The MALLOW Workshop on

Coordination, Organization, Institutions and Norms

in agent systems in on-line communities (COIN)

Torino, IT

7th–11th September, 2009

MALLOW

An international workshop of the COIN series 

Workshop News

Programme (draft)

Session 1: Tuesday 8th, 14:15-15:45 (MALLOW plenary)

  1. Jomi Fred Hubner, Olivier Boissier and Rafael H. Bordini. Normative Programming for Organisation Management Infrastructures (25 mins)
  2. Guido Boella, Leon van der Torre and Serena Villata. Four Ways to Change Coalitions: Agents, Dependencies, Norms and Internal Dynamics (25 mins)
  3. Juan Manuel Serrano and Sergio Saugar. Dealing with incomplete normative states (25 mins)
  4. Discussion (15 mins)

Session 2: Wednesday 9th, 16:15-17:45

  1. Invited talk: Alexandre Passant "Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities" (50 mins)
  2. Sergio Alvarez-Napagao, Owen Cliffe, Julian Padget and Javier Vazquez. Norms, Organisations and Semantic Web Services: The ALIVE approach (10 mins)
  3. Uldis Bojars and Alexandre Passant. SIOC Project: Semantically Interlinked Online Communities (10 mins)
  4. Discussion (20 mins)

Session 3: Thursday 10th, 11:15-12:45

  1. Brigitte Burgemeestre, Joris Hulstijn and Yao-Hua Tan. Towards an architecture for self-regulating agents: a case study in international trade (25 mins)
  2. Milan Stankovic, Alexandre Passant and Philippe Laublet. Directing Status Messages to their Audience in Online Communities (25 mins)
  3. Vicent Botti, Antonio Garrido, Adriana Giret and Pablo Noriega. Managing water demand as a regulated open MAS. (Work in progress) (10 mins)
  4. Fornara Nicoletta. Open Interaction System Specification and Monitoring Using Semantic Web Technology (10 mins)
  5. Discussion (20 mins)

Special Session

We are aiming at an especially interactive meeting for this edition of COIN, in place of the "presentation followed by questions" model of conventional workshops.

We therefore invite in addition to the standard paper submissions the submission of descriptions of on-going research projects and reports on work in progress that relate to COIN topics, where the inclusion of open problems is especially welcome as material to stimulate discussion.

We would like to receive two page summaries, submitted via the submission link given below, formatted in IEEE style (as for standard submissions, see below). The deadline for submission is July 20th (reviews by 27th, camera ready by 31st). All the submissions will be reviewed, primarily for the purpose of identifying issues that could contribute to the discussion at the meeting, and feeding this information back to authors. The summaries will be included in the preliminary proceedings distributed at the meeting.

Extended versions (full papers) may be submitted for full review for consideration for the 2009 COIN volume that will be published in the Springer LNCS series. Details will be provided in due course.

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:

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

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 Provvidenza. 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..

(Post-)Proceedings

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 (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.

Important Dates

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. 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.

To submit a paper, please use the following link: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=coinatmallow2009

Organization

Program Committee

(to be extended)

Workshop Chairs

Axel Polleres,
Digital Enterprise Research Institute
National University of Ireland, Galway
IDA Business Park,
Lower Dangan
Galway, Ireland
tel: +353 91 495723 fax: +353 91 495541
e-mail: axel.polleres <you-know-what> deri.org

Julian Padget
Department of Computer Science
University of Bath
Bath BA2 7AY (UK)
tel. +44 1225 386971 Fax: +44 1225 383493
e-mail: jap <you-know-what> 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 Lemaître (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 São Paulo, Brazil)
Wamberto Vasconcelos (University of Aberdeen, UK)
Javier Vazquez Salceda (Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Spain)
George Vouros (University of the Aegean, Greece)