Human societies are self-organising and probably emerged in parallel with the evolution of language and development of cultural artefacts. This symposium will take as its topics:

• current research about the processes and preconditions for the emergence of human societies;
• experiments on artificial (i.e. computational) societies designed to shed light on generic processes of the emergence of societies;
• the application of anthropological and sociological knowledge to the design of emergent societies of artificial agents
• research on self-organising societies of embedded computational agents
• architectures for computational agents capable of inhabiting such societies

By 'society', we mean here a collection of interacting (human or computational) agents that share an external symbolic system (e.g. a 'language' and cultural symbols) and which possesses social structure (e.g. normatively enforced and shared rules of behaviour). Thus, contributions which consider for example the evolution of language; the development and imposition of norms; the emergence of patterned activity and their recognition by agents; and the design of socially responsive agents will be welcomed.

The symposium will last two days (14 - 15 April) and will immediately follow a related symposium on 'Socially inspired computing - engineering with social metaphors', as parts of a convention on Social Intelligence and Interaction in Animals, Robots and Agents organised by the AISB (the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour) at the University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield. The AISB convention as a whole will include 15 individual symposia of different lengths and topics at the same site. All meals and facilities are shared by the convention in common. More details about the convention can be found at their website, http://aisb2005.feis.herts.ac.uk/ . All symposium participants will have to register for the convention.

Programme Committee

• Gusz Eiben (Free University Amsterdam)
• Nigel Gilbert (University of Surrey)
• Andras Lorincz (Budapest)
• Ben Paechter (Napier University, Edinburgh)
• Paul Vogt (Tilburg University, University of Edinburgh)

Contributing

Papers of about 6 - 8 pages that respond to the topics listed above are invited. Papers should include an abstract of not more than 200 words and should be submitted as an anonymous PDF file (i.e. with name and affiliation details omitted) by email (including your name and contact details) to the Symposium organiser, Nigel Gilbert, at n.gilbert@soc.surrey.ac.uk, by 31 October 2004. Submissions will be acknowledged within 7 days.

Expressions of interest in attending the symposium (but without giving a paper) are also invited, in the form of an abstract of not more than 200 words indicting your background and interest in the subject of the symposium. Send these as plain text emails to the organiser.

Impotant dates

31 October 2004	Submissions due
22 November 2004	22 November 2004
17 December 2004	Camera ready copies due
14 January 2005	Early registration deadline
12-15 April 2005	AISB 2005 convention

It is likely that a selection of the papers will be published as a special section in the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/JASSS.html


Symposium URL:  http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/newties/emerging-art-soc.html