COIN@ECAI 2016

The pervasiveness of open systems raises a range of challenges and opportunities for research and technological development in the area of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. Open systems comprise loosely coupled entities interacting within a social space. These entities join the social space in order to achieve some goals that are unattainable by agents in isolation. However, when those entities are autonomous, they might misbehave and, furthermore, in open systems one may not know what entities will be active beforehand, when they may become active or when these entities may leave the system. The challenge in the design and construction of open systems is to devise mechanisms that foster interactions that are conducive to achieving individual or collective goals. 

Coordination, organizations, institutions and norms are four key governance elements, and the COIN workshops constitute a space for debate and exploration of these four elements for the design and use of open systems. We seek to attract high-quality papers and an active audience to debate mathematical, logical, computational, methodological, implementational, philosophical and pragmatic issues related to the four aspects of COIN. In particular we seek to attract:

• papers that present formal treatment of topics,
• papers that present interdisciplinary treatment of topics,
• papers that provide experimental support to claims,
• papers that discuss tools, prototypes and actual working systems,
• papers that propose novel and challenging positions,
• papers that report on the experience of deployment and application of regulated open MAS, and
• papers concerned with modelling, animation and simulation techniques for these types of multi-agent systems.

• logics, languages and tools for specifying coordination and norms, implementing or simulating organizations and institutions;
• law of open multi-agent systems;
• agent societies and communities, social networks, electronic institutions and virtual organisations
• formal methods for specifying, verifying, validating and visualising COIN;
• autonomic institutions and self-organization in MAS;
• frameworks and protocols for organized and organizational adaptation;
• mechanisms for governance of common pool resources;
• discovery, openness and inter-operation in organizations and institutions;
• mixed human-agent coordination and institutions in virtual worlds;
• computers as social actors;
• norm-aware agents;
• participatory simulation;
• benchmarks and problem sets;
• COIN and emergent behaviour;
• Social intelligence