EMOTIONAL AND EMPATHIC AGENTS (EEA'12)

             ** WORKSHOP ON EMOTIONAL AND EMPATHIC AGENTS **

                                          at AAMAS 2012

                                 June 4-8, 2012, Valencia, Spain





                          http://gaips.inesc-id.pt/aamas12-wseea

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                                      2ND CALL FOR PAPERS



                 [apologies for cross-postings, please distribute]



--------------------------

Workshop Organizers

--------------------------

João Dias (INESC-ID and Instituto Superior Técnico, PT)

Janneke van der Zwaan (Delft University of Technology, NL)

Jason Tsai (University of Southern California, USA)



---------------------------------

Senior Steering Committee

---------------------------------

Ana Paiva (PT)

Catholijn Jonker (NL)

Stacy Marsella (USA)

Virginia Dignum (NL)



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Goals

-------

The main goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers from different disciplines to discuss the creation of what we call "empathic agents". Empathy has been associated with the processes that make a person to have "feelings that are more congruent with another's situation than with his own situation". Humans, when interacting with virtual agents or robots can be led to feel empathy, and experience a diverse set of emotional reactions. On the other hand, agents and robots can in a certain, perhaps limited way, also show certain emotions in reaction to human emotions, thus seemingly expressing empathy towards other agents and towards humans.  Further, agents interacting in social simulation scenarios may react to the other agents in a way that is more congruent with the other's. Thus, by seeking inspiration in empathic relations established between humans and between humans and animals, in this workshop we expect to explore these dimensions of empathic agents.



This workshop is multidisciplinary in nature. We expect to involve researchers who are not only interesting in studying intelligent virtual agents, social simulation and social robotics, but also those interested in empathy, cognition, ethology, emotions, human interactions, computer graphics, human-robots interaction and human/computer interaction.



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Topics of Interest

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Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

- Models of empathy

- Empathy for rational agents

- Architectures for empathic agents and robots

- Emotional contagion

- Emotional interactions and regulation with agents

- Emotion modeling for empathic agents and robots

- User modeling for empathic agents and robots

- Social robots and social agents and empathy

- Inter-agent communication and empathy

- Expression of virtual agents for empathic interactions

- Empathy and facial expressions in virtual agents

- Empathic synthetic speech for virtual agents

- Applications to health and social education

- Interactive storytelling and empathy

- Entertainment and education applications

- Emotional and empathic agents in video games

- Empathy and long term interactions with virtual agents and robots

- Evaluating empathy in agents and robots

- Evaluating human empathic reactions to artificial agents and robots



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Important Dates

--------------------

Paper submission: February 28, 2012

Acceptance notification: March 27, 2012

Camera ready: April 10, 2012

Uploading of workshop papers to website: May 1, 2012

Workshop: June 4-5, 2012 (provisory date)



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Submissions

---------------

Researchers are invited to submit papers for the workshop focusing the topics of interest of the workshop stating clearly how they can contribute to the themes proposed. Papers should be no longer than 8 pages and must use the AAMAS format (http://aamas2012.webs.upv.es/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=19&Itemid=19). All papers will be reviewed by at least two members of the program committee in a single-blind review process. At least one author of each accepted paper is required to register for the workshop.



Papers should be submitted through Easychair in pdf format: https://www.easychair.org/account/signin.cgi?conf=eeaaamas2012



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Program Committee

-------------------------
Please check the program committee members at http://gaips.inesc-id.pt/aamas12-wseea/index.php/committees

Ambient Systems, Networks and Technologies (ANT-2012)

         The 3rd International Conference on Ambient Systems, Networks and Technologies (ANT-2012)
       
                                             27-29 August, 2012
                                       Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada

                            Website:http://cs-conferences.acadiau.ca/ant-12/
             ****************************************************************************

IMPORTANT DATES
===============
- Full Paper Submission:      February 29, 2012 (Extended)
- Acceptance Notification:    April 10, 2012
- Camera-Ready Submission:    May 10, 2012
- Workshops Proposals:        December 10, 2011

ANT-2012 accepted papers will be printed in the conference proceedings published by Elsevier Science in the open-access Procedia Computer Science series (on-line and CD). Procedia Computer Sciences is hosted on www.Elsevier.com and on Elsevier content platform ScienceDirect (http://www.sciencedirect.com), and will be freely available worldwide. All papers in Procedia will also be indexed by Scopus (http://www.scopus.com) and Engineering Village (Ei) (http://www.engineeringvillage.com). This includes EI Compendex (http://www.ei.org/compendex). The papers will contain linked references, XML versions and citable DOI numbers. All accepted papers will also be indexed in DBLP (http://dblp.uni-trier.de/). Selected papers will be invited for publication in special issues of international journals.

