DALT 2006

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                    4th International Workshop on
      Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies (DALT 2006)

                             8 May 2006

                  Future University Hakodate, Japan 
                (held in conjunction with AAMAS 2006)

            URL: http://www.illc.uva.nl/~ulle/DALT-2006/
				   
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CALL FOR PAPERS
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The workshop on Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies  (DALT), 
in its fourth edition this year,  is  a  well-established  forum  for 
researchers interested in  sharing  their  experiences  in  combining 
declarative and formal approaches  with  engineering  and  technology 
aspects of agents and  multiagent  systems.  Building  complex  agent 
systems calls for models and technologies that ensure predictability, 
allow for the verification of properties, and guarantee  flexibility. 
Developing technologies that can  satisfy  these  requirements  still 
poses  an  important  and  difficult  challenge.  Here,   declarative 
approaches  have  the  potential  of  offering  solutions  satisfying
the needs for both  specifying  and  developing  multiagent  systems. 
Moreover, they are gaining  more  and  more  attention  in  important 
application areas such as the semantic web, web  services,  security, 
and electronic contracting.

DALT 2006 will be held as a satellite workshop of AAMAS 2006, the 5th 
International Joint Conference on Autonomous  Agents  and  Multiagent 
Systems, in May 2006 in Hakodate, Japan.  Following  the  success  of 
three  previous  editions,  DALT  will  again  aim  at  providing   a 
discussion forum to both (i)  support  the  transfer  of  declarative 
paradigms  and  techniques  to  the  broader   community   of   agent 
researchers and  practitioners,  and  (ii)  to  bring  the  issue  of 
designing complex agent  systems  to  the  attention  of  researchers 
working on declarative languages and technologies. 

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TOPICS OF INTEREST
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DALT topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

General themes:
* specification of agents and multiagent systems
* declarative approaches to engineering agent systems

Formal techniques:
* modal and epistemic logics for agent modelling
* model checking agents and multiagent systems
* (constraint) logic programming approaches to agent systems 
* distributed constraint satisfaction

Declarative models:
* declarative models of agent beliefs and capabilities 
* declarative models of bounded rationality
* declarative paradigms for the combination of heterogeneous agents
* electronic institutions

Applications:
* agents and the semantic web
* service-oriented multiagent systems 
* agent communication and coordination languages
* protocol specification and conformance checking 
* declarative description of contracts and negotiation policies
* security in multiagent systems

Evaluation of declarative approaches:
* experimental analysis of declarative agent technologies
* industrial experiences with declarative agent technologies

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SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS
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We welcome and encourage the  submission  of  high-quality,  original 
papers, which are not being submitted simultaneously for  publication 
elsewhere. Papers should be written in English,  formatted  according 
to the Springer LNCS style, and not exceed 16 pages. Paper submission 
is electronic via the conference website.

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WORKSHOP PROCEEDINGS
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Printed copies of the proceedings will be available at the  workshop. 
Assuming a sufficient number of  high-quality  submissions,  we  are 
again going to consider the publication of  formal  post-proceedings 
with an international publisher. The post-proceedings of  DALT  2003 
(LNAI 2990) and  DALT  2004  (LNAI  3476)  have  been  published  by 
Springer-Verlag in the  Lecture  Notes  in  Artificial  Intelligence 
series; the post-proceedings of DALT 2005 are due to appear in 2006, 
also published by Springer-Verlag.

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IMPORTANT DATES
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* Paper submission deadline: 1 February 2006
* Notification of authors: 19 February 2006
* Final versions due: 10 March 2006
* Workshop: 8 May 2006

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PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
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* Marco Alberti (University of Ferrara, Italy)
* Natasha Alechina (University of Nottingham, UK)
* Grigoris Antoniou (University of Crete, Greece)
* Matteo Baldoni (University of Torino, Italy) -- co-chair
* Cristina Baroglio (University of Torino, Italy)
* Rafael Bordini (University of Durham, UK)
* Keith Clark (Imperial College London, UK) 
* Ulle Endriss (University of Amsterdam, NL) -- co-chair
* Benjamin Hirsch (Technical University Berlin, Germany)
* Shinichi Honiden (National Institute of Informatics, Japan)
* John Lloyd (Australian National University, Australia)
* Viviana Mascardi (University of Genova, Italy)
* John-Jules Meyer (University of Utrecht, NL)
* Enrico Pontelli (New Mexico State University, USA)
* Birna van Riemsdijk (University of Utrecht, NL)
* Chiaki Sakama (Wakayama University, Japan)
* Wamberto Vasconcelos (University of Aberdeen, UK)
* Christopher Walton (University of Edinburgh, UK)
* Michael Winikoff (RMIT University, Australia)

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