The AAMAS06 Workshop on
Coordination, Organization, Institutions and Norms in agent systems (COIN)

Hakodate, Japan

8-12 May, 2006

AAMAS 06

An international workshop of the COIN series

Workshop Program

We aim at a very interactive workshop. In order to facilitate the discussion, presentations will follow a slightly different format than usual. Namely, each presentation will be introduced by another participant. We have reserved 25 minutes for each paper presentation. A presentation consists of the following parts:

• Reader's perspective (5 min.): A short introduction by one of the other workshop participants who has read the paper.
• Paper presentation (20 min.): Presentation of the paper by the author.

In the first 5 minutes, the paper is introduced by another workshop participant who presents a reader's perspective on the paper. If you want to make slides for your introduction, the limit is 3 slides. During this brief introduction, the introducer may discuss things like:

• A brief (subjective) summary of the paper
• His/her view on the paper
• The relation to his/ her own work
• Constructive criticism
• Suggestions to the author

Each session (consisting of 3 papers) ends with a short (15 minutes) round table during the presenters of all three papers will answer questions and discuss the session topic with the audience.

Schedule

• 9:00-10:30 - Session 1: Coordination and Social Order
• 9:00-9:25: Modelling and monitoring social expectations in multi-agent systems, Stephen Cranefield
• Introduction by: Presenter of Grizard’s paper
• 9:25-9:50: A peer-to-peer normative system to achieve social order, Amandine Grizard, Laurent Vercouter, Tiberiu Stratulat, and Guillaume Muller
• Introduction by: Carl Hewitt
• 9:50-10:15: What is Commitment? Physical, Organizational, and Social, Carl Hewitt
• Introduction by: Stephen Cranefield
• 10:15-10:30: Questions and Discussion
• 10:30-11:00 - Break
• 11:00-12:30 - Session 2: Agent Organizations
• 11.00-11.25: An Agent-Based Model for Hierachical Organizations, Luis Erasmo Montealegre Vázquez and Fabiola López y López
• Introduction by: Carolina Felicissimo
• 11.25-11.50: Supporting Regulatory Dynamics in Open MAS, Carolina Felicíssimo, Ricardo Choren, Jean-Pierre Briot, and Carlos Lucena
• Introduction by: Ramon Hermoso
• 11.50-12.15: Integrating Trust in Virtual Organisations, Ramon Hermoso, Holger Billhardt and Sascha Ossowski
• Introduction by: Presenter of Montealegre’s paper
• 12.15-12.30: Questions and Discussion
• 12:30-14:00 - Lunch
• 14:00-15:30 - Session 3: Electronic Institutions
• 14.00-14.25: Specification and Verification of Institutions through Status Functions, Francesco Viganò and Marco Colombetti
• Introduction by: Julian Padget
• 14.25-14.50: Specifying and Reasoning about Multiple Institutions, Owen Cliffe, Marina De Vos , Julian Padget
• Introduction by: Frank Dignum
• 14:50-15.15: Ubi Lex, Ibi Poena: Designing Norm Enforcement in e-Institutions, Davide Grossi, Huib Aldewereld, Frank Dignum
• Introduction by: Francesco Vigano
• 15.15-15.30: Questions and Discussion
• 15:30-16:00 - Break
• 16:00-17:30 - Session 4: Normative issues in agent organizations
• 16.00-16.25: Ballroom etiquette: a case study for norm-governed multi-agent systems, Dorian Gaertner, Keith Clark and Marek Sergot
• Introduction by: Frank Dignum
• 16.25-16.50: Operationalisation of Norms for Usage in Electronic Institutions, Huib Aldewereld, Frank Dignum, Andrés Garcìa-Camino, Pablo Noriega, Juan Antonio Rodrìguez-Aguilar, and Carles Sierra
• Introduction by: Andrés Garcia Camino
• 16.50-17.15: Norm-Oriented Programming of Electronic Institutions: A Rule-based Approach, Andrés García Camino, Juan-Antonio Rodríguez Aguilar, Carles Sierra and Wamberto Vasconcelos
• Introduction by: Dorian Gaertner
• 17.15-17.30: Questions and Discussion
• 17:30 - End

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 of the ANIREM and OOOP workshops held in AAMAS’05. A twin event of COIN --focused, then, on organizational aspects of agent interactions-- is expected to be collocated with ECAI'06.

