The W3C will hold a workshop on Frameworks for Semantics in Web Services 9-10 June 9-10, 2005 at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) in Innsbruck, Austria. Position papers must be submitted to obtain an invitation to participate and are due by 22 APril 2005.

A one-day Workshop on Ambient Intelligence - Agents for Ubiquitous Environments will be held in 25 or 26 July 2005 in Ultrecht, The Netherlands in conjunction with the 2005 Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems. Submitted papers are due 14 March, 2005.

The merging of virtual environments, mobile communication and sensors, allows the emergence of a new vision: Ambient Intelligence, a pervasive and unobtrusive intelligence in the surrounding environment supporting the activities and interactions of the users. Ambient intelligence appears poised to cause remarkable changes in the way
people live. With digital information, the ease of interaction between humans and computers can be greatly increased by broadening the interface media available and allowing mobile and portable communication to become free of inhibiting wires and stationary units. The result of ambient intelligence is ultimately a more empowered computer with the benefits of added convenience, time and cost savings, and possibilities for increased safety, security, and entertainment. This technology has the potential to significantly impact business and government processes, as well as private life.

Ambient Intelligence represents a vision of the future where we shall be surrounded by electronic environments, sensitive and responsive to people. Ambient intelligence technologies are expected to combine concepts of ubiquitous computing and intelligent systems putting humans in the centre of technological developments. Ambient
Intelligence emphasises greater user-friendliness, more efficient services support, user-empowerment, and support for human interactions. Software Agent (SA) technology is promising in this field and thus, should have a major role in Ambient Intelligence development due to SA characteristics such as autonomy and mobility. For instance, a user could launch an agent from his mobile phone and disconnect itself from the network. Its agent roams the net
of providers and afterwards submits its findings to user through SMS messages.

The Second NASA Workshop on Radical Agent Concepts (WRAC) will be held 20-22 September, 2005 at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Visitor’s Center, Greenbelt MD, USA. To enable adequate discussion, attendance will be limited and will be limited based on the submission of an abstract or complete paper, which is due by 30 April 2005.. Student and non-US citizens are encouraged to participate. Proceedings of the workshop will be made available to attendees and are anticipated to be published after the workshop.

The CRA’s computing research policy blog notes that the British Computer Society released a report identifying seven “Grand Challenges” in computing research that were identified through a series of workshops and discussions featuring the UK’s top computer academics. The areas are:

• In Vivo–in Silico (iViS): the virtual worm, weed and bug
• Sceince for global ubiquitous computing
• Memories for life: managing information information over a human lifetime
• Scalable ubiquitous computing systems
• The architecture of brain and mind
• Dependable systems evolution
• Journeys in non-classical computation

Agents and the Semantic Web, a three day symposium in the 2005 AAAI Fall Symposium Series, will be held in on 3rd-6th November, 2005. The symposium aims to promote and foster a greater understanding of the synergy between Multi-Agent Systems and the Semantic Web. Papers should be submitted by 25 April, 2005.

DARPA BAA 04-19 — Biologically-Inspired Cognitive Architectures or (BICA) — calls for proposals to “develop, implement and evaluate psychologically-based and neurobiologically-based theories, design principles, and architectures of human cognition.” The program has the ultimate goal of “implementing computational models of human cognition that could eventually be used to simulate human behavior and approach human cognitive performance in a wide range of situations.” This BAA solicits proposals for the program’s initial 13 month design phase, which will be followed by a second implementation phase. Proposals are due March 1, 2005.

MobiQuitous 2005, the 2nd International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Networking and Services, will be held 17-21 July 2005 in San Diego CA. Submitted papers are due 2 February 2005.

Combining mobile and ubiquitous computing yields a paradigm providing people and agents with computing and communication services all the time, everywhere, transparently and invisibly using devices embedded in physical environments. In this context, the communication devices, the objects with which they interact, or both may be mobile. This requires advances in wireless network technologies and devices, development of infrastructures supporting cognitive environments, and discovery and identification of ubiquitous computing applications and services.

MobiQuitous 2005 will cover all these aspects, representing a forum where practitioners and researchers coming from the many areas involved in ubiquitous solutions design and deployment will be able to interact exchanging the cross-layer experiences needed to build the overall ubiquitous systems. Areas addressed by the conference include: applications, service-oriented computing, middleware, networking, agents, knowledge management and databases.

Peter Harsha’s CRA Computing Policy Blog notes a Washington Times article discussing targets for federal budget trims. The story lumps “scientific research” in with “other low-priority and no-priority programs” among those to be cut. NSF and NIH are specifically mentioned.

“…Mr. Bush gave a peek into his budget plans last week when he told The Washington Times his spending blueprint was “going to be tough.” That message was underscored by White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, who told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that Mr. Bush will exert “very, very strong discipline” on next year’s spending. “That discipline will be there big time,” Mr. Card told business leaders.
Among the budget-cutting targets: the bloated Agriculture Department, corporate welfare, scientific research, housing, state and local giveaway grants, and other low-priority and no-priority programs that will be slashed or eliminated altogether.
…
The National Science Foundation’s social research grants, long criticized as wasteful, will be cut and NSF’s overall spending is expected to be flatlined. So will the National Institutes of Health, which has seen its budget skyrocket over the past decade, especially in the past four years. “That discipline will be there big time,” Mr. Card told business leaders. …”

Policy Management for the Web (PM4W) is a one day workshop to be held as part of the 14th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2005) on Tuesday 10 May 2005 in Chiba, Japan. PM4W will consist of invited talks, presentations of submitted papers, a panel and discussions. Daniel Weitzner of the W3C will give an invited talk on transparency and policy. Two kinds of papers are sought: research papers that report on the results of original research and short papers that articulate a position, describe an application or demonstrate a working language or system. Papers must be submitted electronically by 1 February 2005. Further details are on the PMW4 web page.

The complete set of papers and posters from the 3rd International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2004) is available online in PDF. You can also download the entire set as one 25MB rar file .

CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)

This looks like a nice resource site.Some interesting conference proceedings and papers etc on SW.