[agents] [CFP] AMPM 2022: 2nd Workshop in Agent-based Modeling & Policy-Making

[Giovanni Sileno]

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AMPM 2022: 2nd Workshop in Agent-based Modeling & Policy-Making
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in conjunction with JURIX 2022, the 35th International Conference on
Legal Knowledge and Information Systems.

Workshop date: December 14th, 2022, Saarbrücken, Germany (the workshop
will be conducted as a hybrid event).

Deadline for submission: November 4th, 2022.

Motivation
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Global financial and economic crises, critical technological
dependencies, pandemics, and climate change have cast serious doubts on
the adequacy of conventional policy-making and law-making to consider
mechanisms underlying social and economic phenomena. From their original
application in engineering and science, computational models are
increasingly being used to guide decisions by studying their potential
consequences prior to making them. They are proposed as a tool for
evidence-based policy-making in a diverse set of contexts: public
health, ecology, labour markets, urban planning, social security, crime
mitigation, economic development, platform economy and
techno-regulation. Motivated by such widespread deployment, work on
using computational models beyond executive policies and towards
law-making — i.e. beyond operational guidance and towards regulation
circumscribing the space in which policies can operate — is gaining
momentum.

Existing computational approaches to policy and normative design are
known to face persisting complementary challenges: formal validity;
effectiveness; efficiency; sustainability, etc. Several disciplines have
focused on distinct aspects of these dimensions (e.g. computational
legal theory, game theory, control systems design, dynamic systems, and
system dynamics), offering alternative methodological standpoints and
computational tools. Unfortunately, these specialized domains rarely
interoperate and frequently contain troublesome assumptions such as
overly simplistic fully observable static environments, static pay-off
tables, static semantics, homogeneous agents that are perfectly rational
and/or controllable. The resulting reduced views fail to take into
account possible phenomena occurring at the boundaries between areas of
concern.

A crucial integrating role can be played by agent-based modelling (ABM).
Based on an interactionist metaphor, agent-based models are an effective
tool for understanding and reproducing the functioning and
generation/emergence of complex macro-dynamics and constructs (shared
knowledge, practices, protocols of interaction) at an aggregate level.
Applied in social contexts, and particularly within the frame of
computational social science (CSS), ABM lends itself to regulators and
policymakers but also more widely to judges, attorneys, and legislators.

Topics
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AMPM is envisioned to be complementary to the traditional scope of
computational social science, complex system research, and agent-based
modeling, focusing on three main tracks:

- models/theories going beyond policies, targeting normative and
cognitive phenomena;
- empirical methods, associated with the practice of ABM in policy and
norm-making contexts;
- better, dedicated tooling, such as computational methods, languages,
and interfaces.

In perspective, the workshop creates space for the ABM call for a
“computation-enhanced regulatory empiricism”, exploiting computation to
investigate factual underpinnings of the legal phenomenon, like the
intricate networks of cognitive, social, technological, and legal
mechanisms through which law emerges, is applied, and exerts its effects.

Scope
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The workshop aims to attract participants from various disciplines, and
to be of interest to anyone working with the domain of governance of
large-scale self-adaptive systems (human, computational, or natural):
policy-making and normative design, governance, (computational) social
science, (computational) legal theory, (computational) economics,
autonomic computing, techno-regulation, distributed systems, agent-based
modelling, and complexity science.

Participation and Submission
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People interested in participating are requested to submit short (max 6
pages) or long papers (max 10 pages) before the November 4th 2022 via
easychair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ampm2022. Please use
the CEURART 1-col style to prepare your submission. The typical
submission for AMPM would be a reduced but self-complete and convincing
version of a study (model, method, tool, theory, ..) — ongoing work to
be later submitted to larger venues as AAMAS or similar —, or an
innovative/provocative position paper, or a sound research stub with
respect to the challenges expressed above.

Authors of the accepted papers will present at the workshop. Presented
papers can then be accepted or conditionally accepted for publication in
the open-access CEUR workshop post-proceedings. A second round of
reviews will be conducted on the camera-ready version to support that
feedback and discussions are adequately integrated.

Organizers
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Giovanni Sileno, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Christoph Becker, Flemish Institute for Technological Research (VITO), Belgium
Nicola Lettieri, INAPP (National Institute for Public Policy Analysis) and University of Sannio, Italy

Program Committee
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Christopher Frantz, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)
Charlotte Gerritsen, Vrije Universiteit (VU), Amsterdam
Marina De Vos, University of Bath
Davide Marocco, University of Naples "Federico II"
Nieves Montes, Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA-CSIC), Barcelona
Fernando Pascoal Dos Santos, University of Amsterdam
Gary Polhill, James Hutton Institute
Davide Dell'Anna, Delft University of Technology
Margherita Vestoso, University of Sannio
Veronika Fikfak, University of Copenhagen
Vitor V. Vasconcelos, University of Amsterdam
Nadia Giuffrida, Polytechnic University of Bari
Parantapa Bhattacharya, Biocomplexity Institute & Initiative, University of Virginia
Isaak Mengesha, University of Amsterdam
Michael Carl Tschantz, International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), Berkeley
Alessandro Pluchino, University of Catania
Wander Jager, University of Groningen
Mostafa Mohajeri Parizi, University of Amsterdam
Dominique Blouin, Télécom Paris
Sebastian Benthall, New York University School of Law

Important Dates
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Submission deadline: 4 November 2022 until 23:59,
Notification of acceptance: 18 November 2022
Workshop: 14 December 2022 (hybrid)

Further information on: https://ampmresearch.github.io/