Agents-Vic Winter Workshop 2007

June 14th @ University of Melbourne

Venue - Theatre 3, on Level 2 of the ICT Building

111 Barry Street, Carlton (Bldg 105, map reference P14 on map at http://www.pb.unimelb.edu.au/CampusMaps/Parkville.pdf)

Limited parking in nearby streets. Paid parking ($9/day) at the University underground park accessible from Berkeley or Bouverie Streets (refer above map)
 
We will have a number of activities, including opportunities for identifying others with overlapping interests, and two guest presenters, with the afternoon targeted at research students at various stages in their candidature.

Registration

In order to plan the day and to estimate catering needs, we now need firm information about attendance. (Morning tea will be provided, but lunch is own arrangements.) Please complete the simple form at http://web.dis.unimelb.edu.au/staff/gwadley/AgentsVic/index.html  as soon as possible, and preferably no later than 5pm, Monday 11th June.

 Schedule

• 9:45-10:15 registration & networking
• 10:15-11:15 David Morley - presentation & questions - title and abstract below
  
• 11:15-11:40 tea/coffee and some prelim organisation for the afternoon (aiming at clusters of like minded research students)
• 11:40-12 panel of AAMAS attendees on their impressions of the conference/area
• 12-1 John Lloyd - presentation & questions - title and abstract below
• 1-2:15 lunch – own arrangements – perhaps "birds of a feather" groups can get to know each other over lunch
  
• 2:15-2:45 panel of current/recent PhD students/survivors
• 2:45-4:00 birds-of-a-feather discussions (more details to follow)
  
• 4:00 – 4:15 close (including some ideas for “what next with Agents-Vic?”)

Enquiries - Liz Sonenberg, l.sonenberg@unimelb.edu.au

 
David Morley (SRI, International) 

http://www.ai.sri.com/people/morley/ 

Developing an Intelligent Personal Assistant: The CALO Project

Abstract: Knowledge workers today must juggle a range of tasks and responsibilities while maintaining awareness of deadlines, resources and events that could impact objectives. In her invited talk at AAAI-06, Karen Myers of SRI International described a collaboration by a team of 25 organizations to produce an intelligent personal assistant for improving the productivity of such workers. This assistant, called CALO (cognitive assistant that learns and organizes), both performs tasks on its user’s behalf and assists with the filtering, organization, and preparation of information. CALO is seeded with default problem-solving knowledge but learns to expand and improve its capabilities over time by observing and interacting with its user.

In my talk I will shamelessly borrow from Karen's presentation, present some videos that show CALO http://caloproject.sri.com/ in action, and briefly discuss some of the areas of effort in the project this year.
 
John Lloyd (Computer Sciences Laboratory, ANU)  

http://users.rsise.anu.edu.au/~jwl/ 

An Expressive Setting for Agent Beliefs
 
Abstract: Beliefs are an important component of any agent system since they are  used to help select actions. In most existing agent systems, first-order logic is used to express beliefs. This is surprising since other logics, especially modal logics, are often used to specify and prove properties about agents, and it is clear that the extra expressiveness of these logics would be useful inside the agents themselves.

This talk will consider the use of quantified modal logic for expressing agent beliefs. The logic itself will be briefly introduced and a suitable syntactic form for beliefs explained. Then the issues of belief acquisition and reasoning with beliefs will be discussed. The talk will end by pointing out some current research issues.

An overview of the material in the talk can be found at  http://users.rsise.anu.edu.au/~jwl/AgentBeliefs.pdf

Details about quantified modal logic can be found at  http://users.rsise.anu.edu.au/~jwl/computation-proof.pdf