Call for Papers and Participation
International Workshop on
Regulated Agent-Based Social Systems:
Theories and Applications (RASTA'02)
organised by
Institute of Science and Technology of Cognition - CNR, Italy,
MIT Sloan School of Management, USA,
Department of Computer Science, North Carolina State University, USA,
University of Washington, USA,
AI Lab of the Department of Computer Sciences, Humboldt University Berlin, and
"Theoretical Foundations of Computer Science" Group, University of Hamburg
Organizing Board
Programme Committee A
Programme Committee B
Programme Committee C
Submissions
Agent Technology is the latest paradigm of software engineering
methodology. The development of autonomous, mobile, and intelligent
agents brings new challenges to the field. Agent technologies and
multi-agent-systems are one of the most vibrant and active research
areas of computer science. At the same time commercial applications
of agents are gaining attention. The construction of artificial
(agent) societies leads to questions that already have been asked for
human societies. Computer Scientists have adopted terms like
emerging behavior, self-organization, and evolutionary theory in an
intuitive manner. Multi-agent-system researchers have started to
develop agents with "social" abilities and complex "social" systems.
However, most of these systems lack the foundation of the
social sciences. It is the intention to bring together
researchers from computer science as well as the social sciences who
see their common interest in social theories for the construction of
multi-agent-systems.
The workshop will take place during the First International Joint
Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (
AAMAS 2002
) in Bologna, Italy from July 15-19, 2002.
Topic A
Social Theory for Agent Technology (Socionics)
The wide range of social theories offers many
different solutions to problems found in complex (computer)
systems. Which theories, to apply how and when is a major challenge.
In developing agents and multi-agent systems computer scientists have
used sociological terms like negotiation, interaction, contracts,
agreement, organisation, cohesion, social order, and collaboration.
Meanwhile an interdisciplinary area called Socionics, the
bridge between sociology and computerscience, is beginning to
establish itself. The realisation that the behaviour of societies
cannot fully be explained by macro-theories only, and the progress
made in agent technology opened the way to new models of societies in
which both macro-theories and micro-theories are incorporated. The
development of the socionics research area and the increased interest
in dynamics of behaviour of agents in hybrid organisations requires
the investigation of new modelling concepts like roles, groups,
social intelligence, beliefs, desires, and
intentions.
Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
-
Social theories relevant for the development of agent systems from the fields of
-
Sociology, Psychology, Philosophy, Economics, Cognitive Sciences, Organizational Sciences, or Game Theory
-
Social concepts and models of
-
Compositionality
-
Communication, coordination, and cooperation
-
Privacy, security, confidence, trust, reputation, control, rationality etc.
-
Emotions
-
Cognitive/neural grounding of social behavior
-
Models of cognitive representations of social worlds
-
From actor-models to agent-models
-
Methodologies for interdisciplinary theory transformation
-
Individual/society (micro/macro) dynamics
-
Intersubjectivity and attribution
-
Conceptual and functional peculiarities of dyads, teams, groups, communities, and societies
-
Social background of agents theories
-
Models of intelligence, mobility, autonomy, emotions etc.
-
Agent-oriented software engineering (AOSE)
-
Specific issues like negotiation, co-operation, decision making, platforms, architectures, frameworks, languages, protocols, knowledge, scalability
-
Role of social theories in agent systems
-
Referrals in information flow
-
Expertise management
-
Modelling and foundations
-
Methodologies, paradigms, and principles
-
Agent languages and architectures
-
Modelling techniques for social aspects
-
Formal foundations, e.g. verification and validation
-
Agent-based modeling and simulation of social networks
-
Applications
-
Social(ly embedded) agents in the area of the Internet, intranets, business objects, e-commerce, CSCW, etc.