Conference Tracks:
=================
- Agent Systems, Intelligent Computing and Applications
- Automatic Networks and Communications
- Data Management
- Emerging Networking, Tracking and Sensing Technologies
- Multimedia and Social Computing
- Multimodal Interfaces
- Service Oriented Computing for Systems & Applications
- Smart Environments and Applications
- Systems Security and Privacy
- Systems Software Engineering
- Vehicular Networks and Applications
- General Track

COMMITTEES
=========

General Chairs
Nick Cercone, York University, Canada
Albert Zomaya, The University of Sydney, Australia

Program Chairs
Hossam Hassanein, Queen's University, Canada
Muhammad Younas, Oxford Brookes University, UK
Takahiro Hara, Osaka University, Japan

Advisory Committee
Ali Ghorbani, University of New Brunswick, Canada
Katia Sycara, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Erol Gelenbe, Imperial College, UK
Vincenzo Loia, University of Salerno, Italy
Ralf Steinmetz, Technische Universitaet Darmstadt, Germany
Peter Thomas, Manifesto Research, Australia
Sajal K. Das, The University of Texas at Arlington, USA
Timothy K. Shih, Tamkang University, Taiwan

Workshops Chairs
Senol Erdogan, Maltepe University, Turkey
Markus Aleksy, ABB Corporate Research Center, Germany

Program vice Chairs
Rainer Unland, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
Reiner Wichert, Fraunhofer-Institut for Computer Graphics IGD, Germany
Jiang Li, Howard University, USA
Tarek Sheltami, KFUPM, Saudi Arabia
Eric Pardede, La Trobe University, Australia
Irena Mlynkova, Charles University, Czech Republic
Abdelfettah Belghith, University of Manouba, Tunisia
Anis Koubaa, Al-Imam University, Saudi Arabia/CISTER Research Unit, Portugal
Keivan Kian-Mehr, University of Western Ontario, Canada
Tansel Ozyer, TOBB Econo & Tech University, Turkey
Thomas Grill, University of Salzburg, Austria
Mohyuddin, King Abdullah International Medical Research Center, Saudi Arabia
Zakaria Maamar, Zayed University, UAE
Jamal Bentahar, Concordia University, Canada
Abdallah Mhamed, Telecom SudParis, France
Wail Mardini, Jordan University of Science and Technology, Jordan
Ridha Khedri, McMaster University, Canada
Luis Javier Garc抋 Villalba, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
Agustinus Waluyo, Monash University, Australia
Bharat Jayaraman, University at Buffalo (SUNY), USA
Soumaya Cherkaoui, Sherbrooke University, Canada
G. Ram Mohana Reddy, National Institute of Technology Karnataka, India
Adnan Al-Anbuky, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand

International Journals Chair
Nauman Aslam, Northumbria University, UK

Local Arrangement Chairs
Ramiro Liscano, University of Ontario, Canada
Bessam Abdulrazak, Sherbrooke University, Canada

Publicity Chairs
Weiwei Fang, Beijing Jiaotong University, China
Djamal Benslimane, Lyon 1 University, France
Thais Regina de Moura Braga Silva, Federal University of Vicosa, Brazil
Wael M El-Medany, University of Bahrain, Bahrain

International Liaison Chairs
Karim Djouani, South African Institute of Technology, South African
Verdi Marchm, HP Labs Singapore, Singapore

Awards Chairs
Maytham Safar, Kuwait University, Kuwait
Bernady Apduhan, Kyushu Sangyo University, Japan

Steering Committee Chair
Elhadi Shakshuki, Acadia University, Canada

Optimisation in Multi-Agent Systems (OPTMAS V)

Fifth International Workshop on Optimisation in Multi-Agent Systems (OPTMAS V)

To be held in conjunction with the *Eleventh International Conference on Autonomous and Multi-Agent Systems  (AAMAS 2012)*

4 or 5 June 2012

cfp at:https://sites.google.com/site/optmas2012

=====================================================================

Call
----
This workshop invites works from different strands of the multi-agent systems community that pertain to the design of algorithms, models, and techniques to deal with multi-agent optimisation problems. In so doing, this workshop aims to provide a forum for researchers to discuss common issues that arise in solving optimisation problems in different areas and elaborate common benchmarks to test their solutions.

