[TYPES/announce] CFP: AGERE! @ SPLASH 2012 - Programming based on Actors, Agents and Decentralized Control

[Alessandro Ricci]

                       CALL FOR PAPERS

                     AGERE! @ SPLASH 2012

         2nd Int. Workshop on Programming based on
         Actors, Agents, and Decentralized Control

        Workshop held at the ACM SPLASH Conference 2012
                      Tucson, Arizona (US)
                        October 22, 2012

                http://agere2012.apice.unibo.it

Deadlines:

Abstracts       August 5, 2012
Papers          August 12, 2012
+ special issue in Science of Computer Programming

                        ăgo ăgo, ăgis, egi, actum, ăgĕre
                        latin verb meaning to act, to lead, to do,
                        common root for actors and agents

The fundamental turn of software into concurrency and distribution is
not only a matter of performance, but also of design and abstraction.
It calls for programming paradigms that, compared to current
mainstream paradigms, would allow us to more naturally think about,
design, develop, execute, debug, and profile systems exhibiting
different degrees of concurrency, autonomy, decentralization of
control, and physical distribution.

The AGERE! workshop is dedicated to focusing on and developing the
research on programming systems, languages and applications based on
actors, agents and any related programming paradigm promoting a
decentralized control mindset in solving problems and in developing
systems to implement such solutions.

The workshop is designed to cover both the theory and the practice of
design and programming, bringing together researchers working on the
models, languages and technologies, and practitioners developing
real-world systems and applications.

The first edition of AGERE! was organized in SPLASH 2011, drawing
significant interest and attendance (see program at
http://agere2011.apice.unibo.it). The workshop is now scheduled to
take place also at SPLASH 2012 and, related to this event, a special
issue on the journal Science of Computer Programming is scheduled for
the end of the year.

=== Organizers

Gul Agha, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
Rafael  H. Bordini, FACIN–PUCRS, Brazil
Assaf Marron, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel
Alessandro Ricci, University of Bologna, Italy (ref: a.ricci at unibo.it)

=== Program Committee (partial list, other names are to be confirmed)

Gul Agha, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
Joe Armstrong,  SICS / Ericsson, Sweden
Saddek Bensalem, Verimag, France
Rafael  H. Bordini, FACIN–PUCRS, Brazil
Gilad Braha, Google, USA
Rem Collier, UCD, Dublin
Tom Van Cutsem,  Vrije Universiteit, Brussel, Belgium
Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni,  LIP6 - Univ. P and M. Curie, Paris, France
Jurgen Dix, Technical University of Clausthal, Germany
Tom Holvoet, Dept. Computer Science K.U.Leuven, Belgium
Assaf Marron, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel
Jens Palsberg, UCLA, Los Angeles, USA
Ravi Pandya, Microsoft, USA
Arnd Poetzsch-Heffter, University of Kaiserslautern, Germany
Alessandro Ricci, University of Bologna, Italy
Birna van Riemsdijk, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Giovanni Rimassa, Whitestein Technologies, Switzerland
Gera Weiss, Ben Gurion University, Israel
Guy Wiener, HP, Israel
Akinori Yonezawa, University of Tokyo, Japan University, Japan
...

=== Main topics

The topics of interest for the workshop include:

- Programming languages and frameworks
+ theory and practice about languages and frameworks based on agents,
actors, and decentralized control.

- Foundations
+ ideas, concepts, formalization of the computation and programming
models for agents, actors and decentralized control.

- Design
+ design principles underlying the paradigms and bridging the gap
between design to programming

- Validation and verification
+ theory and tools about testing, debugging, profiling, verifying and
validating software systems based on such paradigms

- Applications
+ design and development of real-world applications

- Teaching
+ experiences and reflections about using these paradigms in teaching
(concurrent and distributed) programming

=== Contributions & deadlines

AGERE! welcomes three kinds of contributions:

- full-papers
+ length up to 12 pages; covering new research, per the above topics,
not previously published.

- short-papers & position papers
+ length up to 4 pages, these papers are meant to introduce a
contribution (an idea, a viewpoint, an argument, work in
progress...) which may be in its initial stage and not fully
developed but which is worth to be presented given its relevance to
the AGERE! topics, triggering discussions and interactions.

- reviews & surveys
+ up to 12 pages, these papers are meant to provide a good synthesis
& reflections about some aspect (specific or general) which is
relevant for the workshop, contributing then to workshop
discussions on the state of the art and open issues

- demo
+ length up to 4 pages, these contributions are about a
technology/system that will be demonstrated during the workshop.

Deadlines:

Abstracts     August 5, 2012
Papers (*)    August 12, 2012

Papers can be submitted at

  https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ageresplash2012

in PDF format. Submissions should use the ACM format, following the
guidelines in http://www.sigplan.org/authorInformation.htm.

(*) including full-papers, short/position papers, reviews & surveys,
 demo papers

=== Publication channels

Accepted papers (full, short/position, surveys/reviews, demo) will be
included in the ACM DL proceedings after the conference.

Besides, a selected set of papers will be invited to be extended and
included in a special issue which is being organized for the end of
the year in the journal Science of Computer Programming.  The special
issue will be about actor-oriented and agent-oriented programming, and
- more generally - on programming systems, languages, and applications
based on actors, agents, and decentralized control abstractions.

Read more at the AGERE! web site: http://agere2012.apice.unibo.it

=== SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

* To “set the frequency”

[1] Actors and Agents as Programming Paradigms - An Overview. AGERE!
 2011 introductory talk. A. Ricci.
 http://apice.unibo.it/xwiki/bin/download/AGERE/WebHome/opening.pdf

[2] H. Sutter and J. Larus. Software and the concurrency revolution.
 ACM Queue: Tomorrow’s Computing Today, 3(7):54–62, Sept. 2005.

