AIEC99 Artificial Intelligence for Electronic Commerce AIEC99

Call for Participation

AI for Electronic Commerce

AAAI-99 Workshop
July 18/19, 1998
Orlando, Florida

Electronic commerce (EC) is the buying and selling of goods and services in cyberspace. Already a multi-billion-dollar segment of the world economy, it is a fast-growing and exciting field. This workshop addresses the challenges, opportunities, practical applications, and theoretical aspects of using AI in e-commerce. We particularly encourage submissions about practical applications and techniques, and about the newer area of business-to-business e-commerce, e.g., supply chains management.

Recent significant progress in AI for electronic commerce includes:

  • Practical shopping agents, including Web portal services, that use knowledge representation, decision analysis, machine learning, and information retrieval techniques.
  • Practical recommender services, e.g., e-storefronts that use collaborative filtering.
  • Practical data mining by sellers to learn customer buying patterns
  • Practical customer-service help, including agent techniques to categorize and route e-mail, do case-based associative retrieval and make suggestions
  • Theory of economic decision-making, markets, negotiations, and contracts, including from the viewpoints of resource-bounded intelligence, game theory, distributed AI, negotiation, probabilistic and uncertain reasoning, and decision analysis.
  • The theory and practice of auctions
  • Agent communication languages, including negotiation languages and protocols and knowledge interchange and the use of XML-encoded domain ontologies and communication languages
  • Web information retrieval and information integration, including using NLP, text analysis and machine learning
  • Online product/service catalogs, e.g., techniques to aggregate catalogs

We invite submissions about these and other areas, including, but not limited to:

  • intelligent agents for EC, e.g., with rule-based or probabilistic reasoning.
  • knowledge representation to describe goods and services, e.g.: terms and conditions, contractual agreements
  • buyer and seller decision making, including pricing and bidding brokering and matchmaking
  • reputation, recommendation, and other third-party services
  • promotions, advertising, and navigation of buyer attention
  • intelligent presentation of information, e.g., customized to buyer interests
  • opportunities and timings of AI techniques in EC, e.g., relative to other software techniques and relative to evolution of (real-world) markets
  • EC-relevant aspects of business processes in business-to-business buying and selling (e.g., corporate/government procurement decision-making and workflow), datamining and knowledge discovery, collaborative filtering, intelligent user modeling, e.g., of consumer browsing behavior, cooperative problem solving, natural language processing and advanced information retrieval techniques, and mobile agents

Format

The format of the workshop will be a mixture of presentations and discussions. Presentation time will be mostly devoted to papers, along with brief panels. Discussion time will total approximately one-third of overall workshop time. The first part of the workshop will focus more on practical applications, and the later part of the workshop will focus more on theory and discussion.

Attendance and submissions

The workshop will be limited to about 50 invited participants. To participate, you must submit a short statement (one or two pages) describing your relevant background and interests, including your contact information, especially Web/mail addresses.

Paper submissions of three kinds are invited: technical papers; position papers that describe opportunities and challenges (e.g., challenge problems); and application descriptions that focus on AI aspects. Paper submission length should be between 2500 and 5000 words (excluding references), and should follow the same format as of the main AAAI-99 conference (see http://www.aaai.org for details).

Submit your statement and optional paper by sending electronic copies (in pdf, postscript or MS Word) to aiec-submission@cs.umbc.edu by March 12, 1999. Contact one of the workshop chairs for information on submitting hard copy. Invitations will be made by March 26, 1999.

Suggestions for discussion topics are invited and can be sent to aiec@cs.umbc.edu.

Workshop committee

  • Tim Finin, (chair), University of Maryland Baltimore County, finin@cs.umbc.edu, phone: 410-455-3522, fax: 410-455-3969.
  • Benjamin Grosof, (chair), IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. Phone: 914-784-7783, Fax: 914-784-7455
  • Yannis Labrou, University of Maryland Baltimore County, jklabrou@cs.umbc.edu.
  • Leora Morgenstern, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, leora@watson.ibm.com
  • Michael Wellman, Univ. Michigan, wellman@umich.edu,

For more information

For more information, see the workshop web site at http://www.cs.umbc.edu/aiec or contact one of the workshop organizers. Information about the AAAI-99 conference and its workshop program is available at http://www.aaai.org .