[agents] FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS: CARE at AAMAS2014 -- CARE for Intelligent Mobile Services

[Fernando Koch]

Apologies for cross-postings. Extended deadline!
 
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FINAL CALL FOR PAPERS
Fifth International Workshop on
*  Collaborative Agents -- Research & Development (CARE) 2014 *
** CARE for Intelligent Mobile Services ** 
 
Full paper submission: Jan 31, 2014 (extended deadline!!!)
http://www.care-workshops.org/care2014
Paris, France, 5-6 May 2014
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The workshop is held in conjunction with the 13th International Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2014)
 
Workshop Summary
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The thematic focus of this year's workshop is "CARE for Intelligent Mobile Services". The dream of intelligent mobile services that assist people during their day-to-day activities in homes, offices, and health care facilities is compelling. Many software companies, consumer electronics, and telecommunication providers place intelligent mobile services boldly on their industry roadmap, and now face big challenges in creating an infrastructure for mobile services that are simple, quiet, invisible, unobtrusive, and collaborative. Researchers, software engineers and designers must first understand and address the fundamental problems involving intelligent mobile services, such as context-awareness, automated reasoning, pro-activeness, flexibility and collaboration.
 
"CARE for Intelligent Mobile Services" aims to discuss computational models of collaboration that contribute to increasing the quality of mobile and collaborative services, including teamwork, coordination, distributed planning, context awareness, and social analytics. These solutions will address challenging problems in e.g. team coordination, health, education, and security. The CARE workshop series intends to address a gap in the existing agent and AI landscape and, moreover, aims 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. Since the first CARE workshop in 2009 in Melbourne, the CARE workshop series has established a community working on scientific and technological aspects of organizational theory, electronic institutions and computational economies from an institutional perspective. It is a well-attended workshop, with a good number of quality submissions. Revised and selected papers are planned to be published with Springer.

In "CARE for Collaborative Intelligent Mobile Services" the application domains include (not an exhaustive list): Collaborative Intelligent Mobile Services, Context Inference, and Social Connectedness. How can we create computational models, representations, algorithms and protocols to enable the next generation of intelligent mobile services? What are the new challenges when Service Computing becomes mobile? What new functionalities and effectiveness can make use of collaborative models in mobile services? For example, it includes solutions for group coordination like a smart family where the mobile service is intelligent enough to gather information and understand the context of each member in a small group, provide recommendations on daily actions deeply customized to each member and, at same time, be able to reconsider and distribute new recommendations should a change of circumstance of one or more individuals (or related organizations) affect the group plan. In these scenarios, caring requires the coordination of team members in different circumstances to work collaborative to attain a common goal: provide the best orientation for each individual preserving the family interest for the sake of the households wellbeing and preserving the social norms. Related examples include continuous healthcare, (patient care), support of students in their studies (student care), and security and wellbeing for individuals (citizen care).
 
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. The workshop plan is to include a tutorial on "On Social Apps and Intelligent Mobile Services", by Dr Fernando Koch, Director R&D, SAMSUNG Research Institute.
 
PREVIOUS CARE WORKSHOPS
 
CARE at AI 2009, Melbourne, Australia
CARE at IAT 2010, Toronto, Canada
CARE at AAMAS 2011, Taipei, Taiwan
CARE at AI/PRIMA 2013, Dunedin, New Zealand
 
Previous CARE Springer book: http://books.google.com.au/books?isbn=3642224261
 
Important Dates
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Paper submission deadline: Jan 31, 2014 (extended!!)
Notification of acceptance: Feb 19, 2014
Camera-ready copies due: Mar 14, 2014
Workshop Date: May 5-6, 2014
 
Research Questions
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CARE is of interest to an academic and industrial research community that uses and extends AI and multi-agent systems. Topics of interest include with no limitation:
 
- How to apply agents for the next generation of Intelligent Mobile Services and Social Connectedness?
- How to build a model of the features of individuals and groups in mobile service environment?
- How to construct agent-based models equipped to better perform in mobile service environment?
- What are the new challenges when Service Computing becomes mobile?
- What new functionalities and effectiveness can make use of collaborative models in mobile services?
- How can we support/guide collaborative teams in scenarios like Teamwork, Group Coordination, Group Interaction, and others?
- How to build an effective monitoring-recognition-intervention framework in mobile services?
- How organisation structures influence social behaviour and the distribution/execution of tasks?
- 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 can we support/guide collaborative teams. How can we offer flexibility in how teams execute plans? How can we make team members follow agreed procedures (Incentives? Or more fundamental, by designing a new market in which mobile and collaborative services can be most effective?).
- How to enable agents to form and follow joint agreements, guidelines and contracts in complex organisational and market driven domains (agreement adherence)?
- How to assign transaction costs to actions in planning, assignment, and execution in organisational structures?
- How to enable an effective communication infrastructure for collaborative care (possibly including humans and agents)?
- How to design markets that are adequate for agents to act with incomplete and uncertain information of the behaviour of collaborating agents?
- How can we make individuals encourage to perform activities to stay on-track and achieve desired outcomes in mobile groups?
- How can transaction costs influence the social outcome of the system which is further influenced by the organisational context under which the collaboration takes place?
 
 
Submission and Publication
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Submission is done electronically at Easychair: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=care2014. 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 2014 seeks three types of submissions:
- Full paper of 10-12 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, at least, 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.
(Previous Springer Proceedings with CARE can be found here: http://books.google.com.au/books?isbn=3642224261)


Workshop Officials
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GENERAL CHAIRS
 
Dr Fernando Koch, SAMSUNG Research Institute, Brazil (fernando.koch at samsung.com)
Dr. Felipe Meneguzzi, Pontificia Universidade Catolica do Rio Grande do Sul (PUC-RS), Brazil (felipe.meneguzzi at pucrs.br)
 
STEERING COMMITTEE
 
Dr. Christian Guttmann (IBM Research - Australia)
Dr. Frank Dignum (Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands)
Dr. Michael Luck (King's College, London University, UK)
Dr. Milind Tambe (University of Southern California, USA)