WORKSHOP on Collaborative Agents -- REsearch and Development (CARE) 2010

Second INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP on Collaborative Agents -- REsearch and Development (CARE) 2010
31st August 2010, York University, Toronto, Canada

Abstract submission: April 14, 2010
Full paper submission: April 16, 2010

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~xtg/CARE2010/
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The workshop is held in conjunction with the International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT).
http://www.yorku.ca/wiiat10/

Summary
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Collaboration is required when multiple agents achieve complex goals that are difficult or impossible to attain for an individual agent. This collaboration takes place under conditions of incomplete information, uncertainty, and bounded rationality, much of which has been previously studied in economics and artificial intelligence. However, many real world domains are characterised by even greater complexity, including the possibility of unreliable and non-complying collaborators, complex market and incentive frameworks, and complex transaction costs and organisational structures. This workshop's thematic focus is on collaborative and autonomous agents that plan, negotiate, coordinate, and act under this complexity.

This workshop aims to foster discussions on computational models of collaboration in distributed systems, addressing a range of theoretical and practical issues. We seek contributions of members in research and industry that use the agent paradigm to approach their problems.

Some issues of interest of this workshop are:
o How to enable agents to form and follow joint agreements and contracts in complex organisational and market driven domains.
o How to develop a comprehensive contractual formation/maintenance framework applicable to many application domains.
o How to build comprehensive customer lifecycle management systems for customers, including telecommunication consumers, students and patients.
o How to deploy lifecycle management systems in real world applications, such as healthcare, telecommunication, and smart campuses.
o How to design markets that are adequate for agents to act with incomplete and uncertain information of the behaviour of collaborating agents. o How to build MAS that work efficiently in partially regulated markets (where governance policy or partnership agreements govern part of the market).
o What are the implications of partial regulation on the management of contractual relationships and service delivery.
o How organisational structures influence the negotiation of agents and the distribution/execution of tasks.
o How to cope with collaborators that exhibit unreliable and non-conformant behaviour, eg where agreements are made but are not always conformed with.
o How can interventions and incentive structures assist in managing contractual relationships and service delivery.
o How to assign transaction costs to actions in planning, assignment, and execution in organisational structures. o How can transaction costs influence the social outcome of the system which is further influenced by the organisational context under which the collaboration takes place. o Can lessons learnt in game theoretic computation inform collaborative agent settings.
o What role does learning and adaptivity play in building organisational MAS.

The one day workshop will feature a mixture of invited talks, discussions and submitted contributions describing current work or work in progress in collaborative agent research and technology. The workshop environment fosters open discussions among all participants, particularly encouraging students to discuss their research topics and seek feedback from senior agent researchers.


Contact
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CARE organisers

christian.guttmann@gmail.com
dignum@cs.uu.nl

Important Dates
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Abstract submission: April 14, 2010
Full paper submission: April 16, 2010

Notification: May 28, 2010
Camera ready: June 7, 2010


Topics of Interest include (but are not limited to):
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RESEARCH
* Collaboration frameworks
* Models of teamwork and joint action
* Organisation/Institutes/Norms
* Auctioning/Negotiation
* Task/Resource allocation
* Behaviour modelling/monitoring
* Adherence/Intervention mechanisms
* Incentive frameworks
* Intervention mechanisms
* Agreement technology
* Contract networks/formation
* Cloud computing

APPLICATION AREAS
* Collaborative care planning/management * Disaster planning/management
* Traffic planning/management
* Transport/Logistics
* Applications in primary and preventative healthcare * Chronic disease planning/management
* Epidemiological agent models
* Unmanned air/land vehicles
* Robotic soccer/Robotic rescues
* Weather forecast
* Artificial and natural immune systems
* Social networks (e.g., LinkedIn, Facebook,...)
* Smart grid network (e.g., electricity/gas metering)

Submission and Publication
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Submission is to be done electronically at Cyberchair at: http://wi-consortium.org/cyberchair/wiiat10/scripts/ws_submit.php. CARE 2010 seeks 4-page submissions formatted according to IEEE specification.
Style Files for Paper Submission
IEEE Computer Society Proceedings Manuscript Formatting Guidelines:
DOC: ftp://pubftp.computer.org/press/outgoing/proceedings/instruct8.5x11.doc PDF:ftp://pubftp.computer.org/press/outgoing/proceedings/instruct8.5x11.pdf PS: ftp://pubftp.computer.org/press/outgoing/proceedings/instruct.ps LaTex Formatting Macros:
ftp://pubftp.computer.org/Press/Outgoing/proceedings/IEEE_CS_Latex8.5x11x2.zip

Submissions will be peer-reviewed by two or three reviewers per paper. Selection criteria will include relevance, significance, impact, originality, technical soundness, quality of presentation. Some preference may also be given to papers which address emergent trends or important common themes, or which enhance balance of workshop topics.

Post-Proceedings will be published with a major international publisher (most likely Springer as for the CARE 2009).

Workshop Officials
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GENERAL CHAIRS
Christian Guttmann (Monash University, Australia)
Frank Dignum (University Utrecht, Netherlands)

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Wei Chen (Intelligent Automation, Inc., United States of America)
Philippe Pasquier (Simon Fraser University, Canada) Michael Luck (King's College London, United Kingdom)
Lawrence Cavedon (NICTA and RMIT University, Australia)
Samin Karim (Accenture, Australia)
Cees Witteveen (Delft University of Technology, Netherlands)   
Franziska Klügl (Örebro University, Sweden)
Toby Walsh (NICTA and UNSW, Australia)
Cristiano Castelfranchi (Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, Italy)
Alexander Pokahr (University Hamburg, Germany)
Lars Brauchbach (University Hamburg, Germany)
Wayne Wobcke (University of New South Wales, Australia)
Rainer Unland (University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany)
Liz Sonenberg (Melbourne University, Australia) Kumari Wickramasinghe (Monash University, Australia)
Simon Thompson (British Telecom Research Laboratories, United Kingdom)
Gord McCalla (University of Saskatchewan, Canada)
Andrew Gilpin (Hg Analytics, United States of America)
David Morley (SRI International, United States of America)
Marcelo Blois Ribeiro (Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil)
Simon Goss (Defence Science and Technology Organisation DSTO, Australia)