purplecat

We are delighted to inform you that your paper entitled "A Common Basis for Agent Organisation in BDI Languages",
submitted to EUMAS-2007, has been accepted for presentation at the workshop
(recall that the proceedings are only informally published).

This is actually a reheat of our LADS paper but M. assures A. and myself that EUMAS is intended for re-heats and work in progress and the presentations are supposed merely to form a basis for the exchange of ideas. This means that A. gets to go to Tunisia in six weeks' time. M. said I could go too but I felt two weeks before christmas was cutting things a bit fine.

"Isn't that where they filmed Star Wars?" I said. A. and M. looked at me blankly.

"Dear Author(s),

Thank you very much for submitting a paper to CLIMA-VIII. We are
delighted to let you know that your paper is accepted..."

This has to be one of the easiest papers I've ever written. Michael is keen on the use of groups to form multi-agent systems. Key idea: an agent is a group and a group is an agent - all agents can contain and be contained by other agents. This lets groups of agents have plans and goals external to the agents that compose them. Anyway I wrote him some inference rules explaining how this might work in what is known as the operational semantics of a typical BDI (Beliefs, Desires, Intentions) programming language and then left for Hawaii. Sometime while I was away he and his PhD student fleshed it out with some text and an example in a language called AgentSpeak and Presto! one more publication. They even put me down as first author (which means I really should read the paper!!).

"As the authors admit, the whole idea would rather lack a concrete justification in the paper." - ah! the anonymous referees spotted that then!