Invited Talk
----------------
to be announced
(Previous invited speakers include Moshe Tennenholtz (2008), Milind Tambe (2009), Paul Scerri (2010), Sven Koenig (2011) ).

Background
----------------
The number of novel applications of multi-agent systems has followed an exponential trend over the last few years, ranging from online auction design, through in multi-sensor networks, to scheduling of tasks in multi-actor systems. Multi-agent systems designed for all these applications generally require some form of optimization in order to achieve their goal. Given this, a number of advancements have been made in the design of winner determination, coalition formation, and distributed constraints optimization algorithms among others. However, there are no general principles guiding the design of such algorithms that would enable researchers to either exploit algorithms designed in other areas or to ensure that their algorithms conform to some level of applicability to real problems.
This workshop aims to address the above issues by bringing together researchers from different parts of the Multi-Agent Systems research area to present their work and discuss acceptable solutions, benchmarks, and evaluation methods for generally researched optimization problems.
In particular, the main issues to be addressed by the workshop include (but are not limited to):

1. Techniques to model and solve optimisation problems in which the actors
are partly or completely distributed and can only communicate with their peers.
2. Algorithms to compute solutions to mechanisms that deal with different stakeholders who  may  be  self  interested  or  may  have  different computation/communication capabilities from their peers.
3. Techniques to manage and disseminate relevant information across different agents.
4. Dealing with privacy concerns: solving complex  optimization  problems while leaking as little private information as possible
5. Problems that require anytime algorithms.
6. Approximate algorithms that need to provide  guarantees  on  the  quality of the solution.
7. Mechanisms whose properties  can  be  significantly  affected  if  the solution computed is not the optimal one.
8. Techniques to deal with optimizations that have to  be  repeated  with possibly only slight changes in the input data.
9. Techniques to deal  with  situations  where  the  input  data  may  be uncertain or unreliable, requiring that the solution computed be robust to slight differences from the true values.
10. Techniques to deal with agents that are tied to physical devices. This involves computation and communication constraints that need to  be considered in the coordination techniques, as well as the possibility of failures of the devices and communication links.

Keywords
-------------
Topics include but are not limited to:

* Distributed Constraints Optimisation/Satisfaction
* Winner Determination Algorithms in Auctions
* Coalition Formation Algorithms
* Algorithms to compute Nash Equilibrium in games
* Optimisation under uncertainty
* Optimisation with incomplete or dynamic input data
* Algorithms for real-time applications

Workshop motivation
--------------------------
OPTMAS complements the objectives of the AAMAS conference by providing a forum for multi-agent algorithm designers. The workshop will be attractive to those working in the general areas of distributed optimization, auction design, coordination, learning, and uncertainty and will be a good place to present original work and discuss acceptable benchmarks and evaluation methods for generally researched optimization problems.
The aim of OPTMAS is to complement the theoretical angle taken by work presented in the main conference, and other workshops, by focusing on the implementation issues and the general trends in optimization problems that arise across a variety of multi-agent applications.

Important dates
---------------------
* 28th FEBRUARY, 2012 - Submission of contributions to workshops
* 27th MARCH, 2012 - Workshop paper acceptance notification
* 4th or 5th JUNE, 2012 - Workshop takes place in conjunction with AAMAS 2012.

Submission
---------------
Submissions should conform to the ACM SIG style (follow the formatting instructions available at the AAMAS-2012 website) and should not be more than *10* pages long (excluding appendices).

Authors can submit their papers through the OPTMAS 2012 Easychair submission site:
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=optmas2012

Reviewing process
-----------------
Papers will be reviewed by at least 2 reviewers. Criteria for selection of papers will include: originality, readability, relevance to themes, soundness, and overall quality.

