COIN-at-MALLOW 2009: Coordination, Organization, Institutions and,Norms in Agent systems in On-line Communities

==========================================================================
                       *Preliminary Call For Papers*

The MALLOW Workshop on Coordination, Organization, Institutions and
Norms in Agent systems in On-line Communities (COIN)

              Torino, IT, 7th - 11th September, 2009

Aims and Scope:

The COIN workshop series brings together the topics of coordination,
organization, institutions and norms in the context of multi-agent
systems.

These topics have become an established area of agent research and a
significant number of influential papers on these topics have been
appearing in AAMAS and other agent conferences and workshops in recent
years. The series of COIN workshops are thus aimed at consolidating
and expanding the subject by providing focused events in which
researchers from different communities participate.

For this edition of COIN, the focus is on how COIN topics influence
and are realized in on-line communities, where it is necessary to take
into account social, legal, economic and technological dimensions of
agent-agent, agent-human, human-human interactions in order to ensure
social order within these environments. Furthermore, the dynamic
nature of such communities, combined with their potential
dissimilarity to conventional human social structures - which means
that simply transporting existing conventions does not necessarily
work - and the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats posed
by alternative interaction modalities deriving from the different
physics of virtual environments, leads to the exploration and
establishment of new normative frameworks that do not necessarily have
parallels in the physical world but are well reflected in "made
natures" such as the Web. Such frameworks are not only interesting for
the agent community but also have attracted interest of the Semantic
Web Community in events such as the recent W3C Workshop on the Future
of Social Networking (http://www.w3.org/2008/09/msnws/)).

We seek contributions that address, model, analyse and/or enable (but
not-exclusively!) such issues and look forward to a highly
interactive, convivial meeting.

Consequently, relevant topics - tuned to the workshop theme - include:

  * Ontologies, methodologies, tools and standards for multi-agent
    systems
  * Social science background for multi-agent systems: Roles, authority,
    motivation, social power and other social relationships and attitudes
  * Languages for norms and policies: expressiveness vs. efficiency
  * Electronic institutions and virtual organizations
  * Coordination and interaction conventions, technologies and artifacts.
  * Institutional aspects of peer to peer interactions
  * Dynamic, adaptive and emergent organizational structures
  * Issues in the dynamics of norms and policies (creation, evolution,
    change, disappearance)
  * Simulation, analysis and verification of Online Communities as
    multi-agent systems
  * Parallels and differences of  multi-agent systems and Online
    Communities

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

     * Software frameworks, tools, and methodologies
     * Applications, case studies, and experimental work
     * Formal and theoretical models

Papers describing ongoing work and position papers are also welcome.

Venue:
======

The workshop will be part of this year's Multi-Agent Logics,
Languages, and Organisations federated Workshops, MALLOW 2009 and will
take place at Educatorio della Providenza. Full details are available
at http://www.di.unito.it/~baroglio/MALLOW_EASSS09/MALLOW.html. The
MALLOW 2009 format will allow us to host a two-day meeting with longer
presentations, round tables and discussions that were a feature of the
previous MALLOW edition of COIN, in contrast to the compressed
schedule when associated with large international conferences..

Proceedings:
============

Preliminary proceedings will be available at the workshop. As with
previous COIN workshops, revised and extended versions of the papers
of the three 2009 workshops will be published in a single Springer
LNCS volume. Those 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.

Important Dates:
================

   * Submission: June 10th
   * Notification to authors: July 1st
   * Camera ready: July 15th
   * Workshop dates: to be determined, in the period September 7th-11th

Preparation and submission of papers:
=====================================

Although the post-proceedings will be published in Springer LNCS, the
preliminary proceedings will follow a different format, namely IEEE
Transactions. For preparation of papers to be submitted please use the
styles for LaTeX and BibTex and the documentation at the following
address: http://www.michaelshell.org/tex/ieeetran/.

The length of each paper including figures and references may not
exceed 6 pages in this format. 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.

Organization:
=============

Program Committee:
------------------

Jaime Sichman
Kostas Stathis
Antonio Carlos Costa
Lloyd Kamara
Sˆren Auer
John Breslin
Harko Verhagen
Harry Halpin
Niek Wijngaards
Jomi Fred Hubner
Eric Matson
Maarten Sierhuis
Alexandre Passant
Juan Antonio Rodriguez Aguilar
Sascha Ossowski
Jeremy Pitt
Pablo Noriega
(to be extended)

Workshop Chairs:
----------------

Axel Polleres,
Digital Enterprise Research Institute
National University of Ireland, Galway
e-mail: axel.polleres [at] deri.org

Julian Padget,
Department of Computer Science,
University of Bath, UK
e-mail: jap [at] cs.bath.ac.uk

COIN Steering Committee:
------------------------

Guido Boella (University of Torino, Italy)
Olivier Boissier (ENS Mines Saint-Etienne, France)
Nicoletta Fornara (University of Lugano, Italy)
Christian LemaÓtre (Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana, Mexico)
Eric Matson (Purdue University, USA)
Pablo Noriega (IIIA-CSIC, Spain)
Sascha Ossowski (Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain)
Julian Padget (University of Bath, UK)
Jeremy Pitt (Imperial College London, UK)
Jaime Sichman (University of S„o Paulo, Brazil)
Wamberto Vasconcelos (University of Aberdeen, UK)
Javier Vazquez Salceda (Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Spain)
George Vouros (University of the Aegean, Greece)

Received on Sunday, 19 April 2009 23:43:24 UTC