[agents] CFP: 16th International Workshop on Coordination, Organisations, Institutions and Norms (COIN)

[t.balke at surrey.ac.uk]

(apologies for multiple postings)

CFP: 16th International Workshop on Coordination, Organisations, Institutions and Norms (COIN)

With Special Track on Agent-Based Modelling for Policy Engineering

Co-located with PRIMA and AI, Dunedin, New Zealand, 3rd December 2013
http://coin2013-prima.tudelft.nl/
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The pervasiveness of open systems raises a range of challenges and opportunities for technologies in the area of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems and in their contribution to human and artificial societies. Open systems comprise loosely-coupled entities interacting within a society, often with some overall measures of quality or efficiency.  However, achieving and maintaining a ‘good’ society, such as through establishing and enforcing societial norms and policies, is difficult to achieve. This is because of the complexity of real societies, and because the participating entities, their modes of interaction, or the intended purpose of the system may change over time.  Moreover, in the case of open multi-agent systems, the autonomy of the agents can work against the effectiveness of the society. There remains a need for tools and techniques for articulating or regulating interactions in order to make the system more effective in attaining collective goals, more certain for participants, or more predictable.

Coordination, organizations, institutions, and norms are four key governance elements for the regulation of open multi-agent systems, and the COIN workshops constitute a space for debate and exploration of these four elements that are central in the design and use of open systems. COIN at PRIMA’13 features a special track on agent-based modelling for policy engineering (AMPLE) in societies.

We seek to attract high-quality papers addressing mathematical, logical, computational, philosophical, and pragmatic issues related to the four aspects of COIN, and, further, papers taking up the challenges of complex societal systems.

We invite the submission of short papers up to 6 pages and long papers up to 16 pages (both according to the Springer LNCS formatting specifications). In particular, we invite the following types of papers:

- regular research papers (long) that address the topics of interest mentioned below and fulfill at least one of the following criteria:
	- the presentation of formal treatment of topics
	- the provision of experimental support to claims.
 	- the focus on modelling, animation and simulation techniques for these types of multi-agent systems
	- the discussion of tools, prototypes and actual working systems.
- work in progress research papers (short): describing ongoing work and research ideas that are not yet mature enough to submit as a long paper.
- demo papers (short): papers describing a software tool or platform, to inform the community about its functionality and possibly inspire others to use or build on the tool; if software development efforts can be joined in this way, it will allow the community to move ahead in a faster pace.
- bridge papers (short): papers highlighting techniques from non-agent communities (or parts of the agent community that are not typically represented in COIN) that could be inspiring or useful for the COIN community, e.g., techniques from the business process modelling community, from software engineering, etc.
- demo comparison papers (short or long): papers comparing several tools or platforms, highlighting similarities and differences, to help researchers decide which tool is most suitable for their need.
- technical/conceptual comparison papers (short or long): papers comparing different technical/conceptual concepts and mechanisms in the field of COIN, highlighting the specific expressivity (formally or conceptually) and types of domains for which the respective techniques and concepts are particularly suited. In particular, we welcome papers comparing techniques and/or concepts from the different parts of C-O-I-N.


Topics of Interest
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Topics of particular interest for regular research papers for COIN at PRIMA 2013 include, but are not limited, to:
- logics, languages and tools for specifying coordination and norms, implementing or simulating organizations and institutions;
- law of open multi-agent systems: regulatory compliance, penalty and sanctions, dispute resolution and conflict prevention;
- agent societies and communities, social networks, electronic institutions and virtual organizations;
- formal lifecycle models: formation, maintenance, evolution and dissolution of organizations, institutions and normative multi-agent systems;
- formal methods for specifying coordination and organizational structures; models for verification, validation and visualization;
- autonomic institutions and self-organization in multi-agent systems;
- frameworks and protocols for organized and organizational adaptation;
- mechanisms for governance of common pool resources;
- agent environments: physical and institutional resources for physical capability and institutional power;
- discovery, openness and inter-operation in organizations and institutions;
- mixed human-agent coordination and institutions in virtual worlds;
- computers as social actors;
- norm-aware agents;
- participatory simulation; and
- reports on implemented systems.


Special Track on Agent-based Modelling for Policy Engineering (AMPLE)
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Without limiting the range of traditional topics addressed in the workshop, in the upcoming edition we would like to challenge the community to submit the latest results for complex systems in a special track on agent-based modelling for policy engineering. To that extent, we broaden the topics of the workshop with the following:
- tools and methods for implementing policies in agent-based models;
- rich cognitive agent models for policy analysis;
- formal methods for specifying policies in coordination and organizational structures;
- models for verification, validation and visualization of simulations for policy analysis;
- agent-oriented models for decision support;
- integration of normative and social aspects;
- comparison between tools and methods for policy analysis;
- conceptual and applied studies.


Proceedings
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Preliminary proceedings will be available at the workshop.  As with previous COIN workshops, revised and extended versions of the papers of both the two 2013 workshops (the first workshop in 2013 was held at AAMAS) will be published in a single Springer LNCS volume. Those revised versions must take into account the discussion held during the workshop, hence, only those papers that are presented during the workshop will be considered for inclusion in the post-proceedings volume.


Workshop Schedule
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Submission of contributions to the workshop: 23 September 2013 
Workshop paper notification: 17 October 2013
Camera-ready version for preliminary proceedings due: 20 November 2013
Workshop date: 3 December 2013


Submission
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Contributions need to be formatted according to the Springer LNCS format (http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0) and need to be submitted via Easychair (https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=coinprima2013).


Organization
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COIN Organization
Tina Balke, University of Surrey, UK
M. Birna van Riemsdijk, TU Delft, Netherlands

AMPLE Special Track Organization
Amineh Ghorbani, TU Delft, Netherlands 
Tony Bastin Roy Savarimuthu, University of Otago, New Zealand
Neil Yorke-Smith, American University of Beirut, Lebanon