Publication
-----------
Best papers from OPTMAS 2008 and OPTMAS 2009 were selected for publication in the
special issue on Optimisation in Multi-Agent System of the Journal of Autonomous and Multiagent Systems (http://www.springerlink.com/content/n7p264t41264 ).

We plan to continue this initiative for the 2010, 2011, 2012 edition. Therefore, we will negotiate the publication of selected, best papers in a quality journal (JAAMAS or similar).

Organizing committee
--------------------
Dr. Jesus Cerquides Bueno, IIIA - CSIC, Spain
Dr. Alessandro Farinelli, University of Verona, Italy
Dr. Sarvapali D. Ramchurn University of Southampton, UK
Dr. Juan Antonio Rodriguez-Aguilar,IIIA - CSIC, Spain
Dr. Meritxell Vinyals, University of Verona, Italy

Programme Committee
--------------------------------------
Mohsen Afsharchi         University of Zanjan
Ana L. C. Bazzan         Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul
Christian Blum           Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya
Archie Chapman           University of Sydney
Francesco M. Fave        University of Southampton
Katsutoshi Hirayama      Kobe University
Christopher Krenkintveld University of Texas
Sven Koenig              University of Southern California
Nikos Komodakis          University of Crete
Akshat Kumar             University of Massachusetts
Robert N. Lass           Drexel University
Victor Lesser            University of Massachusetts
Beatriz López            University of Girona
Pedro Meseguer           IIIA-CSIC
Maria Polukarov          University of Southampton
Marc Pujol               IIIA-CSIC
Talal Rahwan             University of Southampton
Norman Salazar           IIIA-CSIC
Onn Shehory              IBM Haifa Research Lab
Eric Shieh               University of Southern California
Sameer Singh             University of Massachusetts
Ruben Stranders          University of Southampton
Greet Vanden             Berghe KaHo Sint-Lieven
William Yeoh             Singapore Management University
Roie Zivan               Ben Gurion University of the Negev
_

Eighth International Conference on Swarm Intelligence - ANTS 2012

ANTS 2012
Eighth International Conference on Swarm Intelligence

September 12-14, 2012. Brussels, Belgium

Call for papers prepared on November 17, 2011
More details and up-to-date information at
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/ants2012

Scope of the Conference
=======================

Swarm intelligence is a relatively new discipline that deals with the
study of self-organizing processes both in nature and in artificial
systems. Researchers in ethology and animal behavior have proposed
many models to explain interesting aspects of social insect behavior
such as self-organization and shape-formation. Recently, algorithms
and methods inspired by these models have been proposed to solve
difficult problems in many domains.

An example of a particularly successful research direction in swarm
intelligence is ant colony optimization, the main focus of which is on
discrete optimization problems. Ant colony optimization has been
applied successfully to a large number of difficult discrete
optimization problems including the traveling salesman problem, the
quadratic assignment problem, scheduling, vehicle routing, etc., as
well as to routing in telecommunication networks. Another interesting
approach is that of particle swarm optimization, that focuses on
continuous optimization problems. Here too, a number of successful
applications can be found in the recent literature. Swarm robotics is
another relevant field. Here, the focus is on applying swarm
intelligence techniques to the control of large groups of cooperating
autonomous robots.

ANTS 2012 will give researchers in swarm intelligence the opportunity
to meet, to present their latest research, and to discuss current
developments and applications.

The three-day conference will be held in Brussels, Belgium, on
September 12-14, 2012.

Relevant Research Areas
=======================

ANTS 2012 solicits contributions dealing with any aspect of swarm
intelligence. Typical, but not exclusive, topics of interest are:

Behavioral models of social insects or other animal societies that
can stimulate new algorithmic approaches.

Empirical and theoretical research in swarm intelligence.

Application of swarm intelligence methods, such as ant colony
optimization or particle swarm optimization, to real-world problems.

Theoretical and experimental research in swarm robotics systems.

Publication Details
===================

Conference proceedings will be published by Springer in the LNCS
series.

The journal Swarm Intelligence will publish a special issue dedicated
to ANTS 2012 that will contain extended versions of the best research
works presented at the conference. Further details will be
published on the web site.

