4A 2021 - 1st Workshop on Actors, Agents, Assistants, Avatars (4A'21)

The field of, broadly understood, agent technology is undergoing rapid changes. What was once envisioned, primarily, in research papers becomes reality. Over last few years we observe proliferation of personal assistants and avatars (sometimes considered under a joint umbrella of ChatBots). For instance, consider Siri, Cortana, Amazon Echo, or Google Assistant (to name the most popular). They can help in different activities, but a lot of work remains before they reach full potential. Furthermore, actors start to materialize in real-world applications – as a promising approach to implement large-scale distributed systems. It is also worthy noticing that avatars, humans and smart things can cooperate as a community that instantiates, contributes to and exploits various aspects of collective intelligence. Here, observe that agents can play very relevant role in the context of implementing, for example, intelligence of smart devices, which interact with each other and with humans, by common communication channels and, possibly even, social networks. At the same time, software tools that can be used to realize 4A systems have reached maturity and are surrounded by active user communities.
Topics
To recognize the current trends we have decided to develop a new workshop that will cover all aspects concerning the 4A’s. Therefore, we welcome submissions of original papers concerning the following topics (the list is not exhaustive and deliberately provided on a meta-level):
Actors, as an approach to design and (efficiently) implement distributed systems
Current perspectives on software agents and multi-agent systems
Design and implementation of assistants
ChatBot design, implementation and use • Avatars for today and tomorrow
Theoretical foundations of 4A-based systems • 4A-based simulations (with application to real-world use cases, in particular)
Case studies, applications and experiences with 4A’s (in real-world, in particular)