-
Emperical studies
-
Tools in the fields mentioned above
-
Human-Computer-Interface and usability
-
Testbeds and evaluations
-
Ubiquitous computing and mobile devices
Programme committee A
Sven Brückner |
ERIM, USA |
sbrueckner@erim.org
|
Enhong Chen |
University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China |
cheneh@ustc.edu.cn
|
Rosaria Conte |
National Research Council,Rome, Italy |
conte@www.ip.rm.cnr.it
|
Kerstin Dautenhahn |
University of Hertfordshire, United Kingdom |
K.Dautenhahn@herts.ac.uk
|
Chris Dellarocas |
MIT Sloan School of Management, USA |
dell@mit.edu
|
Peter Dittrich |
University Dortmund, Germany |
dittrich@ls11.cs.uni-do rtmund.de
|
Michael Huhns |
University of South Carolina, USA |
huhns@sc.edu
|
Catholijn Jonker |
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands |
jonker@cs.vu.nl
|
Henry A. Kautz |
University of Washington, USA |
kautz@cs.washington.edu
|
Stefan Kirn |
TU Ilmenau, Germany |
stefan.kirn@wirtsch aft.tu-ilmenau.de
|
Ioan Alfred Letia |
Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania |
letia@cs-gw.utcluj.ro
|
Gabriela Lindemann(co-Chair) |
Humboldt University Berlin,Germany |
lindeman@informatik.hu- berlin.de
|
Ivica Mitrovic |
University of Split, Croatia |
ivica.mitrovic@umas.hr
|
Daniel Moldt(co-Chair)
|
University of Hamburg, Germany |
moldt@informatik.uni-hamburg.de
|
Sascha Ossowski |
Rey Juan Carlos University, Spain |
s.ossowski@escet.urjc.es
|
Pietro Panzarasa |
University of Southhampton, United Kingdom |
pp@ecs.soton.ac.uk
|
Mario Paolucci(co-Chair) |
National Research Council,Rome, Italy |
mario.paolucci@thinkingo lem.com
|
Mirko Petric |
University of Split, Croatia |
mirko.petric@umas.hr
|
Paolo Petta |
University of Vienna, OFAI, Austria |
paolo@ai.univie.ac.at
|
Fiorella de Rosis |
University of Bari, Italy |
derosis@di.uniba.it
|
Bernd Schmidt |
University Passau, Germany |
bschmidt@fmi.uni-passau.de
|
Ingo Schulz-Schaeffer |
TU Berlin, Germany |
schulz-schaeffer@tu-berlin .de
|
Munindar P. Singh |
North Carolina State University, USA |
mpsingh@eos.ncsu.edu
|
Sorin Solomon |
Hebrew University Jerusalem, Israel |
sorin@vms.huji.ac.il
|
Ingo Timm |
TZI Bremen, Germany |
i.timm@tzi.org
|
Inga Tomic-Koludrovic |
University of Split, Croatia |
inga.tomic-koludrovic@umas .hr
|
Adelinde Uhrmacher |
University Rostock, Germany |
lin@informatik.uni-rostock .de
|
Thomas Uthmann |
University Mainz, Germany |
uthmann@informatik.uni-mainz.de
|
Bin Yu (co-Chair) |
North Carolina State University, USA |
byu@unity.ncsu.edu
|
Topic B
Norms and Institutions in MAS
Multi-agent systems are increasingly being considered a
viable technological basis for implementing complex, open systems
such as electronic marketplaces, virtual enterprises, military or
political coalition support systems, etc. The design of open systems
in such domains poses a number of difficult challenges, including the
need to cope with unreliable communication and network
infrastructures, the need to address incompatible assumptions and
limited trust among independently developed agents, and the necessity
of detecting and responding to systemic failures.