Best Paper Award
================

A best paper award will be presented at the conference.

Invited talks
================

- Prof. Dirk Helbing (ETH Zurich, Switzerland) on "Towards Simulating the Foundations of Society"

- Prof. Nigel R. Franks (University of Bristol, UK) on "Ants, Bees and Brains"

- Prof. Vijay Kumar (University of Pennsylvania, USA) on "Architectures, abstractions, and algorithms for large teams of robots"

Further Information
===================

Up-to-date information will be published on the web site
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/ants2012/. For information about local
arrangements, registration forms, etc., please refer to the
above-mentioned web site or contact the local organizers at the
address below.

Conference Address
==================

ANTS 2012
IRIDIA CP 194/6 Tel +32-2-6502729
Université Libre de Bruxelles Fax +32-2-6502715
Av. F. D. Roosevelt 50 http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/ants2012
1050 Bruxelles, Belgium email: ants@iridia.ulb.ac.be

Important Dates
===============

Submission deadline March 2, 2012
Notification of acceptance May 3, 2012
Camera ready copy May 17, 2012
Conference September 12-14, 2012

ANTS 2012 Organizing Committee
==============================

General Chair:
Marco Dorigo, IRIDIA, ULB, Brussels, Belgium

Technical Program Chairs:
Christian Blum, ALBCOM, LSI, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya
Andries Engelbrecht, University of Pretoria, South Africa
Roderich Groß, Sheffield University, UK

Publication Chair:
Anders Lyhne Christensen, Instituto Universitario de Lisboa, Portugal

Organization Chairs:
Mauro Birattari, IRIDIA, ULB, Brussels, Belgium
Thomas Stützle, IRIDIA, ULB, Brussels, Belgium

Local Arrangements:
Andreagiovanni Reina, IRIDIA, ULB, Brussels, Belgium
Arne Brutschy, IRIDIA, ULB, Brussels, Belgium

Agents Applied in Health Care

*7th Workshop on Agents Applied in Health Care*
http://deim.urv.cat/~itaka/workshops/aamas2012

To be held in conjunction with the
Eleventh International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
(AAMAS 2012, 4th-8th June 2012, Valencia, Spain)


/LATEST NEWS

/
/.    If the quantity and quality of the papers submitted to the workshop is appropriate, those papers accepted for presentation at the workshop and presented in Valencia will be invited to present extended versions to a *special issue on agents applied in health care of the International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools (IJAIT)*, included in JCR.

.    Paper* submission deadline extended to February 28th* (this deadline will not be further extended)./

*Technical description*
Intelligent agent-based systems constitute one of the most exciting research areas in Artificial Intelligence. Due to the growing interest in the application of agent-based systems in health care, a number of applications addressing clinical problems are already based in agent technology. Thus, it may now be a good time for the specialists in the field to meet and report on the results achieved in this area, to discuss the benefits (and drawbacks) that agent-based systems may bring to medical domains, and also to provide a list of the research topics that should be tackled in the near future.

This workshop will try to incorporate two novel aspects with respect to related workshops held in the last years:

.    Interdisciplinary research: special efforts will be devoted to try to attract the attention of health care and biomedical specialists, so that they attend the workshop and realise the potential benefits of agent technology.
.    Applied research: the organising committee will also pay special attention to papers describing applications which are not just academic, but are already deployed and running in a real medical environment.

Current topics of research include personalized health systems for remote and autonomous tele-assistance, communication and co-operation between distributed intelligent agents to manage patient care, information agents that retrieve medical information from distributed repositories, intelligent and distributed data mining, and multi-agent systems that assist the doctors in the tasks of monitoring and diagnosis. Several methodological and technical problems have been discovered by the researchers that attempt to deploy agent-based systems in the medical area; just to name a few, the growing number of huge databases that need to be integrated (e.g. genetic data from next generation sequencing), the difficulty to integrate new agent-based systems with legacy software, the need to apply changing national and international laws and regulations concerning the privacy of medical data and the security of the transaction of patient information between agents.

