Brief Bio
Yves Demazeau received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at INPG Grenoble in 1986 and his Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches at the same university in 2001. He is currently CNRS Research Fellow since 1988 and External Professor at the USD Faculty of Science and Engineering since 2002. He is member and the coordinator of the MAGMA research group on Multi-Agent Systems at the LIG (Grenoble Computing Lab, former Leibniz) since 1990, and external member of the MIP Institute in Odense since its creation in 1997. He has been Visiting Professor at VUB Brussels in 1989 and Odense University in 1994.

Yves Demazeau has been active in the research and development of multi-agent systems for 15 years. He has edited 13 books or proceedings (e.g. Principes et architecture des systèmes multi-agents Hermes, Systèmes Multi-Agents (ARAGO 29) Lavoisier), has authored 98 papers and has given more than 38 invited lectures, 104 seminars, and 22 tutorials in this research area. From design to development of multi-agent systems, his main research contributions are the introduction of interaction protocols for agent communication languages, the introduction of organisations as a ground component of multi-agent systems, in the overall VOWELS multi-agent oriented framework. He is involved in the development of several large-scale applications (e.g. CEC-IT AGENT about map generalisation, RNRT 2001 Agentcities France about web services, RNTL 2001 PARI about interactive games)

With a close connection to his research interests, Yves Demazeau has advised 37 MSc and 15 PhD theses. He has been teaching multi-agent systems in several places in Western Europe (UJF-INPG Grenoble, UL Luxembourg, UPD Paris, UPM Madrid, USD Odense,) and in Southern America (UFC Fortaleza, UFRGS Porto Alegre, UNICEN Tandil) for more than 10 years.

Yves Demazeau is serving on the program committees of many conferences and workshops. He was the co-originator in 1989 of the MAAMAW workshop series — program cochair for its 10th and last issue MAAMAW’01 — and in 1999 of the CEEMAS workshop series — program cochair for its 2nd issue CEEMAS’01 —. He was cofounder of the ICMAS conference series — program cochair for the 1st in 1995, general chair for its 3rd issue ICMAS'98, also of the overall Agents' World event —. He has been member of the Board of the International Foundation on Multi-Agent Systems (IFMAS) from 1998 until 2002, and the co-originator and research coordinator from 1998 until 2002 of Agentlink, the CEC European Network of Excellence in the area of (multi-) agent-based computing.

Yves Demazeau is serving as editorial board member for the Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems (JAAMAS Kluwer), Revue d'Intelligence Artificielle (RIA Hermes), and of the book series on Multi-Agent Systems, Artificial Societies and Simulated Organisations (MASA Kluwer). .


Abstract
Multi-agent systems (MAS) have now existed for more than 20 years… In the first 10 years, the community was asked to build usable MAS… In the following 10 years, it was asked to build useful MAS… It is now time to build MAS that are regularly used. This mainly concerns specifying: the purpose of the domain, and the purpose of the user.

In this lecture, we will first discuss the VOWELS paradigm (Agent, Environment, Interaction, Organisation) as was introduced for design purposes in the 90’s. We show how it has evolved from design to programming to contribute to the trend of multi-agent oriented programming. Such a traditional way of design and programming multi-agents has been highly successful and we illustrate this with two examples from geographical information systems and reconfigurable modular robotics.

We then focus on the purpose of the domain and show how the design of MAS can be so different moving from computer science to economic sciences. The evolution of the MAS paradigm beyond that is questionable. We then focus on the purpose of the user. The user has been highly neglected in the design of MAS for the last 20 years. He or she should take a better place. We will discuss the role of the user within the VOWELS paradigm and in interactive games. We will illustrate it through two examples in playware and artistic creation.

Playing with the vowels and including the user is not only an exercise; it also contributes to the evolution of computing towards creativity concerns, and more generally to the service to the person. This line of thought is driving our work agenda for the next years as well as pushing the MAS community towards practical applications.

Brief Bio
Tim Finin is a Professor in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department at UMBC, the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Finin is a member of the UMBC ebiquity group where he is working on projects involving social media, the semantic web, intelligent agents, and pervasive computing. He has over 30 years of experience in the applications of AI to information systems and intelligent interfaces and is currently working on social media, the semantic web, intelligent agents and mobile computing. He holds degrees from MIT and the University of Illinois and has held positions at Unisys, the University of Pennsylvania, and the MIT AI Laboratory. He has authored over 270 refereed publications and an editor in chief of the Journal of Web Semantics. He helped lead the development of the KQML agent communication language and particiated in the design of the the OWL language for the Semantic Web. He has organized several major conferences, chaired the UMBC Computer Science Department, and served as a AAAI councilor and member of the Computing Research Association board of directors.


