Call for Papers IEEE Concurrency Special Series on ACTORS and AGENTS Guest Editors Dennis Kafura and Jean-Pierre Briot GENERAL DESCRIPTION Original papers are sought for a special series in IEEE Concurrency on Actors and Agents. Submitted papers may be research or survey articles, essays, or project descriptions. They may primarily address actors or agents. Accepted papers will appear in consecutive issues of IEEE Concurrency beginning with Fall 1997 and continuing through 1998. It is intended that the collection of accepted papers will represent a cross section of current work involving actors and agents. While the terms "actor" and "agent" are intended to be broadly interpreted for the purpose of this call, preference will be given to papers that use these concepts in a deep and rigorous way. Relevant characteristics of actors and agents include, but are not limited to: autonomy, identity, interaction, communication, coordination, mobility, persistence, protocols, distribution, and parallelism. For the purpose of clarity and comparison, each paper must explicitly define how the terms "actor" and "agent" is used in the paper. TOPIC AREAS Authors should ensure that the focus of their paper is appropriate for the primary readership of IEEE Concurrency: professionals involved with parallel or distributed computing. For both actors and agents, appropriate topics area include, but are not limited to: o CASE STUDIES AND APPLICATIONS complete, compelling, operational systems illustrating the role and benefit of actors/agents o LANGUAGES programming or scripting languages whose constructs explicitly model important structures of actors/agents or which allow actor/agent systems to be more easily developed in parallel and/or distributed environments o FRAMEWORKS, ARCHITECTURES organizations or macro-structures that have proven effective in the construction of existing, operational actor/agent systems o MODELS, SEMANTICS, THEORY formalisms that allow the behavior of individual or systems of actors/agents to be specified, manipulated, verified, or otherwise reasoned about o WWW AND INTERNET the use of actors and/or agents within the context of a global networked community to provide services, support collaboration, manage resources, locate and access information or services, etc. o PERFORMANCE strategies or results related to measuring or improving an important performance measure of actor/agent systems (e.g., network bandwidth, latency, execution time) o SYSTEMS SUPPORT low-level, kernel, or operating system services for concurrency, communication, resource management, scheduling, etc. that support the unique requirements of actor/agent systems in parallel and/or distributed environments o DESIGN generally useful principles, methodologies, patterns, techniques, guidelines, strategies, or heuristics for effectively structuring a system of actors/agents as demonstrated by their use in designing one or more operational systems o TESTING, VERIFICATION, VALIDATION, DEBUGGING techniques or tools for gaining confidence that an actor/agent system will operate as intended or identifying and locating the cause of deviations from the intended behavior Authors may seek further clarification or guidance on the appropriateness of a topic by consulting with the guest editors. Papers will not be accepted that focus on issues peripheral to the interests of the IEEE Concurrency readership. For example, a paper whose main contribution lies in artificial intelligence, language theory, or a specific application domain is not likely to be accepted. PRESENTATION AND FORMAT IEEE Concurrency favors a style of presentation that is active, direct, lively, and interesting writing that "tells a story." Articles are normally 5-10 magazine pages, equivalently 3,500 to 7,000 words or 15 to 30 double-spaced typewritten pages. All articles are peer reviewed. Essays and project descriptions should be about 1,500 to 3,000 words. All accepted papers will be edited in collaboration with the author by the IEEE Concurrency staff for copy, style, and content. IMPORTANT DATES Submissions to the actors/agents series will be accepted beginning with this announcement and until April 1998. Early submission is encouraged to ensure maximal consideration. IEEE Concurrency strives to get the first set of referee reports and make initial decisions in eight to ten weeks of submission. SUBMISSION PROCEDURE Manuscripts should be submitted to one of the two Guest Editors AND to the editor-in-chief of IEEE Concurrency. The Guest Editors contact information is given below. The editor-in-chief is: Professor Gul Agha Department of Computer Science 1304 W. Springfield Ave. University of Illinois Urbana, IL 61801 agha@cs.uiuc.edu (email) 217.333.1043 (Bonnie Howard, Secretary) Manuscripts may be submitted on paper via postal mail or electronically in Postscript form. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION This call and other information is available at the following: http://actor.cs.vt.edu/~kafura/IEEEConcurrency http://www-laforia.ibp.fr/~briot/IEEEConcurrency http://computer.org/pubs/p&dt/p&dt.htm or from the Guest Editors: Dr. Dennis Kafura Department of Computer Science Virginia Tech Blacksburg, VA 24061-0106 kafura@cs.vt.edu (email) 540.231.5568 (telephone) 540.231.6075 (Fax) Dr. Jean-Pierre Briot LIP6, UPMC - Case 169 4 place Jussieu 75252 Paris Cedex 05, France briot@lip6.fr (after July 1, 1997) or briot@laforia.ibp.fr (email) +33 (1) 44 27 36 67 (telephone) +33 (1) 44 27 70 00 (Fax)