*Submitted papers should address at least one of the following issues:*

.    Co-operation between intelligent agents to improve patient management (e.g. distributed patient scheduling).
.    Agents that provide autonomous and remote care delivery.
.    Agents that provide information about medical services.
.    Multi-agent systems for patient monitoring and diagnosis.
.    Successful applications of agents and multi-agent systems in health care.
.    MAS that improve medical training or education (e.g. tutoring systems).
.    Medical agent-based decision support systems.
.    Information agents that gather compile and organise medical data and knowledge available on Internet.
.    Solutions to the basic methodological and technological problems associated to the real deployment of health-care agent-based systems:
-    Security, privacy of medical data.
-    Social acceptance of agent-based systems.
-    Integration and use of medical ontologies.
-    Lack of centralised control.
-    Communication standards.
-    Integration with other types of software.
.    Legal and ethical issues related to the use of agents in health care.
.    Surveys providing an up to date view of the state of the art in the area of agents in health care.

Submissions must be formatted following the guidelines of the main AAMAS conference. Papers must not be longer than 10 pages.

The workshop organisers would appreciate that anyone intending to submit a paper to the workshop communicates this intention before February 1st to the workshop contact person.

*Previous editions of the workshop*
.    First edition - ECAI 2002 in Lyon, France. Expanded versions of selected papers published in a special issue of AI Communications (Ed: A.Moreno, 2003).
.    Second edition - ECAI 2004 in Valencia, Spain. Expanded versions of selected papers published in a special issue of AI Communications (Ed: J.Nealon, 2005).
.    Third edition - IJCAI 2005 in Edinburgh, Scotland. Expanded versions of selected papers published in a special issue of IEEE Intelligent Systems (Ed: A.Moreno, December 2006).
.    Fourth edition - ECAI 2006 in Riva del Garda, Italy. Expanded versions of selected papers published in a volume of the Whitestein series in Software Agent Technologies and Autonomic Computing (December 2007).
.    Fifth edition - AAMAS 2008 in Estoril, Portugal.
.    Sixth edition - e-Health 2010 in Casablanca, Morocco. Papers published by Springer in a book of the series ICST Transactions on e-health.

*Preliminary workshop agenda *
The workshop will feature some of the following activities:
.    1-2 invited presentations by international experts in the field
.    Presentation of state-of-the-art papers with the latest developments in the field.
.    Possible demos of practical applications of MAS in health care.
.    Panel discussion of the main problems that have to be faced to deploy real agent-based health-care applications.

*Important dates*
.    February 28th, 2012: Deadline for paper submission (this deadline will not be further extended)
.    March 28th, 2012: Notifications of acceptance/rejection sent
.    April 10th, 2012: Deadline for sending camera-ready papers to workshop organisers.
.    June 4th or 5th, 2012: Workshop.
.    Autumn-Winter 2012:  Possibility of publishing revised and expanded versions of selected papers in a special issue of an appropriate scientific journal or book.

*
Paper review process*
All the submitted papers will be revised by at least three members of the Program Committee. The main aspects to be reviewed will be originality, technical accuracy and relevance to the workshop.
*
Post --proceedings: special issue in IJAIT*
If the quantity and quality of the papers submitted to the workshop is appropriate, those papers accepted for presentation at the workshop and presented in Valencia will be invited to present extended versions to a special issue on agents applied in health care of the International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools (IJAIT), included in JCR.

*Organising committee*
Antonio Moreno (contact person)
  University Rovira i Virgili (URV), Tarragona, Spain.
  e-mail: antonio.moreno@urv.net
Ulises Cortés
  Technical University of Catalonia (UPC), Barcelona, Spain
Magí Lluch-Ariet
  Informatics Research Institute, Barcelona, Spain
David Isern
  University Rovira i Virgili (URV), Tarragona, Spain.

*Scientific committee*
M.Beer, Sheffield Hallam Univ., UK
F.Grasso, Univ. of Liverpool, UK
A.Ilarramendi, Univ. of the Basque Country, Spain
P.Kostkova, City Univ., UK
L.Lhotska, Czech Technical Univ., Czech Republic
B.López, Univ. of Girona, Spain
M.Schumacher, Univ. of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland, Switzerland
A.Valls, Univ. Rovira i Virgili, Spain
L.Varga, ELTE University, Hungary

Trustworthy Multi-Agent Systems (TruMAS'12)

1st International Workshop on Trustworthy Multi-Agent Systems (TruMAS'12)
KES-AMSTA 2012 Special Session, Dubrovnik, Croatia, 25-27 June 2012
http://www2.imm.dtu.dk/~ndra/TruMAS12
Proceedings published by Springer-Verlag in a volume of LNCS/LNAI.

