To be held July 18, 1999, Orlando, Florida, USA, in conjunction with AAAI-99, the 1999 National Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

Sponsored by AAAI (American Association for Artificial Intelligence).

aaai@aaai.org , http://www.aaai.org , Menlo Park, CA, USA, phone: 650-328-3123 .

Workshop Proceedings to be available as a AAAI Technical Report, published by AAAI/MIT Press.

finin@cs.umbc.edu, http://umbc.edu/~finin,

grosof@us.ibm.com (alt. grosof@cs.stanford.edu),

http://www.research.ibm.com/people/g/grosof ,

jklabrou@cs.umbc.edu , http://www.cs.umbc.edu/~jklabrou

leora@watson.ibm.com , http://www-formal.stanford.edu/leora

Michael Wellman, Univ. Michigan (Ann Arbor),

wellman@umich.edu , http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/wellman

Electronic commerce is an exciting and fast-growing area. We were pleased with the large number of submissions to present and to participate.

The accepted papers clustered into four large themes – see the Preliminary Workshop Schedule below.

In order to stimulate discussion and increase breadth, we chose to have a large number of short presentations.

Pointer: there will be another, topically closely related, workshop held at IJCAI-99 on Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce. Its URL is http://ecommerce.media.mit.edu/amec99/ .

Encouraged by Devika Subramanian (AAAI-99 program chair), Benjamin Grosof formulated the initial workshop concept and the initial workshop proposal to AAAI, and recruited the rest of the organizing committee.

Tim Finin and Yannis Labrou ran the workshop e-mail addresses and Website, and handled most of the process of receiving submissions, sending notifications, and receiving final camera-ready.

The organizing committee themselves did all the reviewing of paper submissions, shared evenly.

Thanks most of all to the workshop authors and other participants, for their interesting and vital contributions.

-- Tim Finin & Benjamin Grosof, workshop chairs

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), data mining 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

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.

(sequenced alphabetically by first author, within each category)

Marc Torrens i Arnal and Boi Faltings

Danny B. Lange, Tom Hill, and Mitsuru Oshima

Hien Nguyen and Peter Haddawy

David M. Pennock and Eric Horvitz

Alun Preece, Kit Hui and Peter Gray

Daniel M. Reeves, Benjamin N. Grosof, Michael P. Wellman, and Hoi Y. Chan

Tuomas Sandholm

Peter R. Wurman, Michael P. Wellman

Christopher H. Brooks and Edmund H. Durfee

Robin Burke

Robert Driskill, John Riedl

Richard Goodwin, Pinar Keskinocak, Sesh Murthy, Frederick Wu, Rama Akkiraju

Junling Hu, Daniel Reeves and Hock-Shan Wong

Yury Smirnov

Rongming Sun, Bei-Tseng (Bill) Chu, Robert Wilhelm, Jian Yao

Pedro Szekely, Bob Neches, David Benjamin, Jinbo Chen and Craig Milo Rogers

Negotiating Agents for Supply Chain Management

Ye Chen, Yun Peng, Tim Finin, Yannis Labrou and Scott Cost

Leona F. Fass

Eugene C. Freuder and Richard J. Wallace

Nicola Guarino, Claudio Masolo, and Guido Vetere

Jiuru Hu, Jerome Yen, Alan Chung

Deborah L. McGuinness

Cyrus F. Nourani

Yuko Sakurai, Makoto Yokoo and Shigeo Matsubara

Mallory Selfridge

Ronald R. Yager

8:20-8:30 Workshop Welcome by workshop chairs

8:30 - 9:15 Invited Talk on E-Commerce Challenges for AI: 30 min plus discussion 15 min

Mark Fox (U. Toronto, Novator Inc.)

9:15 - 10:40 SUPPLY CHAIN, PROCUREMENT, and CONSTRAINTS

9:15-9:30 Intelligent Decision Support for the e-Supply Chain

Richard Goodwin, Pinar Keskinocak, Sesh Murthy, Frederick Wu, Rama Akkiraju

9:30-9:45 Controlling the Selection of Vendors in an Automated Purchasing System

Pedro Szekely, Bob Neches, David Benjamin, Jinbo Chen and Craig Milo Rogers

9:45-10:10 KRAFT: Supporting Virtual Organizations through Knowledge Fusion

Alun Preece, Kit Hui and Peter Gray

10:10-10:25 Applying AI to Manufacturing: Linear Order Promising and Production Planning

Yury Smirnov

10:25-10:40 A CSP-based Model for Integrated Supply Chains

Rongming Sun, Bei-Tseng (Bill) Chu, Robert Wilhelm, Jian Yao

10:40 - 11:10 BREAK

11:10 - 12:25 IMPLEMENTATION, SPECIFICATION, CONTRACTS

11:10-11:35 Smart clients: Constraint Satisfaction as a Paradigm for Scaleable

Intelligent Information Systems

Marc Torrens i Arnal and Boi Faltings

11:35-12:00 A New Internet Agent Scripting Language Using XML

Danny B. Lange, Tom Hill, Mitsuru Oshima

12:00-12:25 Toward a Declarative Language for Negotiating Executable Contracts

Daniel M. Reeves, Benjamin N. Grosof, Michael P. Wellman, and Hoi Y. Chan

12:25- 12:55 DISCUSSION (topic TBD)

12:55 - 2:15 LUNCH

2:15 - 3:35 AUCTION SERVING and MARKET FORMATION

2:15-2:40 eMediator: A Next Generation Electronic Commerce Server

Tuomas Sandholm

2:40-2:55 Agent Service for Online Auctions

Junling Hu, Daniel Reeves and Hock-Shan Wong

2:55-3:20 Equilibrium Prices in Bundle Auctions

Peter R. Wurman, Michael P. Wellman

3:20-3:35 Congregation Formation in Information Economies

Christopher H. Brooks and Edmund H. Durfee

3:35 - 4:05 BREAK

4:05 - 5:25 RECOMMENDER SYSTEMS

4:05-4:20 Recommender Systems for E-Commerce: Challenges and Opportunities

Robert Driskill, John Riedl

4:20-4:35 Integrating Knowledge-based and Collaborative-filtering Recommender Systems

Robin Burke

4:35-5:00 DIVA: Applying Decision Theory to Collaborative Filtering

Hien Nguyen and Peter Haddawy

5:00-5:25 Analysis of the Axiomatic Foundations of Collaborative Filtering

David M. Pennock and Eric Horvitz

5:25 - 5:55 DISCUSSION (topic TBD)