Theme and Topics

The COIN workshop in AAMAS’06 will focus on the normative or prescriptive aspects involved in agent coordination.

Topics of interest include:
• Ontologies, methodologies, tools and standards for regulated MAS.
• Social science background for regulated MAS: Roles, authority, motivation, social power and other social relationships and attitudes.
• Languages for norms: expressiveness vs efficiency.
• Electronic institutions and virtual organizations.
• Coordination and interaction conventions, technologies and artifacts.
• Institutional aspects of peer to peer interactions
• Issues in regulatory dynamics (creation, evolution, change, disappearance).
• Issues in regulated MAS implementation
• Examples of significant regulated environments
• Simulation, analysis and verification of regulated MAS

We particularly encourage authors to submit innovative and original papers
that report on
• Formal and theoretical models
• Software frameworks, tools, and methodologies
• Applications, case studies, and experimental work

Papers describing ongoing work and position papers are welcome.

Proceedings

Proceedings will be available at the workshop. It is planned to publish revised and extended versions of the papers as a Springer LNCS volume (pending confirmation).

Important Dates

Paper submission deadline:( January 15 ) extended to February 01
Notifications of acceptance/rejection: February 19
Camera-ready copies due: March 5
Workshop Date: May 9

Preparation and submission of papers

Paper submission is possible only by email. Authors are requested to send a pdf file attached to an email message to Virginia Dignum at virginia@cs.uu.nl. The message should contain the paper title, author name(s) and affiliation(s), contact information of one of the authors, and an abstract of at most 200 words. The abstract must identify the main topics of the paper. Full papers should have a maximum of 12 pages and must be formatted using the Springer LNCS style. Templates are available at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html .

Organization

Program Committee:

Guido Boella, University of Torino (Italy)
Olivier Boissier, ENS Mines Saint-Etienne (France)
Stephen Cranefield, U. Otago (New Zealand)
Frank Dignum, Utrecht University (the Netherlands)
Carl Hewitt, MIT (USA)
Carles Sierra, IIIA (Spain)
Catholijn Jonker, Radboud University Nijmegen (The Netherlands)
Christian Lemaître, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (Mexico)
Gabriela Lindemann, Humboldt University in Berlin (Germany))
Fabiola López y López, Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (Mexico)
Michael Luck, University of Southampton (UK)
Eric Matson, Wright State University (USA)
Eugenio Oliveira, Universidade do Porto (Portugal)
Andrea Omicini, Università di Bologna (Italy)
Anja Oskamp, Free University Amsterdam (The Netherlands)
Sascha Ossowski, University Rey Juan Carlos (Spain)
Julian Padget, University of Bath (UK)
Alessandro Provetti, Universita` degli Studi di Messina (Italy)
Juan Antonio Rodríguez Aguilar, IIIA-CSIC (Spain)
Jaime Simao Sichman, University of Sao Paulo (Brazil)
Liz Sonenberg, University of Melbourne (Australia)
Wamberto Vasconcelos, University of Aberdeen (UK)
Javier Vázquez-Salceda, Utrecht University (The Netherlands)
Mario Verdicchio, Politecnico di Milano (Italy)
PInar Yolum, Bogazici University (Turkey)
Franco Zambonelli, Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia (Italy)

Workshop Chairs:

Virginia Dignum,
Institute for Computing and Information Sciences
Utrecht University
The Netherlands
tel: +31-30-2539492
email: virginia@cs.uu.nl

Nicoletta Fornara,
Università della Svizzera Italiana (University of Lugano) Faculty of
Communication Sciences via G. Buffi 13 - 6900 Lugano
Switzerland
tel: +41 (0)58 666 4513, Fax +41 (0)58 666 4619
e-mail: nicoletta.fornara@lu.unisi.ch

Pablo Noriega B.V.
IIIA-CSIC
Campus UAB, Bellaterra, Barcelona 08193
Spain
tel. (34) 93 580 9570 Fax. (34) 93 580 9661
e-mail: pablo@iiia.csic.es