Human
organisations and societies have successfully coped with similar
problems of coordination, cooperation, etc., in short, with the
challenge of social order, mainly by developing norms and
conventions, that is, specifications of behaviour that all society
members are expected to conform to, and that undergo efficient forms
of decentralised control. In most societies, norms are backed by a
variety of social institutions that enforce law and order (e.g.
courts, police), monitor for and respond to emergencies (e.g.
ambulance system), prevent and recover from unanticipated disasters
(e.g. coast guard, firefighters), etc. In that way, civilised
societies allow citizens to utilise relatively simple and efficient
rules of behaviour, offloading the prevention and recovery of many
problem types to social institutions that can handle them efficiently
and effectively by virtue of their economies of scale and widely
accepted legitimacy. Successful civil societies have thus achieved a
division of labour between individuals and institutions that
decreases the "barriers to survival" for each citizen, while helping
increase the welfare of the society as a whole.
Several researchers have recognised that the design of open
multi-agent systems can benefit from abstractions analogous to those
employed by our robust and relatively successful societies and
organisations. There is a growing body of work that touches upon the
concepts of norms and institutions in the context of multi-agent
systems. This work moves in several
directions,including:
-
Formal-Theoretical work (definitions
of concepts related to norms and institutions, such as contracts,
commitments, obligations, rights, permissions, responsibility,
delegation; formal notations for expressing and communicating norms
and institutions; development of models of institutions,
institutional roles, action, legitimacy )
-
Experimental, exploratory theoretical work (specifications of hypotheses to be
checked via experimental computational and simulation based studies,
and possibly by cross-methodological comparison between natural and
artificial data)
-
Architectural work (architectures of agents with norms; architectures of electronic institutions;
etc.)
-
Prototyping and evaluation (prototype agent systems
employing norms and electronic institutions in domains such as
electronic commerce; coalition formation; disaster recovery;
experimental evaluation of the effectiveness of given institutions in
the face of heterogeneity; limited trust and unreliable
infrastructure; etc.)
-
Social simulation (modelling of
social and organisational institutions using multi-agent systems; use
of normative concepts and phenomena in the design, evaluation and
comparison of different organisational structures;
etc.)
Topics of interest include but are not
limited to:
-
Norms and Institutions in MAS
-
Formal definitions of normative and institutional concepts
-
Notations and languages for communicating norms and institutions
-
Architectures of agents with norms
-
Norm-based reasoning and argumentation
-
Architectures of social institutions
-
Prototype systems employing the concepts of norms and institutions
-
Methodologies for evaluating the effectiveness of norms and
electronic institutions
-
Application domains for which norms and institutions are especially useful design metaphor
-
The use of norms and institutions in open environments
-
Norms and institutions in electronic commerce applications
-
Adaptive institutions
-
Emergence of institutions
-
Decentralised vs. centralised institutions and systems of enforcement
-
Reputation and reputational systems on the web
-
Social simulation and its relationship to electronic institutions
-
Multi-agent based approach to participatory policy-making
-
Evolutionary models and algorithms for the study of institutions
Programme committee B
Jose Carmo |
Technical University of Madeira, Portugal |
jcc@math.uma.pt
|
Helder Coelho |
University of Lisbon, Portugal |
hcoelho@di.fc.ul.pt
|
Rosaria Conte |
