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<center>

<h2> Call for Participation </h2>

<h1>AI for Electronic Commerce</h1>

<h4>
AAAI-99 Workshop<br>
July 18/19, 1998<br>
Orlando, Florida
</h4>
</center>

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.

<p>

Recent significant progress in AI for electronic commerce includes:

<ul>

<Li> Practical shopping agents, including Web portal services, that use
knowledge representation, decision analysis, machine learning, and
information retrieval techniques.

<Li> Practical recommender services, e.g., e-storefronts that use
collaborative filtering.

<Li> Practical data mining by sellers to learn customer buying patterns

<li> Practical customer-service help, including agent techniques to
categorize and route e-mail, do case-based associative retrieval and
make suggestions

<li> 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.

<li> The theory and practice of auctions 

<Li> Agent communication languages, including negotiation languages
and protocols and knowledge interchange and the use of XML-encoded
domain ontologies and communication languages

<Li> Web information retrieval and information integration, including
using NLP, text analysis and machine learning

<li> Online product/service catalogs, e.g., techniques to aggregate
catalogs

</ul>

<p>

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

<ul>

<li> intelligent agents for EC, e.g., with rule-based or probabilistic
reasoning.

<li> knowledge representation to describe goods and services, e.g.: terms
and conditions, contractual agreements

<li> buyer and seller decision making, including pricing and bidding
brokering and matchmaking

<li> reputation, recommendation, and other third-party services

<li> promotions, advertising, and navigation of buyer attention

<li> intelligent presentation of information, e.g., customized to buyer
interests

<li> opportunities and timings of AI techniques in EC, e.g., relative to
other software techniques and relative to evolution of (real-world)
markets

<li> 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

</ul>


<h4> Format </h4>

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.

<h4> Attendance and submissions </h4>

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.

<p>

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 <a href="http://www.aaai.org">
http://www.aaai.org</a> for details).

<p>

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

<p>

Suggestions for discussion topics are invited and can be sent to <a
href="mailto:aiec@cs.umbc.edu">aiec@cs.umbc.edu</a>.


<h4> Workshop committee </h4>

<ul>

<li> <a href="http://umbc.edu/~finin">Tim Finin</a>, (chair),
University of Maryland Baltimore County, finin@cs.umbc.edu, phone:
410-455-3522, fax: 410-455-3969.
    
<li> <a href="http://www.research.ibm.com/people/g/grosof"> Benjamin
Grosof</a>, (chair), IBM T.J. Watson Research Center.  Phone:
914-784-7783, Fax: 914-784-7455

<li> <a href="http://www.cs.umbc.edu/~jklabrou"> Yannis Labrou</a>,
University of Maryland Baltimore County, jklabrou@cs.umbc.edu.

<li> <a href="http://www-formal.stanford.edu/leora"> Leora
Morgenstern</a>, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, leora@watson.ibm.com
    
<li> <a href="http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/wellman"> Michael
Wellman</a>, Univ. Michigan, wellman@umich.edu,
</ul>

<h4> For more information </h4> 

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


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