Announcing a special issue of
Computational Intelligence:

Agent Technology for Electronic Commerce

Economic activity, accelerated via Internet connections between human buyers and sellers, is accelerated further with software agents acting on behalf of the humans. Before this agent-mediated economic activity can be adopted and used successfully by non-expert humans, technologies of different types must be advanced. Existing AI techniques are often applicable.

• Search techniques must find products and services that match the user's needs, where the offerings may be described in different terms than the requirements, or not explicitly described.
  
  Internet search, user modeling, learning and natural language understanding are applicable.
• Products and services must be combined into packages that meet the users needs. The package may be a simple combination with some interdependence, such as reservations for dinner and a movie in an evening. Or the package can be a coordinated set of products and services that, when performed in a specified order, achieves some goal, such as a manufacturing supply chain.
  
  Relevant technologies include combinatorial search, planning and scheduling, temporal and spatial reasoning and reasoning about actions.
• Trust must be established, and negotiating techniques are needed to achieve a fair exchange of resources.
  
  Logics of beliefs, and optimization techniques are applicable.

This special issue aims to attract researchers concerned with incorporating AI techniques into the software agents that undertake commercial activities over the Internet.

Topics

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• trust, privacy, security of agents
• negotiations: bargaining, auctions
• emergent behaviour of agent societies: congestion, starvation
• adapability/personalization of agents, belief logics
• description logics, ontologies
• distributed reasoning by agents
• collaborative and competitive behaviour of multiple agents
• planning and scheduling by agents
• architectures: methodologies, frameworks, mobility of agents
• privacy and agents

Submission Instructions

Researchers interested in contributing a paper should send it electronically to Bruce.Spencer@nrc.ca. Please observe the Computational Intelligence submission guidelines. Paper lengths should not exceed 15 pages in Computational Intelligence.

Important Dates

Submission date: January 31, 2002

Notification of acceptance: Extended until April 6, 2002

Camera ready copies: April 30, 2002

Guest Editor

Bruce Spencer
Faculty of Computer Science
University of New Brunswick,

Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada

also
Institute for Information Technology – e-Business
National Research Council

Fredericton, New Brunswick
Email: Bruce.Spencer@nrc.ca

Guest Editorial Board

Virendra Bhavsar
Faculty of Computer Science
University of New Brunswick, Fredericton
Email: bhavsar@unb.ca

Jörg Denzinger
Department of Computer Science
University of Calgary
Email: denzinge@cpsc.ucalgary.ca

Ali Ghorbani
Faculty of Computer Science
University of New Brunswick, Fredericton
Email: ghorbani@unb.ca

Steve Marsh
Institute for Information Technology
National Research Council, Ottawa
Email: steve.marsh@iit.nrc.ca

Related Event

This special issue follows the NECAA workshop Novel E-Commerce Applications of Agents held at the AI2001 Conference in June 2001. Papers from that event, as well as new papers not from NECAA are welcome for submission to ATEC.

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