Call for Articles

              Special Issue: Agents Organizations

    Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society (JCBS)

                                ISSN 0104-6500

THEME

Agent organizations are an emergent area of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) that relies on the notion of openness and heterogeneity of MAS and poses new demands on traditional MAS models. These demands include the integration of organizational and individual perspectives and the dynamic adaptation of models to organizational and environmental changes. Organizational self-design will play a critical role in the development of larger and more complex MAS. As systems grow to include hundreds or thousands of agents, we must move from an agent-centric view of coordination and control to an organization-centric one. Practical applications of agents to organizational modeling are being widely developed but formal theories are needed to describe interaction and organizational structure. Furthermore, it is necessary to get a closer look at the relation between organizational roles and the agents that fulfill them.

The overall problem of analyzing the social, economic and technological dimensions of agent organizations, and the co-evolution of agent and human social and personal structures in the organization, provide theoretically demanding, interdisciplinary research questions at different levels of abstraction. Organizational research is increasingly recognizing the advantage of agent-based and other AI models for gaining insight in organizational issues and in exploring dynamic processes and configurations. On the other hand, organizational research has been active in the field of organizational modeling for many years, and has developed insights and theories that are very useful for MAS researchers.

Recognizing the importance of the research in this area, the Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society is organizing a special issue on agents organizations. The primary focus of this special issue will be on high-quality original unpublished research, case studies, as well as implementation experiences.

Topics

The topics of this issue include, but are not limited to:

• Modeling multi-agent organizations
• Formal theories for roles, authority, delegation, empowerment, and entitlement in agent organizations
• Deontic aspects in agent organizations
• Social aspects of agent organizations
• Organization design, monitoring, and adaptation
• Coordination models and devices in agent organizations
• Communication and interaction in agent organizations
• Engineering organizational coordination
• Scaling and control issues in agent organizations
• Application of organizational theory to MAS
• Simulation, analysis and verification of dynamics of multi-agent organizations
• Dynamic, adaptive and emergent organizational structures and dynamics
• Practical application examples for (aspects of) agent-organization systems
• Applications of agent organizations to knowledge management, CSCW, workflow, etc.
• Implementation and tools for agent organizations
• Human-computer interaction in agent organizations

ABOUT THE JOURNAL

The Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society is the formal quarterly
publication of the Sociedade Brasileira de Computação (Brazilian Computer
Society), Brazil. Its aim is  to publish original research papers, serving
as a forum for disseminating  innovative research in all aspects of computer
science. The priorities of the journal are quality and timeliness.  The journal
also has an electronic  version  with free access through the  Scielo Portal
(http://www.scielo.br/revistas/jbcos/iaboutj.htm).

SUBMISSION

Submissions must be in English and should be no more than 20 pages long,

including all text, figures and references. The final manuscript should be

approximately 8000 words in length.

Page 1 should contain the article title (not more than 15 words), author(s),

affiliation(s), keywords (not more than 6 keywords), abstract (no more than

250 words) and the name, fax number and complete mailing address (both postal

and email) of the person to whom correspondence should be sent. All

contributions will be acknowledged and refereed.

Please, send your submissions (pdf files) by email to  jaime.sichman@poli.usp.br,

with the Subject: JBCS Submission – Agents Organizations, according to the schedule

below.

SCHEDULE

Submission due date:          16/11/2004

Notification of acceptance:   01/02/2005

Camera-ready paper due:   15/03/2005

Publishing:                              06/2005

GUEST EDITORS

Jaime Simão Sichman

Intelligent Techniques Laboratory (LTI)

Computer Engineering Department (PCS)

Polytechnic School (EP)

University of São Paulo (USP)

Av. Prof. Luciano Gualberto, 158 travessa 3

05508-900 São Paulo SP

BRAZIL

e-mail: jaime.sichman@poli.usp.br

Phone:  +55 11 30915397

Fax:      +55 11 30915294

Cristiano Castelfranchi

Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies (ISTC)

National Research Council (CNR)
Viale Marx 15

00137 Roma

ITALY

E-mail: c.castelfranchi@istc.cnr.it
Phone: +39 06 86090235

Fax:     +39 06 824737

Virginia Dignum

Institute for Computing and Information Sciences (ICS)

University Utrecht

Centrumgebouw Noord

Padualaan 14, De Uithof

3584CH  Utrecht

THE NETHERLANDS

E-mail: virginia@cs.uu.nl
Phone: +31 30 2539492

Fax:     +31 30 2513791