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Call for Papers

Aims and Scope

Multi-agent systems are often understood as complex entities where a multitude of agents interact, usually with some intended individual or collective purpose. Such a view usually assumes some form of structure, or set of norms or conventions that articulate or restrain interactions in order to make them more effective in attaining those goals, more certain for participants or more predictable. The engineering of effective coordination or regulatory mechanisms is a key problem for the design of open complex multi-agent systems.

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, and the co-evolution of agent interactions, provide theoretically demanding and interdisciplinary research questions at different levels of abstraction. Consequently, this workshop provides a space for the convergence of concerns and developments from MAS researchers that have been involved with these issues from the complementary perspectives of coordination, organizations, institutions and norms.

The COIN workshop is a continuation the workshop with the same name at AAMAS'06 and of the ANIREM and OOOP workshops held in AAMAS'05. A twin event of COIN --focused, then, on organizational aspects of agent interactions-- has been collocated with ECAI'06 in Trento and is expected to be held at the event "Multi-Agent Logics, Languages, and Organisations Federated Workshops" (MALLOW'007) in Durham.

Theme and Topics

The COIN workshop in AAMAS'07 will focus on the normative or prescriptive aspects involved in agent coordination. Topics of interest include:

We particularly encourage authors to submit innovative and original papers that report on

Papers describing ongoing work and position papers are welcome.

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Preparation and Submission of Papers

For preparation of papers to be submitted please follow the instructions for authors available at the Springer LNCS Web page: http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html. The length of each paper including figures and references may not exceed 12 pages. All papers must be written in English and submitted in PDF format. Submission of a paper should be regarded as an undertaking that, should the paper be accepted, at least one of the authors will attend the conference to present the work.

Paper submissions to COIN@AAMAS2007 will be handled using the JEMS system. The URL address to be used is: https://submissoes.sbc.org.br/coin2007. Submission is a three-step process. 

  1. In a first step authors who have never used the system are required to register as new authors with JEMS (note that only 1 registration is needed if you submit more than 1 paper). After registration as author the login data will be sent to the specified email address. This data can be used to access the system. 
  2. In a second step authors have to register their paper (click the submit paper button in the conference page). The authors are asked in this step to specify the name of the authors, the paper title, and the paper abstract. The system will then assign a tracking ID to each submission which is sent to the contact author.
  3. The third step consists on uploading the paper. This step can be done jointly with the registering step. For those authors who prefer to upload their papers after registering, the tracking ID must be used. 
The extended deadline for both paper registering and uploading is February 12, 2007 23:55 BRST (Brazilian time, which corresponds to GMT-2:00).

We will only accept files in PDF format. Please do not try to upload doc or rtf files, they will be rejected by the system. Please do not send papers directly to the PC-chairs. Submissions sent by regular courrier or by email will not be considered.

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Preliminary Programme

Out of 15 submissions, 9 papers were selected for inclusion in the workshop proceedings and presentation at the workshop, an acceptance rate of 60%.  Paper presentations are 20 minutes plus 10 minutes for questions. The workshop programme includes an invited talk and a round table at the end of the day.

08:30 - 09:00 Opening Remarks by Sascha Ossowski and Jaime Sichman
09:00 - 10:30 Session 1:
  • Towards a framework for agent coordination and reorganization, AgentCoRe by Mattijs Ghijsen (Uviversity of Amsterdam), Wouter Jansweijer (University of Amsterdam) and Bob Wielinga (University of Amsterdam)
  • Coordination in Disaster Management and Response: a Unified Approach by Myriam Abramson (Naval Research Laboratory)
  • Towards a Formalisation of Dynamic Electronic Institutions by Eduard Muntaner-Perich (University of Girona) and Josep Lluis de la Rosa Esteva (University of Girona)
10:30 - 11:00 Coffee Break
11:00 - 12:30 Session 2:
  • Implementing Norms that Govern Non-Dialogical Actions by Viviane Silva (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
  • A Contract Model for Electronic Institutions by Henrique Lopes Cardoso (University of Porto) and Eugenio Oliveira (Universidade do Porto)
  • Ignoring, forcing and expecting concurrent events in Electronic Institutions by Andres Garcia-Camino (IIIA-CSIC)
12:30 - 14:30 Lunch Break
14:30 - 16:00 Session 3:
  • Large-scale Organizational Computing requires Unstratified Paraconsistency and Reflection by Carl Hewitt (MIT)
  • Role Model Based Mechanism For Norm Emergence in Artificial Agent Societies by Bastin Tony Roy Savarimuthu (University of Otago), Maryam Purvis (University of Otago), Stephen Cranefield (University of Otago) and Martin Purvis (University of Otago)
  • Using Testimonies to Enforce the Behavior of Agents by Fernanda Duran (PUC-Rio), Viviane Silva (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) and Carlos Lucena (PUC-Rio)
16:00 - 16:30 Coffee Break
16:30 - 18:00 Session 4:
  • Invited Talk: Agents Organizations and Web Services by Mike Huhns (University of South Carolina) and Munindar Singh (North Carolina State University)
  • Round Table (topic tba)
18:00 Closing of COIN@AAMAS'07