[3] M. Resnick. Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams. Explorations in
 Massively Parallel Microworlds. MIT Press, 1994.

[4] A. Kay. Programming and programming languages, 2010. VPRI Research
 Note RN-2010-001.

[5] Howell R. Jordan, Goetz Botterweck, Marc-Philippe Huget, Rem
 Collier: A feature model of actor, agent, and object programming
 languages. SPLASH Workshops 2011: 147-158

* Actors & OO Concurrent Programming approaches

[1] G. Agha. Actors: a model of concurrent computation in distributed
 systems. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 1986.

[2] C. Hewitt. Viewing control structures as patterns of passing
 messages. Artif. Intell., 8(3):323–364, 1977.

[3] G. Agha, I. A. Mason, S. Smith, and C. Talcott. A Foundation for
 Actor Computation.  Journal of Functional Programming, 7(01):1–72,
 1997.

[4] J.P. Briot, R. Guerraoui, and K.P. Lohr. Concurrency and
 distribution in object-oriented programming. ACM Comput. Surv.,
 30(3):291–329, 1998.

[5] G. Agha. Concurrent object-oriented programming. In in
 Communications of the ACM, Association for Computing Machinery,
 vol. 33, no. 9, pp 125-141, September, 1990.

[6] G. Agha, P. Wegner, and A. Yonezawa, editors. Research directions
 in concurrent object-oriented programming. MIT Press, Cambridge,
 MA, USA, 1993.

[7] R. K. Karmani, A. Shali, and G. Agha. Actor frameworks for the JVM
 platform: a comparative analysis.  In PPPJ ’09: Proceedings of the
 7th International Conference on Principles and Practice of
 Programming in Java, pages 11–20, New York, NY, USA, 2009. ACM.

[8] A. Yonezawa, editor. ABCL: an object-oriented concurrent
 system. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA, 1990.

[9] J. Armstrong. Erlang. Commun. ACM, 53(9):68–75, 2010.

[10] J. Schafer and A. Poetzsch-Heffter. Jcobox: generalizing ¨active
  objects to concurrent components. In Proceedings of the 24th
  European conference on Object-oriented programming, ECOOP’10,
  pages 275–299, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2010. Springer-Verlag.

[11] P. Haller and M. Odersky. Scala actors: Unifying thread-based and
  event-based programming. Theoretical Computer Science, 2008.

[12] T. Van Cutsem: AmbientTalk: modern actors for modern
  networks. SPLASH Workshops 2011: 227-230

[13] M. S. Miller, Eric Dean Tribble, Jonathan S. Shapiro: Concurrency
  Among Strangers. TGC 2005: 195-229

* Agents and Agent-Oriented Programming

[1] J. J. Odell. Objects and agents compared. Journal of Object
 Technology, 1(1):41–53, 2002.

[2] N. R. Jennings. An agent-based approach for building complex
 software systems.  Commun. ACM, 44(4):35–41, 2001.

[3] Y. Shoham. Agent-oriented programming. Artificial Intelligence,
 60(1):51–92, 1993.

[4] R. Bordini, M. Dastani, J. Dix, and A. El Fallah Seghrouchni,
 editors.  Multi-Agent Programming Languages, Platforms and
 Applications. Volume 1 (2005) and 2 (2009). Springer.

[5] A. Ricci, A. Santi. Designing a General-Purpose Programming
 Language based on Agent-Oriented Abstractions: The simpAL
 Project. SPLASH Workshops 2011: 159-170

[6] M. D. Travers. Programming with Agents: New metaphors for thinking
 about computation.  Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1996.

[7] R. Bordini, J. Hubner, and M. Wooldridge. Programming Multi-Agent
 Systems in AgentSpeak Using Jason. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2007.

[8] M. Dastani. 2apl: a practical agent programming
 language. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems,
 16(3):214–248, 2008.

[9] K. V. Hindriks. Programming rational agents in GOAL. In
 R. H. Bordini, M. Dastani, J. Dix, and A. El Fallah Seghrouchni,
 editors, Multi-Agent Programming: Languages, Platforms and
 Applications (2nd volume), pages 3–37. Springer-Verlag, 2009.

[10] F. Bellifemine, G. Caire, A. Poggi, G. Rimassa: JADE: A software
  framework for developing multi-agent applications. Lessons
  learned. Information & Software Technology 50(1-2): 10-21 (2008)

[11] N. Howden, R. Ronnquist, A. Hodgson, and A. Lucas. JACK
  intelligent agentsTM — summary of an agent infrastructure. In
  Proceedings of Second International Workshop on Infras- tructure
  for Agents, MAS, and Scalable MAS, held with the Fifth
  International Conference on Autonomous Agents (Agents 2001),
  2001.

[12] Sean Edward Russell, Howell R. Jordan, Gregory M. P. O'Hare, Rem
  W. Collier: Agent Factory: A Framework for Prototyping
  Logic-Based AOP Languages. MATES 2011: 125-136

[13] A. Pokahr, L. Braubach, Kai Jander: Unifying Agent and Component
  Concepts: Jadex Active Components. MATES 2010: 100-112

* Other Decentralized Control Programming Approaches

[1] D. Harel, Assaf Marron, Gera Weiss: Programming Coordinated
 Behavior in Java. ECOOP 2010: 250-274

[2] S. Bliudze and J. Sifakis. A notion of glue expressiveness for
 component-based systems. CONCUR, 2008.

[3] D. Harel, Assaf Marron, Guy Wiener, Gera Weiss: Behavioral
 programming, decentralized control, and multiple time
 scales. AGERE! @ SPLASH Workshops 2011: 171-182

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