DWTA'97

Dartmouth Workshop on Transportable Agents

September 19-20, 1997
Dartmouth College
Hanover,NH


If you are attending the workshop, you need to fill out and send in the registration form. The early registration deadline is September 5.

After a greatly successful 1996 workshop, we are happy to host another workshop on transportable agents.

What are transportable agents?

Agents are programs that can act autonomously. Transportable (or "mobile") agents are agents that can migrate from host to host across the network and interact with other agents. The goal of the workshop is to identify and discuss the scientific and engineering challenges that must be met in an effective mobile-agent system; such a system should provide flexible, efficient, uniform and reliable access to dynamically changing resources in unreliable, heterogeneous networks. The foundations of transportable agents are currently being developed in several technical communities-- artificial intelligence, distributed systems, and programming languages-- with very little interaction and feedback.

Our forum will bring together prominent researchers from these three communities to define a unified long-term vision and a short-term list of scientific challenges. A unified vision will focus current agent research and encourage collaboration among the different communities. Late September is beautiful in northern New Hampshire and Vermont. We hope you can come!

Final schedule

The workshop begins on Friday evening with a keynote speech by John Ousterhout, followed by a reception. On Saturday, topical discussions will be led by Joel Saltz (UMD), Danny Lange (General Magic), Tuomas Sandholm (Washington University), Tim Finin (UMBC), Greg Jorstad (Lockheed-Martin), Victor Lesser (UMass), and Michael Wellman (U. Michigan).

How you can attend

Attendance is by invitation only, but the invitation process is reasonably straightforward.

We encourage agent-system builders, agent programmers, and people who have thought a lot about agents, to attend. So that we can all know each other's background before the workshop, please submit (by email)

  1. a one-page abstract describing your interest in transportable agents (e.g., an agent that you are developing that might be amenable to transportable-agent technology, or a transportable-agent system they have developed), and
  2. a short bio of each potential attendee from your project
  3. an indication of whether you would like to present a poster at the Saturday-night reception
To maintain the workshop atmosphere, we reserve the right to limit attendance if necessary. You should send your application by August 7, 1997. If space allows, late applications will be accepted on a first-come, first-served basis.

Poster session. On Saturday evening the reception will be held in a room surrounded by posters presented by attendees. If you're interested, let us know.

Registration

If you have been invited and decide to attend the workshop, you need to fill out and send in the registration form. There is a fee for the workshop. To get the lowest fee, you must send in the registration form by September 5.

Proceedings

There will be no formal proceedings. We will put all the invitees' abstracts onto the Web, so you can learn about their research that way.

Directions and Housing

Dartmouth College is located in Hanover, New Hampshire. The closest airports are Lebanon, New Hampshire; Manchester, New Hampshire; Burlington, Vermont; and Boston, Massachusetts. The workshop will be held at the Thayer School of Engineering (Cummings Hall), which is in grid square C4 of the campus map. The Hanover green, which is mentioned in the driving instructions, is the big empty space in grid squares E5 and F5.

If you do not want to rent a car, there are other ways to get from Boston to Hanover. The Dartmouth MiniCoach (1-800-637-0123) has four or five round-trips each day, directly from Logan airport in Boston to the Dartmouth campus and back again. Vermont Transit (1-800-552-8737) is the local Greyhound affiliate and has some Logan-Dartmouth connections.

There are many hotels in the area, but they fill quickly during this popular "leaf" season in northern New Hampshire. Book a room now!


Workshop Chairs

George Cybenko, David Kotz, Daniela Rus

Dartmouth research on transportable agents


The 1996 workshop was a great success!


Sponsors

IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Operating Systems and Application Environments

Dartmouth Center for Mobile Computing

Nortel (Northern Telecom)

Air Force Office of Scientific Research MURI grant F49620-97-1-0382


David Kotz -- Last modified: Fri Jul 25 19:10:57 1997