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Proceedings

Printed proceedings will be available at the workshop (a pdf version can be downloaded here). As with previous COIN workshops, revised and extended versions of the papers of the two 2007 editions will be published in a single Springer LNCS volume (pending confirmation). The revised versions must take into account the discussion held during the workshop, hence, only those papers that are presented during the workshop will be considered for inclusion in the post-proceedings volume.

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Important Dates

Extended Paper submission deadline: February 12, 2007
Notifications of acceptance/rejection: March 5, 2007
Camera-ready copies due: March 19, 2007
Workshop Date: May 14, 2007

Please notice that authors will have a very short time to take into account the reviewers comments and to send their final contributions to the workshop if the paper is accepted. Therefore, we strongly encourage possible authors to be aware of this critical period (March 5-19).

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Programme Committee

Alessandro Provetti, Università degli Studi di Messina (Italy)
Andrea Omicini, University of Bologna (Italy)
Anja Oskamp, Free University Amsterdam (The Netherlands)
Carl Hewitt, MIT (USA)
Catherine Tessier, ONERA (France)
Christian Lemaître, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (Mexico)
Danny Weyns, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium)
Eric Matson, Wright State University (USA)
Eugenio Oliveira, Universidade do Porto (Portugal)
Fabiola López y López, Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (Mexico)
Frank Dignum, Utrecht University (the Netherlands)
Gabriela Lindemann, Humboldt University, Berlin (Germany)
Guido Boella, University of Torino (Italy)
Holger Billhardt, University Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid (Spain)
Javier Vázquez-Salceda, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Spain)
Jomi Fred Hubner, UFRB Blumenau (Brazil)
Juan Antonio Rodríguez Aguilar, IIIA-CSIC (Spain)
Julian Padget, University of Bath (UK)
Leendert van der Torre, University of Luxembourg (Luxembourg)
Liz Sonenberg, University of Melbourne (Australia)
Mario Verdicchio, Politecnico di Milano (Italy)
Michael Luck, University of Southampton (UK)
Nicoletta Fornara, Università della Svizzera Italiana (Switzerland)
Olivier Boissier, ENS Mines Saint-Etienne (France)
Olivier Gutknecht, LPL  (France)
Pablo Noriega, IIIA-CSIC (Spain)
PInar Yolum, Bogazici University (Turkey)
Stephen Cranefield, U. Otago (New Zealand)
Ulises Cortés, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Spain)
Vicent Botti, Universitat Politècnica de València (Spain)
Victor Lesser, University of Massachusetts-Amherst (USA)
Virginia Dignum, University of Utrecht (The Netherlands)
Wamberto Vasconcelos, University of Aberdeen (UK)
Yves Demazeau, LEIBNIZ (France)

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Workshop Chairs

Sascha Ossowski, University Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid, Spain
    sascha.ossowski@urjc.es
Jaime Simao Sichman, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil
    jaime.sichman@poli.usp.br

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COIN Steering Committee

Guido Boella, Italy
Olivier Boissier, France
Virginia Dignum, The Netherlands
Victor Lesser, USA
Pablo Noriega, Spain
Andrea Omicini, Italy
Sascha Ossowski, Spain
Julian Padget, UK
Jaime Sichman, Brazil