AGERE 2012

AGERE! @ SPLASH 2012

2nd International Workshop on Programming based on Actors, Agents, and Decentralized Control

Workshop held at ACM SPLASH 2012

21-22 October 2012 - Tucson, Arizona, USA

ago ago, agis, egi, actum, agere
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 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 AGERE! workshop was successfully organized in SPLASH 2011 (http://agere2011.apice.unibo.it) and is proposed to be offered again at SPLASH 2012.

Click here to find out more about previous editions.

Pre-Proceedings

The workshop pre-proceedings are now available. Download them from here.

AGERE! is an ACM SIGPLAN workshop, kindly supported by the Typesafe company.

Supporters

Accepted Papers

Call for Papers

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 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.

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 based on such paradigms.
• Teaching: experiences and reflections about using these paradigms in teaching (concurrent and distributed) programming.

Contributions & deadlines

AGERE! welcomes four kinds of contributions:

• Full-papers: length up to 12 pages.
• Short-papers & position papers: up to 4 pages.
• Reviews & surveys: up to 12 pages.
• Demo: up to 4 pages.

Deadline (strict):
* Abstracts: August 5, 2012
* Papers: August 12, 2012
* Notification: September 7, 2012
* Workshop: October 21-22, 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/Resources/Author

Publication channels

Accepted papers (full, short, position, demo) will be included in the ACM DL proceedings after the conference and (to be confirmed) in the SPLASH Companion DVD.

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 on 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.

Submission

• 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.

Submissions should use the ACM format, following this guidelines.

Papers* can be submitted in PDF format at: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ageresplash2012

(*) including full-papers, short/position papers, reviews & surveys, demo papers.

Birna van Riemsdijk, Delft, Netherlands
20 years of Agent-Oriented Programming in Distributed AI: History and Outlook
DOI: 10.1145/2414639.2414642

Akinori Yonezawa, University of Tokyo, Japan
Agents, Concurrent Objects, and High Performance Computing