OVERVIEW

The Agent Technical Fora have been created by AgentLink III following up on previous special interest groups in AgentLink and AgentLink II European networks. A Technical Fora consist of several working groups called Technical Forum Groups. These groups of researchers and developers share an interest in a specific sub-area of agent and multi-agent technology. Since the end of AgentLink, the Technical Fora have been organized jointly to the EUMAS conference, starting in 2006.

There have been five successful editions of the Agent Technical Fora: Rome, Italy (30 June - 2 July 2004); Ljubljana, Slovenia (28 February - 2 March 2005); Budapest, Hungary (15-17 September 2005); Lisbon (13 December 2006); and Hammamet, Tunisia (12 December 2007). The Sixth Technical Fora will take place in Bath, UK, 17 December 2008 as a joint event with EUMAS 2008.

Since there is no funding available for the participants of the Fora, coupling the event with the workshop enables the participants to the workshop to attend to the meetings without further costs. This will make possible the interesting and broad discussions which were the mark of the different TFGs to continue.

A PDF version of the CfP is also available.

AIMS

The aims of the Technical Fora are:

• to facilitate the dynamic development of communities around specific areas of strategic importance for European agent R&D, enabling them to share common problems, issues, and results in a manner that other meetings (e.g., academic workshops and conferences) do not allow for;
• to respond dynamically to fast-changing developments;
• to establish links with related areas within computing as well as other research disciplines, such as economics and biology;
• to encourage common actions among participants, leading to the promotion of agent technology in projects and standards.

IMPORTANT DATES

TFG Proposal Submission:	24th October 2008
TFG Notification:	31st October 2008
TFG Programme:	21st November 2008
Technical Forum Groups:	17th December 2008

MEETINGS

• Agent Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) Technical Forum
  This sixth edition continues the tradition of the AOSE Technical Forum Group (TFG) started back in 2004. The scope of this Technical Forum (TF) is to work on agent-oriented software engineering (AOSE) main challenges and its specific aim is renewing and strengthening the cohesion of the AOSE community that participated in the previous meetings. As a tangible result of these events, several members of this TFG now share common research activities and projects originated from the discussions they had during the meetings (or after them).
  
  The initial work plan for this full-day meeting mainly includes two parts: (i) presentations and discussion about research topics proposed by TFG supporters, and (ii) the discussion and finalization of a proposal to the FIPA board for the standardization of the description of design processes and their composing fragments. The deadline for contributions related to talks to be held during the meeting is 16th November.
  
  Further information, including topics of interest, can be found on the AOSE TF homepage or the AOSE TF mailing list.
• Self-Organisation in MAS (SELFORG) Technical Forum
  The aim of the SELFORG TFG is to establish the context for systematically applying self-organisation in MAS. Self-organisation refers to a process where a system changes its internal organisation without explicit external control to adapt to changes in its goals and environmental conditions. Self-organisation is an attractive approach to tackle the openness and dynamism of contemporary agent applications.
  
  The work continues from the previous meeting which elaborated on fundamental definitions and identified representative case studies. The aim of this meeting is to apply different self-organisation mechanisms on selected case studies and to assess their effectiveness and quality using suitable criteria.
  
  Further information about the aims and scope of this TF is available, along with information from the previous meetings.

CONTACTS

TF6 Forum Chairs: tf6-chair@irit.fr
AOSE TF Chairs: Massimo Cossentino, Frederic Migeon, Andrea Omicini , Abderrafiaa Koukam
SELFORG TF Chairs: Giovanna Di Marzo Serugendo, Marie-Pierre Gleizes, Anthony Karageorgos