[agents] 2nd CFP CARE for a Smarter Society -- Collaborative Agents Research & Development (CARE)

[Fernando Koch]

Apologies for cross-postings.

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2nd CALL FOR PAPERS

Fourth International Workshop on

*  Collaborative Agents -- Research & Development (CARE) 2013 *
** CARE for a Smarter Society **

Full paper submission: September 15th, 2013

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~xtg/CARE2013/

Dunedin, New Zealand, 3 Dec 2013

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The workshop is held in conjunction with the 26th Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence 
(http://ai2013.otago.ac.nz/), and the 16th Conference on Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems 
(http://prima2013.otago.ac.nz/)

Workshop Summary
================

The topic of this year's workshop is "CARE for a Smarter Society" and associated tracks. The workshop aims to foster discussions on computational models of collaboration that contribute to increasing quality of health and living, promoting citizen participation, and community engagement. The CARE workshop series not only addresses a gap in the existing agent and AI landscape, but also tries to push the boundaries of existing work by addressing a problem that is relatively new to the agent community and that presents the community with exciting applications. We seek contributions of members in research and industry that apply AI and the agent paradigm to approach problems in areas of Smarter Societies.

Collaborative care is today's primary means to achieve complex outcomes and to increase the lifetime value of the cared entities. Collaboration enables agents to achieve complex goals that are difficult or impossible to attain for an individual agent. This collaboration takes place under conditions of incomplete information, uncertainty, and bounded rationality, much of which has been previously studied in economics and artificial intelligence. However, many real world domains are characterised by even greater complexity, including the possibility of unreliable and non-complying collaborators, complex market and incentive frameworks, and complex transaction costs and organisational structures. How can we create computational models, representations, algorithms and protocols to enable the next generation of intelligent collaborative care technologies? How can we build technologies that support collaboration under this complexity and uncertainty?

The one day workshop will feature a mixture of invited talks, discussions and submitted contributions describing current work or work in progress in collaborative agent research and technology. The workshop environment fosters open discussions among all participants, particularly encouraging students to discuss their research topics and seek feedback from senior agent researchers. 

Topics of Interest include (but are not limited to) 
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Smarter Society - new models and technologies that lead collaborative approaches for problems in Smarter Cities, Smarter Health Care, intelligent campuses, intelligent work places, social networking, education, health informatics, and others. 

There will be a special track on **Agent-Based Systems for Energy and Environmental Sustainability (ABSEES)**. This track investigates how agent-based technology in conjunction with AI techniques can be used to explore a) the design and development of novel (smart) energy-related systems, b) suitable methodologies, techniques and tools to create sustainable energy systems and c) mechanisms for facilitating sustainable behaviour in several domains (e.g. transportation, urban planning) among a variety of user-roles (i.e. different types of users). The reviews and proceedings of this track will be handled by the ABSEES track chairs. 

ABSEES Track Chairs: 
Maryam Purvis, maryam.purvis at otago.ac.nz 
Takayuki Ito, ito.takayuki at nitech.ac.jp 

We also consider a demo session, where participants can present practical applications and proof-of-concepts using new models and technologies for collaborative approaches in Smarter Societies, Smarter Health, Smarter Energy, and any other related area.


Important Dates
===============

Paper submission deadline: Sep 15, 2013 
Notification of acceptance: Oct 1, 2013.
Camera-ready copies due: Oct 15, 2013
Workshop Date: Dec 3, 2013

Research Questions
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- How to collaborative agent technology can help to analyse vast amounts of complex social data?
- How to build a model of the features of individuals (citizens/customer/patient behaviour)?
- How to construct agent-based models of social behaviour?
- How organisational structures influence the negotiation of agents and the distribution/execution of tasks?
- How can we support/guide collaborative teams in scenarios like Collaborative Research, Resilient Societies, and Disaster Resilience?
- How to apply agents for the next generation of Social Analytics systems in Smarter Societies?
- How can we offer flexibility in the way how teams execute plans?
- How to enable an effective communication infrastructure for collaborative care (possibly including humans and agents).
- How to build a model of the features of individuals (customer/patient behaviour).
- How to build comprehensive customer lifecycle management systems for customers, including telecommunication consumers, students and patients.
- How can we make team members follow agreed procedures (Incentives? Or more fundamental, by designing a new market?)
- How to deploy lifecycle management systems in real world applications, such as healthcare, telecommunication, and smart campuses.
- How to design markets that are adequate for agents to act with incomplete and uncertain information?
- How to build MAS that work efficiently in partially regulated markets (where governance policy or partnership agreements govern part of the market).
- How can we make individuals encourage to perform activities to stay on-track and achieve desired outcomes (incentive frameworks)?
- How can we enable flexible, goal-driven and contextualised plan creation and business process management (including intelligent execution, monitoring, management, and optimization of business processes)?
- How to build an effective monitoring-recognition-intervention framework?
- What role does learning and adaptivity play in building organisational MAS?
- How to deal with partially regulated markets (free markets are possibly an unrealistic paradigm as they donít really existent)?

Submission and Publication
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Submission is done electronically at Easychair: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=care20130. Submissions should be formatted according to LNCS specification and submitted as a PDF file. Instructions and templates can be found at: www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html.

CARE 2013 seeks three types of submissions:
- Full paper of 12 pages.
- Short paper of 4 pages (such as position and early result papers) are welcome with the option of extending it to a full paper for the post-proceedings.
- Demo paper of 4 pages describing a demonstration. This work will then be presented in the demo session of the workshop.

Submissions will be peer-reviewed by three reviewers per paper. Selection criteria will include relevance, significance, impact, originality, technical soundness, quality of presentation. Some preference may also be given to papers which address emergent trends or important common themes, or which enhance balance of workshop topics.

We plan to publish selected papers as Springer proceedings.
(Springer Proceedings with CARE can be found here: http://books.google.com.au/books?isbn=3642224261)
 
Workshop Officials
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GENERAL CHAIRS
Christian Guttmann (IBM Research -- Australia), guttmann at au.ibm.com 
Fernando Koch (IBM Research -- Brazil), fernando.koch at br.ibm.com

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Andrew Koster
Anthony Patricia
Benjamin Hirsch
Carlos Cardonha
Christian Guttmann
Cristiano Castelfranchi
David Morley
Diego Gallo
Fernando Koch
Frank Dignum
Gordon McCalla
Ingo J. Timm
Inon Zuckerman
Jaime Sichman
Kobi Gal
Lars Braubach
Lawrence Cavedon
Leonardo Garrido
Liz Sonenberg
Marcelo Ribeiro
Martin Purvis
Meritxell Vinyals
Michael Thielscher
Neil Yorke-Smith
Priscilla Avegliano
Ryo Kanamori
Sankalp Khanna
Sarvapali Ramchurn
Sascha Ossowski
Shantanu Chakraborty
Simon Goss
Simon Thompson
Wayne Wobcke
Wei Chen
Zakaria Maamar

Previous CARE workshops:
CARE at AI 2009, Melbourne, Australia
CARE at IAT 2010, Toronto, Canada
CARE at AAMAS 2011, Taipei, Taiwan

Springer http://books.google.com.au/books?isbn=3642224261

Online Discussion Groups
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For the purpose of announcements and future collaboration on the 
workshop topics, professional network groups on Linkedin have been 
created: CARE and AAMAS. CARE has reached a membership of 50 research 
professionals, and AAMAS has now almost 1000 professional members (mostly 
professors, senior researchers and PhD students that have made 
contribution to the field of agents, or have a keen interest 
in the subject matter). These two forums are used extensively to discuss 
AAMAS as well as CARE specific topics.