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 21-22, 2012

http://agere2012.apice.unibo.it

Deadlines:

Abstracts August 5, 2012
Papers August 12, 2012
+ special issue on 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@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
Einar Broch Johnsen, University of Oslo, Norway
Assaf Marron, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel
Mark Miller, Google, USA
Olaf Owe, University of Oslo, Norway
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
Munindar Singh, North Carolina State University, USA
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 here

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

=== 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 on 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