Description

The topic for WOA 2017 is "Agents in Online Social Networks".

Nowadays, Online Social Networks (OSNs) are definitively emerging as virtual environments in which key activities are developed (e.g. e-Commerce, e-Learning, e-Health and Smart Cities) and provide users with large spaces of interactivity suitable to convoy both content and services.

In this context, the necessity of automatizing the activities, giving the users the possibility to interact effectively and efficiently with each other is particularly pressing, making OSNs a key context in which the use of software agents appears suitable and promising. In the last years, many proposals have been presented in the scientific literature for applying agent technology to OSN applications as, for instance, agent-based recommender systems, multi-agent systems for supporting OSN activities in a wide number of areas, and agent architectures for implementing security and privacy in OSNs.

Several important, open research issues have been recently highlighted in such a context. As main examples, we remark the necessity to design effective, ad-hoc models for capturing trust and reputation of OSN users, finding strategies for implementing cooperation and forming user teams and coalitions, and developing rational models for supporting the internal organization of an OSN.

Topics of Interest

• Adaptive, animated and personality driven agents
• Agents and objects
• Agents and supporting technologies to cooperation
• Agents integrated with the Web
• Mobile agents
• Agents for e-commerce
• Agents and Sensor networks
• Learning, planning and reasoning
• Applications Agents 
• Coordination, cooperation and communication
• Hardware and software infrastructures
• Theoretical, conceptual and ontological basis
• Agent based software engineering
• Agent based languages and platforms
• Agent-oriented methods and development tools
• Relations between agents and different development technologies
• Security, trust and responsibility
• Standard and interoperability