AL3-TF@TAAS

 ***************************** CALL FOR PAPERS **************************

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               Special Issue of the ACM Transactions on
                Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (TAAS)
                    <http://esoa.unige.ch/taas/>

      THE AGENTLINK PERSPECTIVE ON AUTONOMOUS AND ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS
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AIMS & SCOPE
------------
AgentLink has just recently closed after eight years of fruitful and
successful activity, as a series of European Commission (EC)-sponsored
projects.  In particular, AgentLink III has worked in the last two years
to put Europe at the leading edge of international competitiveness in
the increasingly-important area of agent technologies.  To this end, and
in order to support co-ordination and collaboration of European research
efforts, AgentLink III established a series of research meetings, called
the AgentLink III Technical Forums (TFs).

Each of these Technical Forums included a number of parallel workshops,
called Technical Forum Groups (TFGs), on specific hot research topics
suggested in response to a call for proposals issued before each
Technical Forum meeting.  Three TF events were held under AgentLink III:
in Rome, Italy; in Ljubljana, Slovenia; and in Budapest, Hungary. 
Participants came mostly from European and neighbouring countries, but
also from Australia, Japan and the USA. The outcomes of TFG activity
were outstanding, in terms of both the communities that developed around
TFGs, and the scientific results emerged from the discussions at the TFG
meetings.

AgentLink now aims to collect, select and publish the most important
advances produced by the AgentLink Technical Forum activity that fall in
the area of Autonomous and Adaptive Systems, within the prestigious ACM
Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems (TAAS).  We are
therefore soliciting submissions that summarise and expand on the TF
activities, and therefore encourage potential authors to visit the web
pages of TAAS (http://esoa.unige.ch/taas/), to understand the aim and
scope of this journal.


AUTHORS & THEMES
----------------
Potential authors for this special issue should be researchers who have
actively participated to the AgentLink Technical Forum activities in the
last two years, along with their colleagues and usual collaborators. 
Each submission should be accompanied by a message (mail or letter)
explicitly stating that at least one of the authors has actively
participated to the activity of one or more of the AgentLink III TFGs,
and that the article submitted develops along the lines elaborated in
the TFG discussion. All papers should present original research and
innovative results.

Themes of the submitted articles should first of all fall within one or
more of the areas that were the subject of the scientific work of the 14
AgentLink III TFGs:

- Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE TFG)
- Agents in Bioinformatics (BIOAGENTS TFG)
- Agents Applied in Healthcare (HEALTHCARE TFG)
- Intelligent Information Agents for Web Economies (IIA4WE TFG)
- Law and Electronic Agents (LEA TFG)
- Networked Agents (NETAGENTS TFG)
- Programming MultiAgent Systems (PROMAS TFG)
- Self-Organisation in MultiAgent Systems (SELFORG TFG)
- Trust for Open Collaborative Agent Business Environments (TRUST TFG)
- Environments for Multiagent Systems (ENV TFG)
- Multiagent Resource Allocation (MARA TFG)
- Towards Semantic Web Agents: Knowledge Web and AgentLink (SWA TFG)
- Towards a Standard Agent-to-Agent Argumentation Interchange Format (AIF TFG)
- Coordinating Agent Standardisation Activities (CASA TFG)

Submitted papers should also explicitly indicate which (one or more) TFG
activity was the origin of the paper contribution.
For more precise information, please consult the AgentLink III TFG pages
at <http://www.agentlink.org/activities/tfg/>.

Naturally, papers submitted to the special issue should also focus on
themes which are of interest for the hosting journal: potential authors
should carefully take into account TAAS aims and scope as specified in
the journal web pages at <http://esoa.unige.ch/taas/indexr.html>.


SUBMISSIONS
-----------
Submissions should fall in any of the areas of interest of TAAS, be
related to at least one of the AgentLink III TFGs, and should include at
least one author who actively participated in one or more of the
AgentLink III TFG activities over the past two years. To this end,
submissions should be accompanied by a message stating the involvement
of the authors (at least one) in the AgentLink III TFG activities, and
indicating the reference TFGs (at least one, possibly more than one) for
the paper.

Papers should be formatted according to the "Instruction for Submission"
at <http://esoa.unige.ch/taas/authors.html> and be sent in PDF format to

	Andrea Omicini <andrea.omicini@unibo.it>
	
*** BEFORE July 15th, 2006 ***

Submitted papers will be reviewed by at least three different expert
reviewers, coming from both the AgentLink community and the TAAS
editorial board.
The review process will be driven by the Guest Editors of this Special
Issue (Peter McBurney, Andrea Omicini, Terry Payne and Paolo Petta) and
by the Editor-in-chief, Giovanna Di Marzo Serugendo.

Final versions of accepted papers should be ready for publication by the
end of 2006.

For any clarification please contact Andrea Omicini at the address
above.