COIN@ECAI 2006

     Coordination, Organization, Institutions and Norms in Agent
    Systems (COIN)

Workshop of ECAI'06

http://agents.cs.wright.edu/coin@ecai/

COIN @ ecai'06
Riva del Garda, Italy
August 28, 2005


    Call For Papers


      Aims and Scope

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:


      Workshop Topics

  * 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


      Proceedings

Proceedings will be available at the workshop. It is planned to publish revised and extended versions of the papers as a Springer LNCS volume (pending confirmation).


      Preparation and submission of papers

Paper submission is possible only by email. Authors are requested to send a pdf file attached to an email message to Eric Matson at eric.matson@wright.edu. The message should contain the paper title, author name(s) and affiliation(s), contact information of one of the authors, and an abstract of at most 200 words. The abstract must identify the main topics of the paper. Full papers should have a maximum of 5 pages and must be formatted using the ECAI style.


      Workshop dates

  * April 15, 2006 Workshop paper submission deadline.
  * May 10, 2006 Notification of workshop paper acceptance.
  * May 24, 2006 Workshop camera ready copy submission.
  * Aug 28-29, 2006 Workshop date August 28th


    Organizing Committee

Guido Boella
University of Torino
Dipartimento di Informatica

Olivier Boissier
ENS Mines Saint-Etienne

Eric Matson
Wright State University
Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Javier Vázquez-Salceda
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
Knowledge Engineering and Machine Learning Group