[agents] ECOSOA submission deadline extended until July 18

[Danny Weyns]

Submission deadline extended until July 18. 

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                      C A L L   F O R   P A P E R S

                       International Workshop on

                  Environment-Mediated Coordination in 
          Self-Organizing and Self-Adaptive Systems (ECOSOA)
          
          www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~distrinet/events/ecosoa/2008/
 
                        ecosoa at cs.kuleuven.be

                         to be held at the
                   Second International Conference 
         on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems (SASO)
       Isola di San Servolo (Venice), Italy, October 20-24, 2008


Important Dates:

Paper submission deadline : July 5, 2008 > July 18
Paper notification        : August 5, 2008
Camera ready paper        : September 10, 2008
Workshop                  : October 20 or 21, 2008


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INTRODUCTION

Self-organization is an approach to engineer decentralized, distributed 
and resource-limited systems that are capable of dynamically adapting to 
changing conditions and requirements without external intervention. This 
useful system property is often reflected in functions such as 
self-configuration, self-optimization, and self-healing. Engineering 
approaches to self-organizing systems often rely on global functionality 
to emerge from local and autonomous decisions of individual agents that 
communicate through a shared coordination medium. Models for 
environment-mediated coordination are often inspired by biological, 
physical and other naturally occurring systems. Typical examples are 
gradient fields and digital pheromones that guide agents in their local 
context and as such facilitate the coordination of a community of agents. 
Since environment-mediated coordination has shown to result in manageable 
solutions with very adaptable qualities, it is a promising paradigm to 
deal with the increasingly complexity and dynamism of distributed 
applications.

Although we have some initial understanding how to engineer such systems, 
many research issues are still open. When designing a system that is based 
only on local interactions and the emergent properties resulting from these 
interactions, it is a difficult research problem on the one hand to obtain 
the required global behavior of the system and on the other hand to avoid 
undesired global properties. A particular issue in the design of 
self-organizing systems is determining the suitable complexity of the 
individual agents required to achieve the desired emergent functions. 
Typically, agents in self-organizing systems are less complex in their 
sensing, reasoning, and acting capabilities than agents in traditional 
multi-agent systems that follow a deliberate organizing approach. But, 
epending on the application domain, the functional requirements, and the 
sheer number of agents available in a particular setting, individual 
agent complexity may vary. As agent complexity increases, 
self-organization may become harder to achieve and to prove. ECOSOA 
addresses the approach of environment-mediated coordination among 
self-organizing agents that off-loads some of the agent complexity into 
the processes of the coordination medium (e.g., truth maintenance through 
pheromone evaporation). Off-loading agent complexity into the coordination 
medium simplifies agent design, implementation, and evaluation and thus 
increases the likelihood of a successful application development.

ECOSOA aims to establish a forum for researchers and engineers interested 
in environment-mediated coordination in self-organizing and self-adaptive 
systems. The event should result in an improved understanding on the role 
of the coordination medium, the principles that underlie self-organization, 
and the engineering of emergent organizations. The intended audience of 
the workshop includes researcher and engineers with an interest/expertise 
in environment-mediated coordination in self-organizing and self-adaptive 
systems, particularly the engineering of emergent organizations. Related 
domains of interest include: multi-agent systems, context-aware and 
pervasive computing, service-oriented architectures, autonomic computing, 
middleware and coordination, computational mechanism design, software 
architecture, and aspect-oriented software development. The workshop also 
aims to attract engineers and practitioners with expertise in applying 
mediatd coordination in specific application areas such as logistics, 
intelligent transportation systems, manufacturing control, peer-to-peer 
applications, sensor networks, etc.