National Research Council,Rome, Italy |
conte@www.ip.rm.cnr.it
|
Chris Dellarocas |
MIT Sloan School of Management, USA |
dell@mit.edu
|
Frank Dignum |
Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands |
dignum@win.tue.nl
|
Rino Falcone |
Institute of Cognitive Science and Technology-CNR, Italy |
Falcone@ip.rm.cnr.it
|
David Hales |
Manchester Metropolitan University, UK |
daphal@essex.ac.uk
|
Michael Huhns |
University of South Carolina, USA |
huhns@sc.edu
|
Andrew Jones |
King's College London, UK |
ajijones@dcs.kcl.ac.uk
|
Henry A. Kautz |
University of Washington, USA |
kautz@cs.washington.edu
|
Victor Lesser |
University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA |
lesser@cs.umass.edu
|
Gabriela Lindemann(co-Chair)
|
Humboldt University Berlin,Germany |
lindeman@informatik.hu-berlin.de
|
Daniel Moldt(co-Chair)
|
University of Hamburg, Germany |
moldt@informatik.uni-hamburg.de
|
Mario Paolucci(co-Chair) |
National Research Council,Rome, Italy |
mario.paolucci@thinkingolem.com
|
Michael Prietula |
University of Florida, USA |
prietula@ufl.edu
|
Juan Antonio Rodriguez-Aguilar |
Laboratory of Intelligent Software Components, Spain |
jar@isoco.com
|
Giovanni Sartor |
Queen's University of Belfast, N. Ireland |
sartor@cirfid.unibo.it
|
Carles Sierra |
IIIA-CSIC, Spain |
sierra@iiia.csic.es
|
Munindar P. Singh |
North Carolina State University, USA |
mpsingh@eos.ncsu.edu
|
Leon van der Torre |
Vrije University, The Netherlands |
torre@cs.vu.nl
|
Harko Verhagen |
Stockholm University and the Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden |
verhagen@dsv.su.se
|
Pinar Yolum |
North Carolina State University, USA |
pyolum@eos.ncsu.edu
|
Bin Yu (co-Chair) |
North Carolina State University, USA |
byu@unity.ncsu.edu
|
Topic C
Agent-based social networks
Agent-based social networks are self-organizing
networks of users, in which each user is assigned a software agent
and software agents assist the users in maintaining their social
relationships and searching relevant information in the networks on
behalf of users. The new, multidisciplinary field might provide an
effective tool for sociologists studying individual behaviors in a
complex social system and testbed for the study and evaluation of
artificial agent societies.Agent-based social networks help to
develop an effective, naturally occurring knowledge management system
in the organizations, while each agent automatically learns one
another's domains of expertise. The rapid change of organizational
structure makes agent-based social networks even more important in
which workers rely on their personal social networks, rather than
unstable, weakening"organization charts".
Moreover, agent-based
social networks are a natural nextstep in the evolution of networked
computing. Agent-based social networks extend the stand-alone
multiagent systems with users, and enable them to share their
knowledge and experience on a wide scale. Interesting
questions include how to find the users with needed
information effectively with the local knowledge while the privacy of
the users is preserved, and how the structure of social networks
affects the information flow.
Topics of
interest include but are not
limited to:
-
Structure of social networks
-
Small-world networks
-
Power-law networks
-
Peer-to-peer networks
-
Dynamics of social networks
-
Multiagent learning and user modeling
-
Dynamics of social networks
-
Simulation testbed, and evalutations
-
Evolutation, stability and efficiency
-
Search in social networks
-
Middle agents and referrals
-
Effect of the structures on the information flow
-
Applications
-
Knowledge management
-
Reputation management
-
Link analysis for recommender systems
-
Computer supported collaborative learning and working
-
Social psychology
-
interpersonal communication
-
transactive memory
-
cognitive process and emotions
Programme committee C
Karl Aberer |
EPF Lausanne, Switzerland |
karl.aberer@epfl.ch
|
Andreas Abecker |
DFKI, Germany |
aabecker@dfki.uni-kl.de
|
Mark S. Ackerman |