Abstract
Twenty years ago Tim Berners-Lee proposed a distributed hypertext system based on standard Internet proto-cols. The Web that resulted fundamentally changed the ways we share information and services, both on the public Internet and within organizations. That original proposal contained the seeds of another effort that has not yet fully blossomed: a Semantic Web designed to enable computer programs to share and understand structured and semi-structured information easily. We will review the evolution of the idea and technologies to realize a Web of Data and describe how we are exploiting them to enhance information retrieval and in-formation extraction. A key resource in our work is Wikitology, a hybrid knowledge base of structured and unstructured information extracted from Wikipedia.

Brief Bio
Vicente J. Botti received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the Polytechnical University of Valencia, Spain, in 1982 and 1990 respectively. He is currently Full Professor of Computer Science and Vicerrector at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain. His scientific areas of interest include multi-agent systems and artificial intelligence (in these areas have developed their own models, architectures and applications), having published over 300 scientific articles in scientific journals and conferences in these areas, in concrete about multi-agent system platforms, MAS development methodologies, Virtual Organizations, Open Multiagent Systems, Service Oriented Organizations and Agreement Tecnologies. He is head of the Research Group of Information Technology and Artificial Intelligence (GTI-IA). He is and has been principal research of several national and international research projects (CICYT, MC & T, ESPRIT, etc), and various technology transfer projects. He is currently one of the three principal researchs of the project Ingenio Consolider 2010 ‘Agreement Technologies’ and the principal research of the project Prometeo ‘Advances on Agreement Technologies for Computational Entities’. He has participated as a member and chaired several committees of scientific conferences in his areas of interest (AAMAS, EUMAS, HoLoMAS, CEEMA, IDEAL, ATT, COIN, CAEPIA, CCIA, ICAART, IWPAAMS ....). He has worked closely with the scientific communities of Artificial Intelligence and Multiagent Systems as Chairman of the Organizing Committee of the 16th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2004) and of the 9th European Workshop on Modeling Autonomous Agents in a Multiagent World, MAAMAW'99.


Abstract
With the new generation of distributed systems a new paradigm emerges: Technology Agreement. Autonomy, interaction, mobility and openness are the characteristics that the paradigm will cover from a theoretical and practical perspective. Semantic alignment, negotiation, argumentation, virtual organizations, learning, real time, and several other technologies will provide the tools to define, specify and verify such systems. The new paradigm will be structured around the concept of agreement between computational entities. These agreements must be consistent with the policy context in which they are established and will, once accepted, that entites will call for mutual services and compliance. An entity, by virtue of being autonomous, may choose to comply or not an agreement, and they should meet an obligation when it is infered from the agreements made. Security on execution will be based on measures of trust and reputation. These measures will help in the decision-making process for institutions to determine with whom to interact and accept terms of agreement.

Brief Bio
Peter D. Karp is director of the Bioinformatics Research Group within the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI International. Dr. Karp has authored more than 100 publications in bioinformatics and computer science. He received the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1989, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Center for Biotechnology Information.

Dr. Karp is the bioinformatics architect of the EcoCyc and MetaCyc databases. He has developed algorithms for visualization of metabolic pathways, and for prediction of metabolic pathways from genome data. His research interests include metabolic pathway bioinformatics, genome annotation, scientific visualization, biological ontologies, and database interoperation.


Abstract
BioCyc is a collection of 500 scientific knowledge bases (KBs) that describe metabolic pathway and genome information from all domains of life. Pathway Tools is an extensive software system for developing, querying, and analyzing knowledge bases that couple metabolic pathway information with genome information. We present a paradigm for developing large-scale, high-value KBs and argue that the AI community should foster many more such efforts.