SCOPE OF THE WORKSHOP

The general goal of ECOSOA is to advance state of the art theories and 
engineering of environment-mediated coordination in self-organizing and 
self-adaptive systems. A specific focus of the workshop will be on 
engineering emergent organizations. Emergent organizations result from 
the dynamic interactions of agents that exploit a shared coordination 
medium to coordinate their behavior. This contrasts to organizations in 
the form of 'mental concepts in the mind of agents' in which agents 
interact directly via exchanging high-level messages. Particular topics 
of interest include:

Foundation

- Exploitation of biological and physical principles to engineer emergent 
  organizations
- Theories, models and mechanisms for self-organizing 
- Theories and models of environment-mediated coordination and emergent 
  organizations

Engineering

- Software architectures of environment-mediated coordination 
- Design approaches for self-organizing and emergent properties
- Engineering of environment-meditated coordination for self-* systems
- Middleware for self-organizing and self-adaptive systems
- Implementation of environment-mediated coordination 
- Assessment metrics and performance evaluation

Applications

- Experience reports of complex distributed applications with 
  environment-mediated coordination and emergent organizations
- Practical applications of environment-mediated coordination of 
  self-organizing and self-adaptive systems


SUBMISSIONS

ECOSOA welcomes the submission of theoretical, experimental, 
methodological as well as application papers. Papers may report on 
completed work, descriptions of work in progress or discussion papers.

Submitted papers will undergo a thorough review process. Each paper 
will be reviewed by three members of the program committee. Papers 
that present a valuable idea that needs further development can be 
accepted as a short paper.

The submission should be 6-10 pages in length, including figures and 
references. The paper must be formatted according to the IEEE Computer 
Society Press proceedings style guide (IEEE Conference Proceedings).

All papers should be prepared in pdf format and submitted by email 
to: ecosoa [at] cs.kuleuven.be. The good receipt of your submission 
will be confirmed by email.


ORGANISING COMMITTEE

- Danny Weyns, DistriNet Labs, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
- Sven Brueckner, NewVectors, TechTeam Government Solutions, Inc., USA
- Yves Demazeau, CNRS, Laboratoire d’Informatique de Grenoble, France

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

- Flavien Balbo, LAMSADE, Université Paris-Dauphine, France
- Tibor Bosse, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
- Valerie Camps, Universite Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France
- Cristiano Castelfrachi, ISTC-CNR, Rome, Italy
- Vincent Chevrier, Universite Henri Poincaré Nancy, France
- Giovanna Di Marzo Serugendo, University of London, UK
- Jacques Ferber, Université de Montpellier II, Lirmm, France
- Marie-Pierre Gleizes, IRIT Toulouse, France
- David Hales, Technical University of Delft, The Netherlands
- Alexander Helleboogh, DistriNet Labs, K.U.Leuven, Belgium
- Tom Holvoet, DistriNet, K.U.Leuven, Belgium
- Mark Jelasity, Hungarian Acad. Sci. & Univ. Szeged, Hungary
- Jeff Kephart, IBM, USA
- Franziska Kluegl, University of Wurzburg, Germany
- Marco Mamei, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy
- Fabien Michel, LERI, Reims, France
- R. Zalila Mili, University of Texas at Dallas, USA
- Andrea Omicini, Università di Bologna, Italy
- Juan Pavón, Universidad Complutense Madrid, Spain
- H. Van Dyke Parunak, NewVectors LLC, Ann Arbor, USA
- Wolfgang Renz, Hamburg University of Applied Science, Germany
- Alessandro Ricci, Università di Bologna, Italy
- Nicolas Sabouret, LIP6 Paris, France
- Jorge J. Gomez-Sanz, Universidad Complutense Madrid, Spain
- John Sauter, NewVectors LLC, Ann Arbor, USA
- Hartmut Schmeck, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
- Guy Théraulaz, Universite Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France
- Karl Tuyls, University of Maastricht, The Netherlands
- Adelinde Uhrmacher, University of Rostock, Germany
- Paul Valckenaers, PMA, K.U.Leuven, Belgium
- Mirko Viroli, Università di Bologna, Italy
- Franco Zambonelli, University of Modena and R. Emilia, Italy 

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