Call for Participation:

The highly interdisciplinary area of Socially Intelligent Agents has attracted a number of active researchers who model, design and analyse agents (software or robotic) which behave socially. Much of this work is strongly inspired by forms of natural social intelligence characteristic of humans. This symposium will address recent technological, methodological and theoretical developments in the field of Socially Intelligent Agents (SIA's), as well as discuss social and cultural issues, and limitations and problems of Socially Intelligent Agents. A focus will be the issue of the 'human-in-the-loop'.
Both agents and humans can have different roles during agent-human interaction, e.g. as designers, users, observers, assistants, collaborators, competitors, customers, or friends. The symposium will concentrate primarily on socially intelligent agents that are either directly interacting with humans, showing aspects of human-style intelligence, supporting interaction among humans and/or modelling explicitly aspects of human social intelligence.
The symposium will focus on four Key Themes for which considerations of the 'human-in-the-loop' are crucial. Interdisciplinary approaches are particularly encouraged.
The symposium will comprise keynote talks, panel discussions and individual paper presentations, addressing one or several of the following Key Themes:

• 1) Connecting to SIA's: architectures and design spaces for SIA's; innovative user-interfaces, novel environments and new methodologies for software and robotic agents interacting and collaborating with humans and facilitating communication and collaboration between humans; hot approaches (emotional, empathic aspects) and cold approaches (intention and plan ascription, reasoning etc.); synchronisation in human-agent dialogue; the role of embodiment in human-agent interaction; exploiting anthropomorphism; believability and degrees of agent complexity
• 2) Learning and playing with SIA's: new applications of social agent technology in rehabilitation and education; SIA's as instructors, guides, teachers, assistants and friends; SIA's which support human creativity and imagination; SIA's in living environments (e.g. at school, at home, at work, on holiday, at meeting points)
• 3) Living with SIA's: social agent technology which influences attitudes/opinions/behaviour; issues of 'social relationships' between human and agent e.g. helping, competition and cooperation, autonomy and control, predictability, deception, manipulation, initiative, delegation, responsibility, conflicts
• 4) Growing up and evolving with SIA's: social agent technology which empowers humans, addressing the cognitive and emotional needs of humans; impact of SIA's on human society and culture; agents adapting to and supporting cultural diversity; ethical considerations

Submission Information

Potential participants are asked to submit a short paper (3 to 5 pages) describing their work in this area. Please send submissions via electronic mail to Kerstin Dautenhahn at K.Dautenhahn@herts.ac.uk. The text can either be submitted in plain Ascii format (preferred), or the submission can be made available on a Webpage and the URL is sent via email.

Important Dates:

• Deadline for submission of abstracts: 29th of March 2000
• Notification of acceptance/rejection: 25th of May 2000
• Camera-ready copies of papers: 10th August 2000

JHWH

Then I saw another angel coming up from the east, having the seal of the living God. He called out in a loud voice to the four angels who had been given power to harm the land and the sea:

"Do not harm the land or the sea or the trees until we put a seal on the foreheads of the servants of our God."