University of Michigan, USA |
ackerman@godzilla.ICS.UCI. EDU
|
Kathleen Carley |
CMU, USA |
Kathleen.Carley@cmu.edu
|
Rosaria Conte | National Research Council,Rome, Italy |
conte@www.ip.rm.cnr.it
|
Noshir Contractor |
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA |
nosh@uiuc.edu
|
Raymond D'Amore |
MITRE, USA |
rdamore@mitre.org
|
Chris Dellarocas |
MIT Sloan School of Management, USA |
dell@mit.edu
|
Rino Falcone |
Institute of Cognitive Science and Technology-CNR, Italy |
falcone@www.ip.rm.cnr.it
|
Andrea Hollingshead |
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA |
hollings@uiuc.edu
|
Michael Huhns |
University of South Carolina, USA |
huhns@sc.edu
|
Henry A. Kautz |
University of Washington, USA |
kautz@cs.washington.edu
|
Henry Lieberman |
MIT, USA |
lieber@media.mit.edu
|
Gabriela Lindemann(co-Chair) |
Humboldt University Berlin,Germany |
lindeman@informatik.hu-berlin.de
|
Jiming Liu |
Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong |
jiming@Comp.HKBU.Edu.HK
|
Steve Marsh |
National Research Council, Canada |
steve.marsh@nrc.ca
|
Mark Maybury |
MITRE, USA |
maybury@mitre.org
|
Daniel Moldt(co-Chair)
|
University of Hamburg, Germany |
moldt@informatik.uni-hamburg.de
|
Bonnie Nardi |
Agilent Technologies, USA |
bonnie_nardi@exch.labs.agilent.com
|
Hiroaki Ogata
|
University of Tokushima, Japan |
ogata@is.tokushima-u.ac.jp
|
Pietro Panzarasa |
University of Southhampton, United Kingdom |
pp@ecs.soton.ac.uk
|
Mario Paolucci(co-Chair)
|
National Research Council,Rome, Italy |
mario.paolucci@thinkingolem.com
|
Michael Prietula |
Emory University, USA |
mike_prietula@bus.emory.edu
|
Bart Selman |
Cornell University, USA |
selman@CS.Cornell.EDU
|
Carles Sierra |
IIIA-CSIC, Spain |
sierra@iiia.csic.es
|
Munindar P. Singh |
North Carolina State University, USA |
mpsingh@eos.ncsu.edu
|
Katia Sycara |
CMU, USA |
katia@cs.cmu.edu |
Bin Yu (co-Chair)
|
North Carolina State University, USA |
byu@unity.ncsu.edu
|
Organizing Board
Rosaria Conte |
National Research Council,Rome, Italy |
conte@www.ip.rm.cnr.it
|
Chris Dellarocas |
MIT Sloan School of Management, USA |
dell@mit.edu
|
Henry A. Kautz |
University of Washington, USA |
kautz@cs.washington.edu
|
Gabriela Lindemann(co-Chair)
|
Humboldt University Berlin,Germany |
lindeman@informatik.hu-berlin.de
|
Daniel Moldt(co-Chair)
|
University of Hamburg, Germany |
moldt@informatik.uni-hamburg.de
|
Mario Paolucci(co-Chair)
|
National Research Council,Rome, Italy |
mario.paolucci@thinkingolem.com
|
Munindar P. Singh |
North Carolina State University, USA |
mpsingh@eos.ncsu.edu
|
Bin Yu (co-Chair) |
North Carolina State University, USA |
byu@unity.ncsu.edu
|
Submissions
Innovative and recent papers written in English are welcome for submission. The
papers will be reviewed by at least two programme committee
members. Selection criteria will focus on relevance to the special
topic, originality with respect to the state of the art, and
potential for discussion.The program committee invites
submissions of contributions as: long versions (up to 20 pages),
short versions (up to 10 papges), and position statements / posters
(up to 2 pages). Submissions should be in either POSTSCRIPT or PDF
format and emailed to the chair of the topic to which it pertains:
Topic A - Socionics - papers should be emailed to
rasta02@informatik.uni-hamburg.de .
Topic B - Norms and Institutions in MAS - papers should be emailed to Mario Paolucci at
mario.paolucci@thinkingolem.com.
Topic C - Agent-based social networks - papers should be emailed to Bin Yu at
byu@unity.ncsu.edu .
Accepted papers will be included in the workshop proceedings which will appear as a technical report
of the Department of Computer Science, University of Hamburg, and
which will be available at the workshop.
After an additional review process we will publish
the best submissions in a special book within the LNCS/LNAI series of
Springer.
Last modified: 24.10.2002
Daniel Moldt
http://www2.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/tgi/events/rasta02/cfp.html