[agents] Call for Participation: Workshop on Cognition in ABM - Behaviour Changes in Large Organisations

[Harko Verhagen]

*Workshop on Cognition in ABM - **Behaviour Changes in Large Organisations*
*
Date & time: 10th June 2010, 9:30 - 17:00*

*Venue: University of Leicester*

The construction trade has recently been swamped with a host of health 
and safety directives. From not entering a building site without a hard 
hat over steel toe shoes at all times to proper roping on climbing a 
scaffold, the list seems to be endless. The legislation is in the 
interest of the construction workers as it centers on their safety. 
Nonetheless, implementation is slow and resistance among construction 
workers is high.

NHS hospitals in the UK have a severe problem with superbugs like MRSA. 
Although it seems that the origin of those bugs is connected to 
overprescription of antibiotics to patients, leading to very fast 
mutation and high levels of resistance, it has been acknowledged that 
hospital hygiene is a major contributor to the spread of MRSA. In order 
to buck the trend, the department of health has released a host of 
guidelines, measures and targets over the years. Again, infection rates 
and cleanliness results are less than encouraging and improvement is slow.

It seems the behaviour of people working in large institutions such as 
hospitals and building sites is not easy to change. How can cleanliness 
in hospitals be improved? How can the safety of construction workers be 
ensured? The overarching question is how a culture in large 
organisations can be changed. Is tighter control needed? More 
incentives? Coercion? Choice? Responsibility? Education and information?

In this workshop we would like to focus on how to model changes in 
institutional cultures. We do not look for an implemented solution to 
the problem. Instead we would like a range of approaches to the problem 
providing unique formalisations and modeling ideas to understand and 
solve the problems faced in this kind of behaviour change in large 
institutions.

This workshop brings together key players from the agent-based modelling 
(ABM) and the multi-agent systems (MAS) community. We ask them to give 
us an outline how they would tackle the problem of culture change in 
hospitals. The workshop will allow for small group discussion as well as 
a plenary about different approaches and their integration.

*Speakers:*

Virginia Dignum is a senior lecturer at the Delft University of 
Technology, Dept. of Technology, Policy and Management. She received a 
PhD in from UU in 2004. Previously, she worked in industry for more than 
12 years and was a lecturer at Utrecht University. Her research focuses 
agent based models of organisations, and hybrid teams of people and 
machines. She received the prestigious award of excellence Veni from the 
Dutch Scientific Research Foundation in 2006. She is involved in several 
European and national projects, has organised many international 
conferences and workshops (in particular, was co-organiser of AAMAS'05) 
and has more than 80 peer-reviewed publications and has given many 
invited talks and tutorials in venues so diverse as corporate trainings, 
cognitive psychology research schools, social simulation, software 
engineering, knowledge management or multi-agent systems conferences.

Bruce Edmonds is the Director of the Centre for Policy Modelling, and a 
Senior Research Fellow at the Manchester Metropolitan Unviserity 
Businesss School. He is interested in far too many things for his own 
good, but including social simulation, complexity, context, social 
intelligence, and alternative ways of distributing/organising society. 
More information about him can be found at http://bruce.edmonds.name 
<http://bruce.edmonds.name/>.

Michael Luck is Professor of Computer Science in the Department of 
Computer Science at King's College London, where he leads the Agents and 
Intelligent Systems subgroup and undertakes research into agent 
technologies and intelligent systems. Professor Luck has published 
around 200 articles in these and related areas, and twelve books 
(including monographs, textbooks, and edited collections); he was lead 
author of the AgentLink roadmaps in 2003 and 2005. According to CiteSeer 
in August 2006, he is in the top 0.5% of computer scientists in 
the world, and according to Google Scholar, he has an h-index of 33. 
More information about him can be found http://www.dcs.kcl.ac.uk/staff/mml/.

Edmund Chattoe-Brown's research addresses decisions with significant 
social components. Flows of information/influence through networks are 
obvious examples. He is interested in how agent-based modelling can 
systematically be informed by data routinely collected in social 
science, steering between data free "toy" models and "number crunching" 
for existing theories.

Corinna Elsenbroich is a Research Fellow in Sociology at the University 
of Surrey. Her research background is in philosophy of science and 
computer science. Her research interests are the methodology of 
simulation in the social sciences and the interrelations between 
reasoning, decision making and action which will here be applied to the 
phenomenon of social norms.

Nigel Gilbert is professor of Sociology at the University of Surrey and 
editor of the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation.  He 
has written on the methodology of agent-based modelling and authored two 
textbooks on social simulation, as well as directing a number of large 
projects that used agent-based models.

*Registration*

Please visit: http://www.simian.ac.uk/courses