International Workshop Series CIA on

 Cooperative
Information Agents


Events Mission Background
Awards Topics Contact

NEWS:

After twelve years, the annual international workshop series on cooperative information agents will close with its 2008 edition in Prague.
The research area of intelligent information agents is established within both the scientific community and the business world. But it has been a long way
to that since the term “intelligent information agent” has been coined in the seminal work of Mike Papazoglou and his colleagues in 1992. In fact, the
CIA workshop series was founded in 1997 to complement the conference series on cooperative information systems (CoopIS) at that time with a
small but distinguished workshop forum for all people interested in research and development of intelligent information agents for the Internet, the Web
and – later on – the Semantic Web. Since the beginning of the 1990s, an increasing number and variety of agent-based information systems in different
application domains such as e-health, e-government, bioinformatics, e-commerce, and logistics has been deployed. In addition, most of the original topics
of the CIA series have been taken up by major scientific conferences in relevant disciplines like intelligent agents and multi-agent systems, service-oriented
computing, information systems, and P2P computing by default now. Recently, the CIA series has been top-ranked 55 from 620 considered conferences
in the domain Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (www.cs-conference-ranking.org, July 21, 2008).
So, personally, I think the series did successfully accomplish its mission in support of inter-disciplinary research of intelligent information agents.
Whether there will be a need and demand to continue with it or to join forces for a similar enterprise in the future remains to be seen; it largely
depends on the further evolution of the field and its sufficient coverage by other major events.
Therefore, I would like to very gratefully thank all authors of submissions, the participants, the invited speakers, as well as each of the brave local
organisation teams, the program co-chairs, and the program committee members of all editions for their absolutely impressive and encouraging
collaboration in various ways in the past dozen of years. My particular thanks go to the sponsors of the series for their generous support,
and last but not least to the incredible team at Springer for publishing all proceedings as volumes of the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence
(LNAI) series. Thank you!! 
With best wishes, Matthias Klusch

The CIA workshop series has been top-ranked 55 from 620 considered conferences in the domain Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning;
its EIC value (Estimated Impact of Conference; normalized to be in the range 0.00-1.00 - the closer the number to 1.00, the better the conference)
 is 0.55. Weights used to determine EIC: CP: 30% - citation of papers; RR: 30% - quality of referees' reports; RS: 25% - availability of resources
to students by the conference (funds for travel, fees, hotel); JA: 10% - conference papers accepted/appeared in reputable journals after the conference;
IN: 5% indexing. Source: www.cs-conference-ranking.org/conferencerankings/ (Topics II, status as of July 21, 2008)



  Aim

The objective of the international workshop series on cooperative information agents (CIA) is to provide a small but lively and inter-disciplinary forum for researchers, software developers, and managers to get informed about, present, and discuss latest high-quality results in advancements of theory and practice of agent-based intelligent and cooperative information systems, and applications for current and future open information and service environments in the Internet, Web, and semantic Web. Each event of the series is designed to offer the registered participants the following items for a very reasonable registration fee
The series has been founded in 1997; since then the events of the series are held annually at different locations across the world (though, up to date mainly in Europe). The proceedings of the series are regularly published as volumes of the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI) series of the Springer Verlag.

  Background

One key challenge of developing advanced agent-based information systems is to balance the autonomy of networked data and knowledge sources with the potential payoff of leveraging them by the appropriate use of intelligent information agents on the Internet. An information agent is a computational software entity that has access to one or multiple, potentially heterogeneous, and geographically and logically distributed data and information sources, pro-actively acquires, mediates, and maintains relevant information on behalf of its human users or other agents, preferably just-in-time. In other words, it is supposed to manage and overcome the difficulties associated with information overload in the open and exponentially growing Internet and Web. Originally, the term "information agent" has been coined by Papzoglou in his seminal work on intelligent cooperative information systems (1992).
Depending on the application and tasks at hand intelligent information agents may collaborate in open, networked data and information environments to provide added value to a variety of applications in different domains. Thus, research and development of information agents is inherently inter-disciplinary: It requires expertise in information retrieval, artificial intelligence, database systems, human-computer interaction, and Internet and Web technology.
Recommended Web site for further information, and related activities in this research domain:
  Topics of the Series

All topics related to R&D of intelligent information agents are covered by the CIA workshop series. These topics include but are not limited to

  Events of the Series

12th International Workshop CIA-2008
Prague, Czech Republic, September 10 - 12, 2008
11th International Workshop CIA-2007
Delft, The Netherlands, September 19 - 21, 2007
10th International Workshop CIA-2006
Edinburgh, UK, September 11 - 13, 2006
 9th International Workshop CIA-2005
Koblenz, Germany, September 11 - 13, 2005
as integral part of the MATES-2005 conference:
 8th International Workshop CIA-2004,
Erfurt, Germany, September 27 - 29. 2004
 7th International Workshop CIA-2003,
Helsinki, Finland, August 27 - 29, 2003
 6th International Workshop CIA-2002,
Madrid, Spain, September 18 - 20, 2002 5th International Workshop CIA-2001,
Modena, Italy, September 6 - 8, 2001 4th International Workshop CIA-2000
Boston, USA, July 4 - 7, 2000
 3rd International Workshop CIA-1999,
Uppsala, Sweden, July 31 - August 2, 1999 2nd International Workshop CIA-1998
Paris, France, July 4 - 7, 1998
 1st International Workshop CIA-1997
Kiel, Germany, February 26 - 28, 1997

   Awards of the Series

Since 2001, the series issues a Best Paper Award, and a System Innovation Award, to acknowledge and further stimulate highly innovative research and development, respectively, in the domain of intelligent information agents.

