RASTA'03: Call for Papers and Participation

Call for Papers and Participation

Second International Workshop on
Regulated Agent-Based Social Systems:
Theories and Applications (RASTA'03)

Workshop date: 23 June, 2003

in connection with ICAIL 2003
the Ninth International Conference on ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE and LAW
24 - 28 June, 2003 Edinburgh, Scotland, UK

organised by
Institute of Science and Technology of Cognition - CNR, Italy,
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 Submissions

New deadline for submissions: March 24, 2003
Notification of acceptance: April 23, 2003
Deadline for final papers: May 13, 2003
Workshop: June 23, 2003

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 and those who want to use multi-agent-systems to simulate social systems.

The workshop will take place before the Ninth International Conference on ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE and LAW 24 - 28 June, 2003 Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
The Workshop date will be 23 June, 2003

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 rasta03@informatik.uni-hamburg.de .

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. The best contributions will be considered for further publication.

For further information about RASTA'03 contact the programme committee by email at rasta03@informatik.uni-hamburg.de
or have a look at the
RASTA'03 homepage at http://www2.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/tgi/events/rasta03/

Range of Interest

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, or collaboration. Meanwhile an interdisciplinary area called Socionics, the bridge between sociology and computer science, 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. However, the integration of these theories is still insufficient. The development of the socionics research area and the increased interest in dynamics of behaviour and structures of or within agents in hybrid organisations requires the investigation of new modelling concepts.
When looking at the actually implemented systems many difficult challenges have to be solved with respect to the behaviour and the relationships within the involved and implemented entities of a system. Especially the introduction of norms and institutions in the social world has helped to organize our world. The transfer of these concepts into the field of MAS seems to be a promissing direction. At the same time the complete understanding of establishment of norms and institutions still needs research. Most interesting is that MAS are now seen as a good vehicle in terms of metaphers, concepts, and tools to support this research direction.
Social networks have been a good tool to 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. The mutual dependencies between organizations and their personal / artifical actors is a demanding testbed for theories and applications of MAS. The future will provide more and more connected and mutually dependent organizations / people / artifical agents. The consequences still have not been understood.
The way to approach all these challenges can be from theoretical, experimental, empirical, prototypical, applied etc. work. We expect to have again many different directions which will lead to an interesting discussion during and after the workshop as last time.

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, Law, 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

Agents and Law

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

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

Social networks

Structure of social networks like: small-world networks, power-law networks, and peer-to-peer networks,

Dynamics of social networks like: multiagent learning and user modeling, simulation testbed and evalutations, evolutation, stability, and efficiency,

Applications like: knowledge management, reputation management, and computer supported collaborative learning and working

Social psychology especially: interpersonal communication, transactive memory, cognitive process, and emotions

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**
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
Petra Ahrweiler	University of Hamburg, Germany	ahrweiler@sozwi.sozialwiss.uni-hamburg.de
Luis Antunes	University of Lisboa, Portugal	xarax@di.fc.ul.pt
Sven Brückner	ERIM, USA	sbrueckner@erim.org
Kathleen Carley	CMU, USA	Kathleen.Carley@cmu.edu
Noshir Contractor	University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA	nosh@uiuc.edu
Jose Carmo	Technical University of Madeira, Portugal	jcc@math.uma.pt
Enhong Chen	University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China	cheneh@ustc.edu.cn
Helder Coelho	University of Lisbon, Portugal	hcoelho@di.fc.ul.pt
Rosaria Conte	National Research Council,Rome, Italy	conte@ip.rm.cnr.it
Raymond D'Amore	MITRE, USA	rdamore@mitre.org
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
Bruce Edmonds	Manchester Metropolitan University Business School, United Kingdom	b.edmonds@mmu.ac.uk
Rino Falcone	Institute of Cognitive Science and Technology-CNR, Italy	Falcone@ip.rm.cnr.it
David Hales	Manchester Metropolitan University, UK	dave@davidhales.com
Andrea Hollingshead	University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA	hollings@uiuc.edu
Andrew Jones	King's College London, UK	ajijones@dcs.kcl.ac.uk
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
Victor Lesser	University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA	lesser@cs.umass.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
Thomas Malsch	Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg, Germany	malsch@tu-harburg.de
Steve Marsh	National Research Council, Canada	steve.marsh@nrc.ca
Mark Maybury	MITRE, USA	maybury@mitre.org
Jordi Sabater Mir	IIIA / CSIC, Spain	jsabater@iiia.csic.es
Ivica Mitrovic	University of Split, Croatia	ivica.mitrovic@umas.hr
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
Sascha Ossowski	Rey Juan Carlos University, Spain	s.ossowski@escet.urjc.es
Pietro Panzarasa	University of London, United Kingdom	p.panzarasa@qmul.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
Michael Prietula	University of Florida, USA	prietula@ufl.edu
Juan Antonio Rodriguez-Aguilar	IIIA-CSIC, Spain	jar@iiia.csic.es
Fiorella de Rosis	University of Bari, Italy	derosis@di.uniba.it
Giovanni Sartor	University of Bologna, Italy	sartor@cirfid.unibo.it
Michael Schillo	DFKI Multiagent Systems Group, Germany	schillo@dfki.de
Ingo Schulz-Schaeffer	TU Berlin, Germany	schulz-schaeffer@tu-berlin.de
Bart Selman	Cornell University, USA	selman@CS.Cornell.EDU
Munindar P. Singh	North Carolina State University, USA	mpsingh@eos.ncsu.edu
Sorin Solomon	Hebrew University Jerusalem, Israel	sorin@vms.huji.ac.il
Liz Sonenberg	University of Melbourne, Australia	LizS@staff.dis.unimelb.edu.au
Katia Sycara	CMU, USA	katia@cs.cmu.edu
Ingo Timm	TZI Bremen, Germany	i.timm@tzi.org
Inga Tomic-Koludrovic	University of Split, Croatia	inga.tomic-koludrovic@umas .hr
Leon van der Torre	Vrije University, The Netherlands	torre@cs.vu.nl
Adelinde Uhrmacher	University Rostock, Germany	lin@informatik.uni-rostock.de
Thomas Uthmann	University Mainz, Germany	uthmann@informatik.uni-mainz.de
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	North Carolina State University, USA	byu@unity.ncsu.edu

**Organizing Board**
Gabriela Lindemann	Humboldt University Berlin,Germany	lindeman@informatik.hu-berlin.de
Daniel Moldt	University of Hamburg, Germany	moldt@informatik.uni-hamburg.de
Mario Paolucci	National Research Council,Rome, Italy	mario.paolucci@thinkingolem.com

Last modified: 07.03.2003 Daniel Moldt
http://www2.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/tgi/events/rasta03/cfp.html

Second International Workshop on Regulated Agent-Based Social Systems: Theories and Applications (RASTA'03)

in connection with ICAIL 2003 the Ninth International Conference on ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE and LAW 24 - 28 June, 2003 Edinburgh, Scotland, UK

Submissions

Range of Interest

Second International Workshop on
Regulated Agent-Based Social Systems:
Theories and Applications (RASTA'03)

in connection with ICAIL 2003
the Ninth International Conference on ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE and LAW
24 - 28 June, 2003 Edinburgh, Scotland, UK