[agents] CfP: COIN at AAAI'08: workshop on Coordination, Organization, Institutions and Norms

[Virginia Dignum]

COIN at AAAI'08
===================================================
Workshop on Coordination, Organization, Institutions and Norms
co-located with the 23th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence

http://www.aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI/aaai08.php

Hyatt Regency McCormick Place in Chicago, Illinois,
July 13--17, 2008

====================================================

Submission Deadline: 7 April 2008

====================================================

In recent years, social and organizational aspects of agency have become 
a major issue in MAS research. Recent applications of MAS on Web 
Services, Grid Computing and Ubiquitous Computing enforce the need for 
using these aspects in order to ensure social order within these 
environments. Openness, heterogeneity, and scalability of MAS pose new 
demands on traditional MAS interaction models. Therefore, the view of 
coordination and control has to be expanded to consider not only an 
agent-centric perspective but societal and organization-centric views as 
well.

The overall problem of analyzing the social, legal, economic and 
technological dimensions of agent organizations, and the co-evolution of 
agent interactions, provide theoretically demanding and 
interdisciplinary research questions at different levels of abstraction. 
The MAS research community has addressed these issues from different 
perspectives that have gradually become more cohesive around the four 
notions that give title to the workshop: coordination, organization, 
institutions and norms.

In order to reach those different research communities working in 
related topics, COIN will facilitate and coordinate the organization of 
twin yearly events co-located with large international conferences, 
diverse in focus and geographically.

The COIN workshop series, started in 2005 and have been held yearly 
since, as a dual event at two world class conferences, in different 
geographic regions. In 2008, COIN is planned to co-locate with AAAI in 
Chicago and AAMAS in Portugal.

We aim for a one-day workshop that combines an invited talk by a leading 
researcher (to be determined) with paper presentations and ample time 
for general and/or group discussions. We are seeking papers that clearly 
exemplify central notions in a research field or try to synthesize 
unified views. To encourage interaction and a broad exchange of ideas, 
the workshop will be limited to 30 participants.

Topics
=====

    * Modeling multi-agent organizations
    * Models and architectures for social agents
    * Coordination in dynamic and emergent agent organizations
    * Organization design, monitoring and adaptation
    * Ontologies, methodologies, tools and standards for regulated MAS.
    * Social science background for regulated MAS: Roles, authority,
      motivation, social power and other social relationships and
      attitudes.
    * Languages for norms: expressiveness VS efficiency.
    * Electronic institutions and virtual organizations.
    * Coordination and interaction conventions, technologies and artifacts.
    * Institutional aspects of peer to peer interactions
    * Issues in regulatory dynamics (creation, evolution, change,
      disappearance).
    * Issues in regulated MAS implementation
    * Simulation, analysis and verification of regulated MAS
    * Engineering organizations (validation, implementation and tools
      for agent organizations
    * Scaling and control issues in agent organizations
    * Norms, institutions and organizations: authority, power,
      dependence, penalty and sanctions, contracts, trust, reputation as
      regulating tools for autonomous agents within organizations
    * Application of organizational theory to MAS
    * Simulation, analysis and verification of dynamics of multi-agent
      organizations
    * Dynamic, adaptive and emergent organizational structures
    * Practical applications of agent organization systems


Submissions
==========
Submissions may discuss work in any stage of development, from concepts 
and future directions to finished work. Authors should submit an 
extended abstract (3-4 pages) or a full paper of up to 8 pages, in the 
AAAI format 
(http://www.aaai.org/Publications/Author/authorinstructions.pdf). 
Manuscripts are to be in English (with American spelling preferred). 
Only PDF submissions will be accepted.

The type of submission (position paper, work in progress, finished work, 
statement of interest) must be clearly indicated on the first page of 
each submission.

Submissions and inquiries should be sent to Virginia Dignum 
(virginia at cs.uu.nl).

Proceedings will be available at the workshop. It is planned to publish 
revised and extended versions of the papers as a Springer LNCS volume 
(pending confirmation).


Important dates
============
    * April 7: Submissions due
    * April 21: Notification of acceptance
    * May 5: Camera-ready copy due to organizers
    * May 12: Camera-ready copy due to AAAI
    * July 13-14: AAAI-08 Workshop Program


Organizers
=========
Virginia Dignum
Department of Information and Computing Sciences
Universiteit Utrecht
The Netherlands
e-mail: virginia at cs.uu.nl


Eric Matson
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Wright State University
Dayton, Ohio, USA
e-mail: eric.matson at wright.edu


Program Committee
================

    * Alexander Artikis, National Centre for Scientific
      Research-Demokritos (Greece)
    * Guido Boella, University of Torino (Italy)
    * Olivier Boissier,EMSE-St. Etienne (France)
    * Rosaria Conte, CNR & University of Siena (Italy)
    * Ulisses Cortes, UPC (Spain)
    * Shaheen Fatima, University of Liverpool (UK)
    * Nicoletta Fornara, University of Lugano (Switzerland)
    * Scott Harmon, Kansas State University (USA)
    * Henry Hexmoor, Southern Illinois University (USA)
    * Koen Hindriks, Delft University of Technology (NL)
    * Jomi Fred Hubner, EMSE-St. Etienne (France)
    * Christian Lemaitre, Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana (Mexico)
    * Victor Lesser, University of Massachusetts (USA)
    * Pablo Noriega, IIIA-CSIC (Spain)
    * James Odell, James Odell Associates (USA)
    * Andrea Omicini,DEIS Universit di Bologna (Italy)
    * Sascha Ossowski, University Rey Juan Carlos (Spain)
    * Julian Padget, University of Bath (UK)
    * Juan-Antonio Rodriguez-Aguilar, IIIA (Spain)
    * Paul Scerri, Robotics Institute-Carnegie Mellon University (USA)
    * Jaime Sichman, University of Sao Paulo (Brazil)
    * Maarten Sierhuis, RIACS-NASA (USA)
    * Catherine Tessier, ONERA-CERT (France)
    * Walt Truszkowski, NASA (USA)
    * Wamberto Vasconcelos, University of Aberdeen (UK)
    * Javier Vazquez-Salceda, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (Spain)
    * Mario Verdicchio, University of Bergamo (Italy)