Nominations for the best paper awards are to be done by the program committee in due course of the reviewing process; for the best paper award only submissions to the workshop are eligible for nomination. Nominations for the system innovation award can be placed either by the extended organisational board of the workshop (PC, chairs, sponsors) concerning some regular paper submitted to the workshop, or by the author(s)/developer(s) themselves via an explicit request for nomination sent to one of the co-chairs of the workshop. Each nominee is requested to demonstrate a running prototype of the nominated system at the workshop to all participants and the jury. Explicit request by author/developer (no need to submit a regular paper) is via submission of a brief description of the considered system of information agents (max. 4 pages, informal, including figures, references) in terms of its (1) core functionality, main techniques used, and (publicly available reference to) experimental results, and (2) a brief summary of the innovative features of your system in comparison to other existing systems. In addition, each submission including such a description may also be nominated by the extended organisational board.

Winners of the CIA Best Paper Award:

2007 (LNAI 4676)

"An Agent Architecture for Hybrid P2P Free-Text Search."
Avi Rosenfeld, Claudia Goldman, Gal Kaminka and Sarit Kraus (Bar-Ilan U, Israel)

2006 (LNAI 4149)

"Learning to Negotiate Optimally in Non-Stationary Environments"
 Vidya Narayanan, Nicholas R. Jenning  (U Southampton, UK)

2005 (LNAI 3550) Joint Best Paper Award with MATES 2005 Conference

"BSCA-P: Privacy Preserving Coalition Formation"
Bastian Blankenburg, Matthias Klusch (DFKI, Germany)

2004 (LNAI 3191)

"A Probabilistic Approach to Predict Peers' Performance in P2P Networks"
Zoran Despotovic, Karl Aberer (EPFL, Switzerland)

2003 (LNAI 2782)

“Ostensive Automatic Schema Mapping for Taxonomy-based Peer-to-Peer Systems”
by Yannis Tzitzikas and Carlo Meghini (Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell’ Informazione;
Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Pisa, Italy)

2002 (LNAI 2446)

"Acquiring an Optimal Amount of Information for Choosing from Alternatives"
by Rina Azoulay-Schwartz and Sarit Kraus (Israel, USA)

2001 (LNAI 2182)

"Optimality and Risk in Purchase at Multiple Auctions"
by Onn Shehory (IBM Research, Israel)

Winners of the CIA System Innovation Award:

2008

GENIUS: General Environment for Negotiation with Intelligent multi-purpose Usage Simulation.
Developed by Koen V. Hindriks, Catholijn M. Jonker, and Dmytro Tykhonov (The Netherlands).

2007

MAGARRO: A MultiAgent System for Physically based Rendering Optimization.
Developed by Carlos Gonzalez-Morcillo, Gerhard Weiss, Luis Jiménez, David Vallejo,
and Javier Albusac (Spain)

2006

Miracle: Market-Inspired Approach to Collaborative Learning
Developed By Jan Tozicka, Michal Jakobm Michal Pechoucek (TU Prague, Czech Republic)

2005

Bibster: A Semantics-based Bibliographic P2P System.
Developed by Jeen Broekstra, Marc Ehrig, Peter Haase, Frank van Harmelen, Maarten Menken, Peter Mika, Michal Plechawski, Pawel Pyszlak, Björn Schnizler, Ronny Siebes, Steffen Staab, Christoph Tempich (U Karlsruhe, VU Amsterdam)

Special Price "Best Innovation/Effort Relation":
GruSMA: An Agent-Based Knowledge Acquisition Platform.
 Developed by David Sánchez Ruenes, David Isern, Antonio Moreno (Spain)

2004

A-Globe: Agent Platform with Inaccessibility and Mobility Support
Developed by David Sislák, Milan Rollo, Michal Pechoucek (CTU, Czech Republic)

2003

ACCESS: An Agent System for Ubiquitous Service Delivery
Developed by Conor Muldoon, Gregory O' Hare, Donnacha Phelan, Robin Strahan, and Rem Collier (University College of Dublin, Ireland)

2002

First prize:
VPC: Virtual Private Community System,
Developed by T. Iwao, M. Okada, K. Kawashima, S. Matsumura, H. Kanda, S. Sakamoto, T. Kainuma, M. Amamiya (Fujitsu, Japan),
and
Mars&Venus: Competitive Information Recommendation System,
Developed by Y. Kitamura, T. Sakamoto, S. Tatsumi (Osaka U, Japan)

Third prize:
Tourists on the Move,
Developed by M. Laukkanen, H. Helin, H. Laamanen (Sonera Corporation, Finland)

2001

First prize:
LEAP - Enabling FIPA agents on small devices.
Developed by Federico Bergenti et al. (University of Parma, Italy)

Second prize:
Towards efficient and reliable agent communication in wireless environments.
Developed by Heikki Helin et al. (Sonera Corporation, Finland)




For more information on this workshop series, sponsorships, and hosting an event of the series,
please contact:

Dr. Matthias Klusch
German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence
Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3
66123 Saarbrücken, Germany
Phone: +49-681-302-5297
Fax: +49-681-302-2235
E-Mail: klusch@dfki.de

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