[agents] 2nd CFP - COIN at PRIMA/PRICAI 2014 (Gold Coast, Australia)

[Tony Savarimuthu]

18th International Workshop on Coordination, Organisations, Institutions and Norms
Co-located with PRIMA and PRICAI conferences to be held in Gold Coast, Australia (1-5 December 2014)
Website: http://www.dsl.uow.edu.au/events/COIN-PRIMA-2014/

Description
=========

The pervasiveness of open systems raises a range of challenges and opportunities for technologies in the area of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. Open systems comprise loosely coupled entities interacting within a society that usually has some overall measures of quality or efficiency. However, achieving and maintaining a "good" society is difficult to achieve as 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 is therefore a need for tools and techniques for articulating and/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.

We seek to attract high quality papers addressing mathematical, logical, computational, philosophical and pragmatic issues related to the four aspects of COIN. We invite the submission 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:

1. Regular research papers (long)
2. Work in progress research papers (short): describing on-going work and research ideas that are not yet mature enough to submit as a long paper
3. Demo papers: papers describing a software tool or platform. (short)
4. Bridge papers: papers highlighting techniques from areas outside agent technology (or parts of the agent community that are not typically represented in COIN) that are potentially of interest to the COIN community, e.g., techniques from the business process modeling community, from software engineering, etc. (short)
5. Demo comparison papers: papers comparing several tools or platforms, highlighting similarities and differences, to help researchers decide which tools might be most suitable for their needs (short or long).

Topics of Interest
==============
Topics of particular interest for regular research papers for COIN at PRIMA 2014 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 interoperation in organizations and institutions;
- mixed human-agent coordination and institutions in virtual worlds;
- participatory simulation.
- reports on implemented systems.

Proceedings
===========
Preliminary proceedings will be available at the workshop. As with previous COIN workshops, revised and extended versions of the papers of both the two 2014 workshops (the first workshop in 2014 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
=================
Workshop Papers due:            September 22, 2014
Notification of Acceptance:           October 16, 2014
Workshop Proceedings due:          November 19, 2014
Workshop Dates:                    December 4 or 5, 2014

Submission
=========
Contributions need to be formatted according to the Springer LNCS format
(http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=016467933410) and need to be submitted via Easychair (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=coinprimapricai2014<https://www.easychair.org/conferences/conference_dir.cgi?a=7211294>).

Organization
===========
Aditya Ghose, University of Wollongong, Australia (aditya at uow.edu.au)
John Thangarajah, RMIT University, Australia (johnt at rmit.edu.au)