IMPORTANT DATES

5 February 2012  Submission of papers
22 February 2012 Notification of acceptance
7 March 2012 Camera ready
25-27 June 2012 TruMAS and KES-AMSTA

WORKSHOP AIM AND SCOPE

The rapid development of computer-based technologies has made computers more and more complex and ubiquitous. Many computer-based systems are in charge of critical tasks such as, to mention only a few, the management of financial and medical databases, the monitoring of nuclear plants, the flying of airplanes, etc. Multi-agent systems (MAS) have been proposed as a new paradigm for conceptualizing, designing, and implementing open and distributed software systems. The foundational idea behind a Multi-Agent System is to have a loosely coupled network of software agents (i.e., sophisticated computer programs that act autonomously on behalf of their users) which interact to solve problems that are beyond the individual capacities or knowledge of each single agent. Therefore, it is not surprisingly MAS have received a lot of attention as reference computing paradigm to tackle complexity in modern computer-based systems.

However, the complexity of modern computer-based systems as well as their numerous applications has inherently increased the challenges for ensuring trustworthiness. Trustworthiness encompasses vital characteristics of a system such as safety (the non-occurrence of catastrophic consequences for the environment the system works in), security (the non-occurrence of unauthorized disclosure of information), integrity (the non-occurrence of inadequate information alteration), availability (the readiness for correct service of the system), reliability (the property of the system to continuously provide service) or more generically dependability. The overall trustworthiness of a system is connected to all the aforementioned properties and should be regarded holistically. Functional correctness, security, safety, reliability are facets that have to be ensured for the system's components as well as for the system as a whole.

The 1st International Workshop on Trustworthy Multi-Agent Systems (TruMAS 2012) aims at bringing together researchers, engineers and practitioners interested in all the different aspects of trust, dependability and security in Multi-Agent Systems. The workshop is expected to stimulate discussions about the future development of appropriate models, methods, notations, languages and tools for trustworthy Multi-Agent Systems. The overall goal is to explore the different facets of trustworthiness in Multi-Agent Systems, how every single aspect can be fostered, and how they relate.

Topics of interests include, but are not limited to:
- Trust and reputation models, metrics and assessment in Multi-Agent Systems
- Dependability facets in Multi-Agent Systems
- Fault-tolerance and robustness in Multi-Agent Systems
- Architectures for trustworthy Multi-Agent Systems
- Robust and secure communication in Multi-Agent Systems
- Robust and secure negotiation in Multi-Agent Systems
- Software engineering methodologies for trustworthy Multi-Agent Systems
- Security and access control in open Multi-Agent Systems
- Self-configuration and adaptation
- Formal methods and frameworks to model, analyze, prove, or measure aspects of trustworthy Multi-Agent Systems
- Industrial experiences in the adoption of trust-based Multi-Agent Systems approaches
- Rigorous software development to ensure trustworthiness in Multi-Agent Systems

Since the overall goal of trustworthy Multi-Agent Systems includes the investigation of several cross- disciplinary issues such as a deep understanding of trust vs. trustworthiness, trust-based approaches, dependability, etc..., a synergy between different scientific communities and research disciplines is needed. For this reason, although the workshop seems naturally focused on multi-agent issues, contributions from different disciplines such as philosophy, sociology, psychology, communication sciences, as well as from computer science specific sub-disciplines such as software engineering and dependability are welcomed and encouraged.

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS

Submitted full papers must not exceed 10 pages in length, including bibliography and well-marked appendices. Papers can be submitted using the PROSE Online Paper Submission system available on the KES-AMSTA'12 Web site. Please remember to select the TruMAS invited session entry in the "Session Name" drop-down box when submitting your paper.

Please use the LNCS templates and style files available on the Springer Web site (Information for LNCS Authors).

Submitted papers will be evaluated by the program committee and chosen for presentation based on their scientific contribution and relevance to the topics of the workshop. At least one author of each accepted paper must register to the workshop and participate presenting the paper.

