purplecat

I am pleased to inform you that your paper

Title: Actions with Durations and Failures in BDI Languages

has been accepted for poster presentation at ECAI'14 and a two-page publication
in its proceedings.

I actually received this notification a while back but I was sulking about the "two-page publication" part, wrestling with the childcare issues attending the conference was going to raise and generally not feeling particularly celebratory about it. However the original 8 pages have been brutally hacked down to 2, though I personally think it will be be a bit of a miracle if they are comprehensible to someone in that form and the original 8 have been issued instead as a University technical report so if anyone really wants to know what we were on about they can find out.

One of the reasons we went the technical report route was I realised while I was hacking how much I dislike discovering a reference is actually two page short paper from ECAI (European Conference on Artificial Intelligence) or IJCAI (International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence) because at that length the content is generally high-level hand waving or densely technical with no context or motivation. As a result of the compromise between my boss and I about what should go in our 2 page version, I have high hopes it manages to combine both high-level hand waving (boss's preference) and poorly motivated densely technical stuff (my preference).

For those actually interested in the content, we realised that sometimes doing stuff (e.g., moving from point A to point B) takes time, and sometimes it goes wrong while you are doing it, and that the existing rational agent programming languages didn't handle this very well. So we outlined in a general way how it should be handled. One of the referees thought it was an interesting problem but our solution was "a bit trivial". I resisted the temptation to write "well of course the solution looks obvious now" in my author's response.