SASEMAS'04
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call for paper / txt
CALL FOR PAPERS
1st INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON
SAFETY AND SECURITY IN MULTI-AGENT SYSTEMS
(www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/research/safeagent/2004)
Sponsored by THE BOEING CORPORATION
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to be held at the 3rd International Joint Conference on
Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS)
(satchmo.cs.columbia.edu/aamas04/)
New York, USA
20 July 2004
IMPORTANT DATES:
Paper Submission: April 16th 2004
Notifications: May 7th 2004
Camera-ready copy: May 21st, 2004
Workshop: Tuesday July 20, 2004
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Overview
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As agent technology begins to be deployed in applications where
incorrect or inappropriate agent behaviour can have harmful effects
ranging from embarrassment to financial cost to physical injury to
humans, safety and security are two central issues.
Multiagent systems are being designed for ever more demanding and
possibly hostile environments. For example, NASA has proposed
missions where multiagent systems, working in space or on other
planets, will need to do their own reasoning about safety issues that
concern not only themselves but also that of their mission. Likewise,
industry is interested in agent systems that can search for new supply
opportunities and engage in (semi-)automated negotiations over new
supply contracts. These systems should be able to securely negotiate
such arrangements and decide which credentials can be requested and which
credentials may be disclosed. Such systems may encounter environments
that are only partially understood and where they must learn for
themselves which aspects of their environment are safe and which are
dangerous.
On one side agents should act "safely": they should be robust enough
to to avoid damages due to unexpected events, or internal bugs in non
critical parts of their architecture. On the other side they should
act "securely": they should be robust enough to resist potentially
harmful effects due to malicious behavior of other agents. This
workshop aims to bring together researchers, academics, practitioners
and students interested in ways of ensuring that agent behaviour is
safe and secure.
While intelligent software agents and multiagent systems can provide
many advantages over conventional software systems, they are also
usually much more complex. Software agents often integrate such
activities as deliberately planning to achieve their goals,
dynamically reacting to unanticipated obstacles and opportunities,
communicating with other agents to share information and coordinate
actions, and even learning from and/or adapting to their environments.
Because agents are often situated in dynamic environments, these
activities must be carried out in a timely manner.
These aspects of agents make the process of verifying and validating
the safety and security of these systems much more difficult than for
conventional software systems. Hence, verifying reasonable behavior
from the agent and from multi agent systems requires new and different
techniques and perspectives. The process of verifying and validating
the safety of these systems is often complicated by the systems being
open to unknown agents. Little, if anything, might be known about
these agents. We need to be able to structure the system to handle
the situatin when these agents might have goals that are atagonistic
to the overall system goals. Moreover, even is the system is not open
to all agents, there may still be security concerns if different
agents are under the administrative control of different entities (eg
in multi-national space missions or orchestrated financial web
services).
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Intended Participants
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This workshop will be of interest to researchers and developers of
agent systems for a wide range of emerging applications. The workshop
will also be of interest to those that might use agent technology in
safety critical applications, since these are the people that must be
convinced of the safety and the security of these systems.
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Proposed Topics
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This workshop will explore issues related to the development and
deployment of "safe and secure agent and multiagent systems".
Relevant topics include, but are not limited to:
- Definitions of safety and security for single agents or entire systems.
What does it mean for an agent to be "safe", or to be "secure" and to
"behave appropriately"? How can answers to the above questions be
lifted to multiagent systems?
- Verification/validation of agent and multiagent systems.
How can agents, working in complex, open systems, be shown to be
"safe" or "secure"? Can a multiagent system, that is composed of
"safe" agents, be itself "unsafe"? Can the composition of "secure"
agents lead to a "unsecure" system?
- User requirements.
Some obvious ones are that the user is safe from his agent performing
any "risky" actions, that the agent is "safe" (i.e., robust) in a
given environment, and that the multiagent society is safe from its
member agents performing "malicious" actions.
- Design, mechanisms and deployment.
Do old-style formal specification, declarative languages, and
user-friendly interfaces have roles to play for agent building
environments? What mechanisms can be used to ensure/improve the safety
or security of an agent and/or multiagent system?
- Autonomy and Autonomous Reasoning.
How can agents reason about their own safety? E.g., determining the
types and degrees of dangers inherent in different courses of action.
How can adjustable autonomy be used to ensure agents behave reasonably?
- Learning/adaptive agents.
How can agents that are self-modifying be shown to be safe and to
avoid security related risks? In hostile environments, how can agents
learn what is safe and secure to do and what is not?
- Application areas.
Which application areas would most benefit from agent technology but
would also be very sensitive to safety or security issues?
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Formatting guidelines:
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We encourage submission in Springer Lecture Notes Series format.
(See the Springer LNCS home page:
http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html).
The length of papers is recommended to be 15 pages long excluding
bibliography. However, slightly longer papers may also be accepted.
All non-presenting participants should submit a one-page position
statement which presents their perspective on safe agents. Position
papers from industry participants are especially encouraged.
All submissions must include the author's name(s), affiliation,
complete mailing address, phone number, fax number and email
address.
All papers must be submitted in PDF format.
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Submission procedure:
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We require on-line submission through SafeAgent2004 home page
(http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/research/safeagent/2004).
Multiple submission policy for papers: Papers that are being submitted
to other conferences (including AAMAS), whether verbatim or in
essence, must reflect this fact on the title page. Papers that do not
meet this requirement are subject to rejection without review.
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Publication:
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Selected papers may be published as a post-proceedings volume in
the Springer Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series. All
accepted papers will be published in the Workshop Proceedings.
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Student Support:
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We will be able to offer limited financial support to some students,
who have papers accepted at the workshop and are in need of assistance
in order to attend.
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Sponsored by:
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The Boeing Corporation
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Organising Committee:
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Mike Barley (University of Auckland)
Fabio Massacci (University of Trento)
Haris Mouratidis (University of East London)
Paul Scerri (CMU)
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Program Committee:
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Eduardo Alonso (City University of London - UK)
Michael Backes (IBM - Switzerland)
James Bailey (University of Melbourne - Australia)
Steve Chien (JPL - USA)
Subrata Das (Charles River Analytics - USA)
Theo Dimitrakos (CCLRC - UK)
Ed Durfee (University of Michigan - USA)
Rick Frost (Brigham Young University - USA)
Paolo Giorgini (University of Trento - IT)
Jan Jurjens (TUM - Germany)
Vic Lesser (University of Massachusetts - USA)
Gordon Manson (University of Sheffield - UK)
Fabio Martinelli (CNR/IIT - IT)
Eduardo -Fernandez Medina-Paton (Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha - ES)
David Musliner (Honeywell - USA)
Lin Padgham (RMIT - Australia)
Anita Raga (University of North Carolina - USA)
Marco Roveri (IRST - Italy)
Erika Sanchez (ITESM - Mexico)
Diana Spears (University of Wyoming - USA)
Michael Weiss (Carleton University - Canada)
Eric Yu (University of Toronto - Canada)
Wei Zhang (Boeing - USA)