example synthetic characters or robots) with these capabilities is nowadays widely acknowledged in different research areas such as affective computing, socially intelligent agents, computer animation, or virtual environments. Researchers in all these areas are however, confronted with the problem of how to make the emotional displays of artefacts and characters believable and acceptable to humans. This can involve not only generating appropriate expressions and behavioural displays – explored in animated film for many years – but also endowing artefacts with underlying models of personality and emotions that support the coherence and autonomy of their emotional displays and interactions.

Thus this symposium concerned "animation" not only from a graphical perspective, but more generally in the human sense: making characters "life-like", externally but also "internaly": giving them an "anima". The aim of this symposium was to bring together researchers from different disciplines (including psychology, animal behaviour, the arts, computer graphics and animation as well as those mentioned above) to reflect on this common problem from different perspectives and to gain new insights from this multi- disciplinary feedback.

Organisers' e-mails: R.S.Aylett@salford.ac.uk, L.Canamero@herts.ac.uk

Intelligent agents in virtual markets

Chair: Aspassia Daskalopulu (Kings College London)

Much of recent research in Computer Science has been concerned with the development of theoretical frameworks and practical applications for electronic marketplaces, in which organisations may find opportunities for commercial transactions, identify prospective partners and establish agreements with them and proceed to implement exchanges of goods, data and services subject to such agreements and the broader legal and business norms that govern the e-market. The use of agent technology for such applications is explored with two main types of agents developed: agents that act on behalf of organisations and informed by their owners' business processes participate in auctions, negotiate agreements and implement the contractual relations they establish; and agents that regulate the activity within an e- market, monitoring the behaviour of other agents and their interactions and the implementation of their transactions subject to the agreements that govern them.

It has become increasingly acknowledged that successful deployment of such systems depends on users' confidence in their performance and that the emergence of useful practical solutions depends on the richness of the interaction between their agents. Many of the assumptions that underlie existing agent models and multi-agent interaction, for example in relation to autonomy, rationality and sincerity are being revised, with input from other disciplines, such as Law, Economics, and the Social and Organisational Sciences. The precise nature and range of services afforded by e-markets as well as the broader legal and business framework appropriate for them are themselves topics of debate and virtual marketplaces serve as experimental platforms for such issues as well.

The symposium aimed to provide a forum for the assessment of research outcomes across the disciplines involved and for identifying issues for future investigation. Topics of interest included:

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  Analytical and architectural frameworks for e-markets.

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  Agent representation and reasoning for e-markets.

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  Agent communication languages for agreement negotiation.

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  Agent interaction policies for e-markets.

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  Conceptual analysis of central notions in e-commerce transactions, such as trust, agency, delegation, liability, risk, reputation, control, confidence and reliability.

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  Legal and social aspects of e-markets.

Organiser's e-mail: aspassia@dcs.kcl.ac.uk

Over 150 participants attended the convention and there was a good turnout to hear the addresses of the invited speakers These speakers were unfortunately left with the impossible task of providing topics of interest to the attendees of all six different symposia and workshops. It is not possible to pick out any outstanding contributions, indeed it would be invidious to do so since, sessions were run in parallel. Two particularly interesting sessions did however, attract much attention: the first was in the symposium "AI and Creativity in Arts and Science" where John Platts, Ann Blandford and Christine Huyck had submitted the paper "Awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock: twist-centred story generation by transformation". This was where a mechanism whereby a human storyteller may compose a twist-centred story, that is, a story possessing a surprising ending that obliges the audience or reader to reappraise their understanding of what has preceded it. A piece of software called TWISTER, which models the process was described. In a session in the symposia "Animating Expressive characters for Social Interaction" many of the papers presented were particularly well- received. These included both the "Keynote Talks" and submitted contributions.

Amongst these "What's in a Robot's Smile? The Many Meanings of Positive Facial Expressions" by Marianne LaFrance of Yale University (USA), captured our imagination. One considered, how this could affect the concepts behind "Conversation Theory" and machine/user interaction. She believes that:

Human smiles are distinctive, noticeable, complex and socially indispensable. The issue addressed in this paper concerns whether the smiles robots display or percieve can or should possess similar characteristics

No one will argue with the statement that "... the human smile in all its various forms is probably indispensible for successful face-to-face interaction".

The whole convention provided proof that an interdisciplinary approach is a necessity whatever facet of AI is developed and studied. Those attending appeared to have affiliations in faculties of the world's university systems and organisations which ranged from software to those concerned with social matters and behaviour.

The convention certainly achieved its aim of reflecting both traditional and the emerging interests in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science. The fact that, it appeared to be entirely "proposal orientated" ensured that it truly reflected current interests and concerns.

The Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour took the opportunity to hold its AGM during the convention. Details of its activities can be found on: http://www.aisb.org.uk/ The Society now has an AISB Journal as well as its Quarterly Newsletter. Membership is open to anyone with interests in artificial intelligence and cognitive and computer sciences.

Editors' note: Copies may be requested admin@aisb.org.uk (Price was £10 each at the Convention.)