Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies

The 10th International Workshop on Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies (DALT 2012) will be held as part of the workshop programme of the 11th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2012) at Valencia, Spain, in June 2012.

DALT is a well-established forum for researchers and practitioners interested in exploiting declarative approaches for tackling the great challenges that today's distributed applications raise. Distributed systems can encompass highly autonomous components, working in open, dynamic, and unpredictable environments. Designing, developing, testing, and maintaining such systems calls for models and technologies that ensure predictability and allow for the verification of critical properties, while still maintaining flexibility. Rapid prototyping and knowledge representation and management are often important in the design and development of such systems. The design of technologies, that can satisfy these requirements, poses important and tough challenges: declarative approaches have the potential to offer solutions which satisfy the needs, arising at each engineering stage. For this reason declarative approaches have gained more and more attention in important application areas such as the semantic web, service- oriented computing, security, and electronic contracting. DALT's natural vocation is to provide a forum which, on the one hand, supports the transfer of declarative paradigms and techniques to the broader community of agent researchers and practitioners (and beyond), and on the other, brings the issue of designing complex agent systems to the attention of researchers working on declarative languages and technologies. Since there are few computational environments as complex as the web, with its "Future Internet" and "Web 2.0-3.0-4.0" facets, DALT 2012 will have, as a special interest topic, those future web trends where declarative languages and technologies for multi-agent systems will play an effective role. In particular, social computing (models of social interactions, trust, commitments, and contracts; social environments based on declarative technologies) and its related semantic issues (explicit representation of knowledge and mechanisms for allowing societies of agents to reason with and about this knowledge). At the same time, the theoretical aspects underlying multi-agent systems will remain a major topic of interest for the workshop.

Following the success of DALT 2003 in Melbourne, DALT 2004 in New York, DALT 2005 in Utrecht, DALT 2006 in Hakodate, DALT 2007 in Honolulu, DALT 2008 in Hestoril, DALT 2009 in Budapest, DALT 2010 in Toronto, and DALT 2011 in Taipei, DALT 2012 will be of particular interest to multi-agent system researchers working in computational logic and formal methods in general, and to scientists from neighbouring communities considering declarative approaches to cope with the increasing complexity of distributed software.

The post-proceedings of DALT 2003 (LNAI 2990), DALT 2004 (LNAI 3476), DALT 2005 (LNAI 3904), DALT 2006 (LNAI 4327), DALT 2007 (LNAI 4897), DALT 2008 (LNAI 5397), DALT 2009 (LNAI 5948), DALT 2010 (LNAI 6619), DALT 2011 have been published by Springer-Verlag in the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series.