The Fourth International Conference on Autonomous Agents

Wiebe van der Hoek from the University of Utrecht was the tutorial chair. From proposals received, he selected 10 tutorials covering a wide range of topics: “Information Agent Technology for the Internet” (Matthias Klusch, DFKI); “User Modeling and Adaptive Interfaces” (Pat Langley, Daimler The Fourth International Conference on Autonomous Agents took place in Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain) from 3 to 7 June 2000, the first one held outside the United States. It had a similar attendance to previous years (435 attendees), thus opening the possibility of other conferences outside the United States. The program committee chairs were Maria Gini, the University of Minnesota, and Jeff Rosenschein, the Hebrew University in Israel. There were 199 submissions from 20 countries, from which 48 papers and 65 posters were selected. Gini managed to obtain some key sponsorship from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the National Science Foundation to support the travel expenses of more than 25 U.S. students. This support helped to raise the number of students attending the conference to around 120, providing evidence of the increasing interest in the field among young Ph.D. students. Eighteen students volunteered to help in the organization of the conference, assisting in the sessions and at the registration desk. The social events were well attended. Especially notable was the banquet held at the Hipostila room, a magnificent masterpiece by Antoni Gaud. You can see many pictures of the conference, including the banquet, at www.iiia.csic.es/agents2000. During the banquet, two conference paper awards were announced. The Best Student Paper Award was given to SongYee Yoon (MIT Media Lab) for “Motivation-Driven Learning for Interactive Synthetic Characters,” and the Best sanne); “On Minds and Agents: Social Intelligence in Animals and Artifacts” (Kerstin Dautenhahn, University of Reading); “Understanding Code Mobility” (Gian Pietro Picco, Polictecnico di Milano); “Agent Communication Languages: Past, Present, and Future” (Yannis Labrou and Tim Finin, both of University of Maryland); and “Agent-Oriented Software Engineering” (Mike Wooldridge, University of Liverpool, and Nick Jennings, Southampton University). From them, the most well attended were those given by Sen on learning agents and by Wooldridge and Jennings on agentoriented software engineering. In total, more than 200 people attended the tutorials.