Knowledge base content is assembled by coupling automated inference with manual entry by professional curators using domain-specific interactive editing tools. We discuss reasons to be skeptical of wiki or crowd-sourcing alternatives. One KB within the BioCyc collection, MetaCyc, includes information from 21,000 scientific articles. Data are made freely and openly available through several channels including a Web site that receives 350,000 page views per month by scientist users. The Web site provides extensive query and visualization capabilities to allow users to interrogate the data, and to comprehend this complex information space. Visualization capabilities include automatic layout of individual metabolic pathways (which are coupled sequences of biochemical reactions), of complete metabolic networks, and of cellular regulatory networks. One set of data analysis tools supports analysis of experimental data in the context of these cellular networks. Another set of data analysis tools performs network analyses such as identification of likely drug targets, and prediction of likely growth media for the organism.

All KBs share a common ontology, and were developed using a frame-based knowledge representation system called Ocelot. Ocelot is implemented in Common Lisp and uses a relational database management system for persistent storage. It supports multiple concurrent users through an optimistic concurrency control protocol. A transaction logging facility stores all KB updates for future inspection, and also allows earlier states of a KB to be reconstructed. These database issues have been of much greater practical significance than traditional KR issues such as the use of a classifier.

Brief Bio
Amílcar Cardoso received his PhD in Informatics Engineering in 1993 and the Habilitation in 2007, both at the University of Coimbra. He serves as Associate Professor at the Dep. of Informatics Engineering of the University of Coimbra, where he teaches Artificial Intelligence, Computational Creativity and Digital Design topics. He is the Director of the R&D Centre for Informatics and Systems (CISUC), funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, where he also coordinates the Cognitive and Media Systems Group.
He has developed, in the nineties, pioneering work on Computational Creativity (CC), an area where since then he has assumed relevant organizational and networking roles: Chair of the Working Group on CC of the COST Action 282 (2001-2003), co-founder of the Creative Systems Workshops series (2001-2003), member of the Steering Committee of the International Joint Workshops on CC and, more recently, of the International Conference on Computational Creativity (2006-now).
His main current research interests also include Affective Computing and MAS, particularly in contexts of creative systems, human-machine interaction, automatic music composition and social simulation.


Abstract
The study of creativity is attracting a growing community of computer science researchers, seeking for theories, models, mechanisms and techniques that may support computational approaches to the phenomenon. This research is motivated by the awareness that computing systems that display or promote creativity have potential advantages in a wide range of application areas where there is the need to explore vast search spaces in divergent ways, and where surprising answers are likely to be welcome. Product design, marketing, arts and scientific discovery are examples of such application areas.

The importance of creativity in the processes of innovation makes its effective corporate use and availability a competitive advantage in a global economy where differentiation is a key success factor. The promotion of creative abilities, one of the primary motivations for the scientific study of creativity, is a long-standing and strategic endeavor in organizations and has a potential for considerable impact on business and educational contexts. Efforts have been increasingly invested to this aim during the last years by intervening at the personal, organizational and societal factors that condition creativity development.

Computational environments, as integral part of the ecosystems where most current innovation processes develop, have great potential to enhance creativity, e.g., by providing knowledge in context and fitted to user needs, by providing communication channels to collaborate and share experiences over social networks, or by offering tools to support specific aspects of the creative process, like idea generation. However, the hypothesis of having the computer systems playing a pro-active creative role in the innovation process, either autonomously or in close co-operation with humans, has not been sufficiently explored.

One of the possible explanations for this lies in the observation that computer science research and industry have invested enormous efforts for decades to make computer applications robustly deterministic, predictable and immune to noise, although adaptive to environmental changes. In this context, the idea of developing systems with the capacity to exhibit autonomous creative behavior can seem esoteric, impractical and even undesirable.

On the other hand, it is still surprisingly common the view of creativity as an intrinsically inexplicable phenomenon, the result of an innate intuition or even a sort of divine inspiration. The inspirational and romantic views, as Boden called them, are deeply rooted on a huge unawareness about what science has achieved to help understanding Creativity as a facet of Human Intelligence. There is significant research on Creativity at least since the Industrial Revolution, and many fundamental contributions spread across the 20th century. The view of creativity as a facet of human intelligence, which resulted mostly from the work of Guilford on the Structure of Intellect, has motivated further research intended to produce explanation models of the phenomenon, training and stimulating techniques, measurement instruments, etc.

In this talk we present some basic concepts and terminology of Computational Creativity, and refer to some inspiring previous research in the light of four complimentary perspectives of analysis: the creative process, the creator, the product of creativity and the environment where creativity develops. We overview some proposals of formal and computational models of creativity, and examine the application of specific computational techniques to the implementation of creative systems and tools. A discussion on the main current challenges of Computational Creativity and potential application domains is also included.