The MALLOW Workshop on

Coordination, Organization, Institutions and Norms

in agent systems (COIN)

Durham, UK

3^rd– 4^th September, 2007

MALLOW

An international workshop of the COIN series

Workshop News

20070727: list of accepted papers posted.
20070811: provisional workshop schedule posted.
20070827: last year's COIN proceedings now on-line.
20070926: this year's preliminary proceedings as a single pdf

Aims and Scope

In recent years, social and organizational aspects of agency have become a major issue in MAS research. Recent applications of MAS in Web Services, Grid Computing and Ubiquitous Computing make clear the need to take into account social, legal, economic and technological dimensions of agent interactions in order to ensure social order within these environments. The MAS research community has addressed that need from different perspectives that have gradually become more cohesive around the four notions that give title to the workshop: coordination, organization, institutions and norms. COIN@MALLOW07 provides a space for presentation and debate for researchers active in these areas.

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
Dynamic, adaptive and emergent organizational structures
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

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

Papers describing ongoing work and position papers are welcome as well.

Venue

The workshop will be part of this year’s Multi-Agent Logics, Languages, and Organisations federated Workshops, MALLOW’007 hosted by the Department of Computer Science and St. Chad's College, University of Durham, U.K.. Participants in the COIN workshop are urged to participate in the co-located workshops. For more details of MALLOW, please see http://www.dur.ac.uk/durham.agents007/MALLOW007/. The MALLOW’007 format will allow us to host a two-day meeting with longer presentations, round tables and discussions that have not been feasible in previous editions of COIN.

Proceedings

Proceedings will be available at the workshop. As with previous COIN workshops, revised and extended versions of the papers of the two 2007 workshops will be published in a single Springer LNCS volume (confirmation pending). 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.

Author instructions for manuscript preparation are available from: http://www.springer.com/dal/home/computer/lncs?SGWID=1-164-7-72376-0. Latex2e is preferred.

Important Dates

Paper submission deadline: June 15

Notifications of acceptance/rejection: July 21

Camera-ready copies due: August 3

Workshop Dates: September 3 and 4

Preparation and submission of papers

For preparation of papers to be submitted please follow the instructions for authors available at the Springer LNCS Web page:http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html. The length of each paper including figures and references may not exceed 12 pages. 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.

You may submit your paper via e-mail to pablo_@_iiia_.csic._es (remove the "_")

Organization

Program Committeee

Guido Boella (Torino, IT)
Olivier Boissier (Saint-Etienne, FR)
Cristiano Castelfranchi (ISTC/CNR, IT)
Stephen Cranefield, (Otago, NZ)
Marina de Vos (Bath, UK)
Virginia Dignum, (Utrecht, NL)
Marc Esteva (UT Sydney, AU)
Nicoletta Fornara (Lugano, CH)
Carl Hewitt, (MIT, USA)
Christian Lemaitre (UAM, MX)
Victor Lesser (UMASS, USA)
Gabriela Lindemann, (Humboldt, DE)
Fabiola López (BUAP, MX)
Michael Luck (KCL, UK)
Eric Matson (Wright State, USA)
Tim Norman (Aberdeen, UK)
Eugénio Oliveira (Porto, PT)
Andrea Omicini (Bologna, IT)
Sascha Ossowski (URJC, ES)
Juan Antonio Rodríguez Aguilar, IIIA-CSIC (Spain)
Marek Sergot (Imperial, UK)
Jaime Sichman (University of Sao Paulo, BR)
Carles Sierra (IIIA-CSIC, ES)
Mario Verdicchio (Bergamo, IT)
Wamberto Vasconcelos (Aberdeen, UK)
Javier Vázquez-Salceda (UPC, ES)

Workshop Chairs

Pablo Noriega,
IIIA-CSIC
Campus UAB, Bellaterra;
Barcelona 08193 (ES)
tel. +34 93 580 9570 Fax. +34 93 580 9661
e-mail: pablo_@_iiia_.csic.es (remove the "_")

Julian Padget
Department of Computer Science
University of Bath
Bath BA2 7AY (UK)
tel. +44 1225 386971 Fax: +44 1225 383493
e-mail: jap_@_cs.bath.ac.uk (remove the "_")

COIN Steering Committee

Guido Boella, Italy
Olivier Boissier, France
Virginia Dignum, The Netherlands
Victor Lesser, USA
Pablo Noriega, Spain
Andrea Omicini, Italy
Sascha Ossowski, Spain
Julian Padget, UK
Jaime Sichman, Brazil