COIN@ECAI 2006

In recent years, social and organizational aspects of agency have become a major issue in MAS research. Recent applications of MAS on Web Services, Grid Computing and Ubiquitous Computing enforce the need for using these aspects in order to ensure social order within these environments. Openness, heterogeneity, and scalability of MAS pose new demands on traditional MAS interaction models. Therefore, the view of coordination and control has to be expanded to consider not only an agent-centric perspective but societal and organization-centric views as well.

The overall problem of analyzing the social, legal, economic and technological dimensions of agent organizations within the co-evolution of agent interactions provide theoretically demanding and interdisciplinary research questions at different levels of abstraction. The MAS research community has addressed these issues from different perspectives that have gradually become more cohesive around the four notions that give title to the workshop: coordination, organization, institutions and norms.

In order to reach those different research communities working in related topics, COIN will facilitate and coordinate the organization of twin yearly events co-located with large international conferences, diverse in focus and geographically.

While this year’s twin event (in AAMAS ‘06) will focus on the complementary normative or prescriptive aspects involved in agent coordination, this workshop will focus on the organizational aspects of agent interactions, such as those involved in:

•  Modeling multi-agent organizations  •  Models and architectures for social agents  •  Social science background for regulated MAS: Roles, authority, motivation, social power and other social relationships and attitudes  •  Coordination and interaction conventions, technologies and artifacts  •  Electronic institutions and virtual organizations  •  Coordination in emergent agent organizations  •  Organization design, monitoring and adaptation  •  Engineering organizations (validation, implementation and tools for agent organizations  •  Scaling and control issues in agent organizations  •  Norms, institutions and organizations: authority, power, dependence, penalty and sanctions, contracts, trust, reputation as regulating tools for autonomous agents within organizations  •  Application of organizational theory to MAS  •  Simulation, analysis and verification of dynamics of multi-agent organizations  •  Dynamic, adaptive and emergent organizational structures  •  Practical application examples for (aspect of) agent organization systems: applications of agent organizations to knowledge management, CSCW, workflow, etc.  •  Human-Computer interaction in agent organizations, specifically balancing authority between agents and users  •  Additional topics related to the organization of agent systems