[agents] Fantastic MASs and where to find them: call to contribute to a public repo of MASs, frameworks & libraries

[Viviana Mascardi]

Dear colleagues,

we kindly ask the support of the community to collect publicly available 
software developed inside our research area -- frameworks for building 
MASs, add-ons and extensions of such frameworks, implemented MASs -- 
into a single public repository aimed at sharing practical research 
results and creating a benchmark available to every researcher 
interested in MASs.

If you developed a MAS development framework, a tool/add on/library etc 
for an existing one -- for example JADE, JaCaMo, NetLogo, etc -- or a 
complex MAS (more complex than a toy example), you are invited to fill 
this form https://forms.office.com/r/ZGx1gKFtR4 by June 30th, 2022.

You may fill it for each product you want to share with us.

Via this “survey from the contributors” we aim at:

--  Collecting a large set of publicly available MASs to create a shared 
benchmark of MASs to be used by colleagues working in the 
(agent-oriented) software engineering, runtime verification, code 
analysis areas, etc. Making the source code available to the community 
would made your contribution of larger interest, but a compiled code is 
also precious. Since testing new tools/approaches is usually difficult 
because of the lack of third parties MASs, creating a shared repository 
might help addressing this problem and might simplify the verification 
and validation phases requested by high level publication venues. 
Furthermore, concrete implementations of MASs solving real problems are 
often hard to be shared among the community, even if they are extremely 
precious and valuable: we also hope to help in making these 
contributions more visible and to describe those resources in a paper.

--  Performing an analysis of the large set of MAS development and 
simulation frameworks along with their add ons, libraries, extensions, 
and making them also available in the public repository; we plan to 
collect the results of our "survey from the contributors" in a paper 
that might be used as a starting point for the anaysis of the state of 
the art.


The contribution that you will share should have a licence that allows 
it to be shared with the community and be publicly available on the web: 
for tools/add on/frameworks we will store and share the link to the 
original repository and the information you provided, while, as far as  
MASs are concerned, we plan to re-share their code into the repository 
(upon your permission, whithout changing it in any way, and with the 
possibility for you to revoke the permission to re-share in any moment), 
with a clear acknowledge of the source and authors. Including a link to 
your MAS code without re-sharing it will be of course possible.

In the future, the contents of the public repo might also feed the 
existing AI4EU platform, https://www.ai4europe.eu/, with the agreement 
of the contributors, to make them even more visible.

Thank you for your help, and feel free to contact us for any question!

Best regards,

Daniela Briola, University of Milano Bicocca, Italy 
(daniela.briola at unimib.it)
Angelo Ferrando, University of Genova, Italy (angelo.ferrando at unige.it)
Viviana Mascardi, University of Genova, Italy (viviana.mascardi at unige.it)

-- 
#UniGenonsiferma

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