ECAI 2000 Workshop

Programme

History

Background

The last ten years have seen a marked increase of interest in inter-agent decision making on the basis of argument and negotiation. This has led to "Computational Dialectics"--an area of AI which investigates computational models of the processes by which groups of natural or artificial agents construct judgement, agreement, or other forms of social choice. Special emphasis lies on methods for recognizing or achieving an outcome in a fair and effective way or to persuade other computational agents to behave in a manner that we want.

High-level protocols for multi-agent rational decision making are expected to become significant conditions for computational cooperation in the 21st century, and it is crucial that both academics and industrialists within Europe have access to a forum at which current research and application issues are presented and discussed. The aim of this workshop is to encourage and support activity in the research and development of multi-agent rational decision making, in both academia and industry.

Aim

The proposed workshop will discuss inter-agent argumentation and negotiation protocols as well as approaches that model group decision making processes. The following list contains some (but not necessarily all) of the relevant topics:

• models of (defeasible) argumentation
• argumentation-based negotiation
• persuasion in multi-agent systems
• automated negotiation
• mediating systems
• group decision making
• groupware, www-boards and computer supported collaborative argumentation
• semi-automated moderation of discussion groups
• computation of status of claims and arguments
• descriptive as well as normative studies of order protocols
• proof standards, standards of correctness, effectiveness, fairness of protocols, and standards for completion
• argumentation and decision making in the presence of limited resources
• implemented dialectical systems

The workshop aims to provide a forum for researchers from various fields (multi-agent systems, distributed AI, decision theory, legal reasoning) to identify common interests related to computational dialectics. It will consist of invited talks, paper presentations and a panel. We plan to experiment with a dialectical form of paper presentations: for each paper a proponent and an opponent will give their views of the merits/problems of the presented approach.

Accepted papers are re-produced in the workshop proceedings. The papers that appear in the proceeedings will be considered for subsequent publication in a journal.

Important dates:

22 Aug 2000

Workshop Computational Dialectics

Program committee:

Trevor Bench-Capon, Liverpool; Thomas Gordon, GMD; Hadassah Jakobovits, Brussels; Ron Loui, St. Louis; Simon Parsons, Liverpool; Henry Prakken, Utrecht; Chris Reed, Dundee; Giovanni Sartor, Belfast; Carles Sierra, Barcelona; Katia Sycara, Carnegie Mellon; Bart Verheij, Maastricht.

Organizing committee:

Dr. Gerard Vreeswijk Utrecht University Department of Computer Science Padualaan 14, De Uithof 3584 CH Utrecht email: gv@cs.uu.nl phone: +31-50-363 6295 fax: +31-50-363 6160

Prof. Nick Jennings Dept. of Electronics & Computer Science University of Southampton Highfield Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK email: nrj@ecs.soton.ac.uk phone: +44-23-8059 7681 fax: +44-23-8059 3313

Prof. dr. Gerhard Brewka Intelligent Systems Department Computer Science Institute University of Leipzig Augustusplatz 10-11, 04109 Leipzig email: brewka@informatik.uni-leipzig.de phone: +49-341-9-73-22 35 fax: +49-341-9-73-22 99