Proceedings will be published by Springer-Verlag in a volume of LNCS/LNAI.

CHAIRS

Nicola Dragoni
DTU Informatics
Technical University of Denmark, Denmark
ndra@imm.dtu.dk

Manuel Mazzara
School of Computing Science
Newcastle University, UK
manuel.mazzara@newcastle.ac.uk

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Faycal Abouzaid, CRAC, Ecole Polytechnique of Montreal, Canada
Enrico Denti, DEIS, University of Bologna, Italy
Nicoletta Fornara, Faculty of Communication Sciences, University of Lugano, Switzerland
Katsuhide Fujita, Institute of Engineering Innovation, School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo, Japan
Mauro Gaspari, Department of Computer Science, University of Bologna, Italy
Paolo Giorgini, Information Engineering and Computer Science Department (DISI), University of Trento, Italy
Nathan Griffiths, Department of Computer Science, University of Warwick, UK
Koji Hasebe, Academic Computing & Communications Center, University of Tsukuba, Japan
Hiromitsu Hattori, Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, Japan
Takayuki Ito, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Nagoya Institute of Technology, Japan
Waqar Jaffry, Department of Artificial Intelligence, VU University, The Netherlands
Andrew J I Jones, Department of Informatics, King's College London, UK
Steve Marsh, Communications Research Centre, Canada
Hernan Melgratti, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina
Paul Scerri, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Eugen Staab, imc AG, Germany
Daniel Villatoro, Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, Spanish Scientific Research Council, Spain
Mirko Viroli, DEIS, University of Bologna, Italy

Cooperative Games in Multiagent Systems (CoopMAS-2012)

The Third Workshop on Cooperative Games in Multiagent Systems                  (CoopMAS-2012)

            http://staff.science.uva.nl/~stephane/coopmas12/

                  Workshop co-located with AAMAS-2012
                            Valencia, Spain
                         June 4th or 5th, 2012

**Key dates**

  * Submission of contributions: February 28th 2012
  * Acceptance notification: March 27th 2012
  * Workshop: June 4th or 5th, 2012

*Submission Instructions*

Submission must follow the Springer LNCS format and should be a maximum of 15 pages.

Papers must be submitted in PDF through easychair:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=coopmas2012

*Aims and Focus*

The use of cooperative game theory to study how agents should cooperate and collaborate, along with the related topic of coalition formation, has received growing attention from the multiagent systems, game theory, and electronic commerce communities.

The workshop is intended to focus on topics in cooperation in multi-agent systems, cooperative game theory and cooperative solution concepts, formation of coalitions, negotiation between agents, joint decision making, and voting. We encourage submission of papers describing original or recently published work (in venues that are not typically attended by AAMAS participants, i.e., conferences other than AAMAS/AAAI/IJCAI). We also encourage submission of full version of short papers accepted at AAMAS. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  * Cooperative game theory
  * Coalition formation
  * Joint decision making and voting
  * Representation issues
  * Negotiation
  * Collaborative filtering
  * Market and economics based cooperation
  * Interact with humans (negotiation / collaboration)

The workshop should be of interest to researchers in cooperative game theory and coalition formation, as well as to those who examine collaboration between agents, cooperation in multiagent systems and design and implement collaborating agents. We also welcome participants who are interested in applications of cooperative game theory, which include trading agents, sponsored search and recommender systems.

*Program Committee*
Confirmed PC members (to be completed)
  * Haris Aziz (Technische Universität München, Germany)
  * Georgios Chalkiadakis (Technical University of Crete, Greece)
  * Piotr Faliszewski (AGH University of Science and Technology, Poland)
  * Gianluigi Greco (University of Calabria, Italy)
  * Kate Larson (University of Waterloo, Canada)
  * Tomasz Michalak (University of Warsaw, Poland)
  * Maria Polukarov (University of Southampton, United Kingdom)
  * Ariel Procaccia (Carnegie Mellon University, United States)

*Workshop Organizers*

  * Stéphane Airiau (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
  * Yoram Bachrach (Microsoft Research, Cambridge United Kingdom)
  * Edith Elkind (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)   * Lirong Xia (CRCS, Harvard University, United States)