CALL for PAPERS

[Maja Mataric]

                          CALL FOR PAPERS
      (http://www.cs.brandeis.edu:80/~maja/abj-special-issue/)

                       ADAPTIVE BEHAVIOR Journal

                          Special Issue on 

	      COMPLETE AGENT LEARNING IN COMPLEX ENVIRONMENTS

                    Guest editor:  Maja J Mataric
                 

                   Submission Deadline: June 1, 1996.

   Adaptive Behavior is an international journal published by MIT Press;
   Editor-in-Chief: Jean-Arcady Meyer, Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris.

In the last decade, the problems being treated in AI, Alife, and
Robotics have witnessed an increase in complexity as the domains under
investigation have transitioned from theoretically clean scenarios to
more complex dynamic environments.  Agents that must adapt in
environments such as the physical world, an active ecology or economy,
and the World Wide Web, challenge traditional assumptions and
approaches to learning.  As a consequence, novel methods for automated
adaptation, action selection, and new behavior acquisition have become
the focus of much research in the field.

This special issue of Adaptive Behavior will focus on situated agent
learning in challenging environments that feature noise, uncertainty,
and complex dynamics.  We are soliciting papers describing finished
work on autonomous learning and adaptation during the lifetime of a
complete agent situated in a dynamic environment.

We encourage submissions that address several of the following topics
within a whole agent learning system:

* learning from ambiguous perceptual inputs

* learning with noisy/uncertain action/motor outputs

* learning from sparse, irregular, inconsistent, and noisy
reinforcement/feedback

* learning in real time							

* combining built-in and learned knowledge 				

* learning in complex environments requiring generalization in state
representation

* learning from incremental and delayed feedback

* learning in smoothly or discontinuously changing environments

We invite submissions from all areas in AI, Alife, and Robotics that
treat either complete synthetic systems or models of biological
adaptive systems situated in complex environments.

Submitted papers should be delivered by June 1, 1996.  Authors
intending to submit a manuscript should contact the guest editor to
discuss paper suitability for this issue.  Use maja at cs.brandeis.edu or
tel: (617) 736-2708 or fax: (617) 736-2741.  Manuscripts should be
typed or laser-printed in English (with American spelling preferred)
and double-spaced. Both paper and electronic submission are possible,
as described below.  Copies of the complete Adaptive Behavior
Instructions to Contributors are available on request--also see the
Adaptive Behavior journal's home page at:
http://www.ens.fr:80/bioinfo/www/francais/AB.html.

For paper submissions, send five (5) copies of submitted papers (hard-copy
only) to:

Maja Mataric
Volen Center for Complex Systems
Computer Science Department
Brandeis University
Waltham, MA 02254-9110, USA

For electronic submissions, use Postscript format, ftp the file to
ftp.cs.brandeis.edu/incoming, and send an email notification to
maja at cs.brandeis.edu.

For a Web page of this call, and detailed ftp directions, see: 
http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~maja/abj-special-issue/