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Collaborative Agents -- REsearch and Development (CARE) 2009

INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP

held in conjunction with the 22nd Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence AI09 (http://www.infotech.monash.edu.au/about/news/conferences/ai09/)

Workshop Day on 1st December 2009 (ICT Building, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia)

LIVE MEDIA STREAM (Starting at 8:50am, 1st Dec 2009, Melbourne Time)

LIST of ACCEPTED PAPERS

PRELIMINARY WORKSHOP SCHEDULE

 

News

Registration Info:

$300, non-student, non-AI participant

$150, student, non-AI participant

(AI-participant, $100 and $50)

 

Accommodation Info in Melbourne

 

Contact

CARE organisers
care2009@easychair.org

 

Online Discussion Groups

Please join the following groups for updates and discussions about CARE and Agents.

 

Linkedin: CARE and AAMAS

 

Invited Speaker: Professor Michael Luck (King's College, University of London, United Kingdom)

Room: Lecture Theatre 3, ICT Building, Date: 1st December 2009, Time: 11:10am

 

Title: Flexible Behaviour Regulation in Agent Based Systems

Abstract: Cooperation is the fundamental underpinning of multi-agent systems, allowing agents to interact to achieve their goals. However, agents must manage the risk associated with interacting with others who have different objectives, or who may fail to fulfill their commitments. There are many ways in which such a desirable social order may be encouraged or even mandated. For example, trust offers a mechanism for modeling and reasoning about reliability, honesty, etc, while organisations and norms provide a framework within which to apply them, and motivations provide a means for representing and reasoning about overall objectives. In this talk, I will consider the role of trust, organisations and norms in a motivation-based view of agency that seeks to regulate behaviour, and will illustrate some of these issues with aspects of several projects, including the CONTRACT project, concerned with contract-based electronic business systems.

 

Biography: Michael Luck is Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science at King's College London, where he leads the Agents and Intelligent Systems subgroup and undertakes research into agent technologies and intelligent systems. His work has sought to take a principled approach to the development of practical agent systems, and spans formal models and theories as well as practical applications. Recent work has been directed at norms and institutions, declarative programming of agent systems, and industrial deployment and technology forecasting. He is currently leading work at King's on the IST CONTRACT project, concerned with distributed electronic business systems on the basis of dynamically generated, cross-organisational contracts.

 

Professor Luck has published around 200 articles in these and related areas, and twelve books (including monographs, textbooks, and edited collections); he was lead author of the AgentLink roadmaps in 2003 and 2005. He is a a director of the board of the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (IFAAMAS), co-founder of the European Multi-Agent Systems (EUMAS) workshop series (and currently serving on its Advisory Board, having previously served as its first Chair), co-founder and Chair of the steering committee of the UK Multi-Agent Systems Workshops (UKMAS), and a Steering Committee member for the Central and Eastern European Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (CEEMAS). Professor Luck was a member of the Executive Committee of AgentLink III, the European Network of Excellence for Agent-Based Computing, having previously been the Director of AgentLink II. He is an editorial board member of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, the International Journal of Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, Web Intelligence and Agent Systems, and ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems, and was previously series editor for Artech House's Agent Oriented Systems book series. Michael Luck is general co-chair of the Ninth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2010), to be held in Toronto, Canada in May 2010. 

 

 

Invited Speaker: Dr. Simon Goss (Defence Science and Technology Organisation DSTO, Australia)

Room: Lecture Theatre 3, ICT Building, Date: 1st December 2009, Time: 15:30pm

 

Title: Situation Awareness, Sense Making and Sentiment

Abstract:

Since the 1990s, accounting for situation awareness in the behavioural representation of military operators in Operations Research (OR) modelling has driven the use and extension of the BDI agent framework.  The pragmatic ambition to be able to ³plug and play² teams, and partial teams, of agents and humans in simulation has forced us to wrestle with issues in specifying environments for agent and human interaction.  Similarly the demands of coordination and competition without communication require accounting for recognition of intention.  Changing the granularity of focus to the team, and beyond to the command, level takes us out of the realm of the folk psychology of individuals to broader constructs from the social sciences when we seek to understand and model phenomena such sense making and change of mood in a population.

 

Biography: Simon Goss holds a BSc(Hons) and a PhD in Physical Chemistry from LaTrobe University.  After post-doctoral work in Ion Photodissociation Spectroscopy he moved to intelligent instrumentation and subsequently applied artificial intelligence.

 

Simon joined DSTO in 1990 to assess the opportunities for artificial intelligence in the Aircraft Systems Divisional programme and was awarded a

Defence Science Fellowship in 1997 to the Artificial Intelligence group in the Dept of Psychology at the University of Nottingham.  Returning to

Melbourne in late 1998, Simon led enabling research resulting in two deployed application recognition awards for AOD teams from the American

Association for Artificial Intelligence (1999, 2001).  Cognitive science and ecological psychology are strong influences in his attitude to agents and

agency both in his DSTO work and as an adjunct in the AgentLab at the University of Melbourne.

 


Workshop Summary

Collaboration is required when multiple agents achieve complex goals that are difficult or impossible to attain for an individual agent. This collaboration takes place under conditions of incomplete information, uncertainty, and bounded rationality, much of which has been previously studied in economics and artificial intelligence. However, many real world domains are characterised by even greater complexity, including the possibility of unreliable and non-complying collaborators, complex market and incentive frameworks, and complex transaction costs and organisational structures. This workshop's thematic focus is on collaborative and autonomous agents that plan, negotiate, coordinate, and act under this complexity.

 

This workshop aims to foster discussions on computational models of collaboration in distributed systems, addressing a range of theoretical and practical issues. We seek contributions of members in research and industry that use the agent paradigm to approach their problems.

 

Some issues of interest of this workshop are:

  • How to enable agents to reach and maintain joint agreements in complex organisational and market driven domains.
  • How to develop a comprehensive agreement formation/maintenance framework applicable to many application domains.
  • How to build and extend MAS that work efficiently in partially regulated markets (instead of free or fully regulated markets).
  • How to identify and represent conceptual/formal components of organisational structures (e.g., health care and other service-oriented domains).
  • How organisational structures influence the negotiation of agents and the distribution/execution of tasks.
  • Similarly, what are the implications of a partially regulated market on negotiation/distribution/execution of tasks.
  • How to design markets that are adequate for agents to act with incomplete and uncertain information of the behaviour of collaborating agents.
  • How to cope with unreliable and non-conformant collaborators, where agreements are made but are not always conformed with.
  • Which measures of optimality and efficiency are useful in evaluating models of collaboration by means of theory and simulation.
  • How can interventions and incentive structures assist in reaching and maintaining agreements.
  • How to assign transaction costs to actions in the planning, assignment, and execution stages (e.g., costs incurred by reaching and maintaining agreements).
  • How can transaction costs influence the social outcome of the system which is further influenced by the organisational context under which the collaboration takes place.
  • Can lessons learnt in game theoretic computation inform collaborative agent settings.
  • How can agents collectively acquire knowledge about their environment, and their collaborative tasks.

The one day workshop will feature a mixture of invited talks, discussions and submitted contributions describing current work or work in progress in collaborative agent research and technology. The workshop environment fosters open discussions among all participants, particularly encouraging students to discuss their research topics and seek feedback from senior agent researchers.

 

Important Dates

EXTENDED DEADLINE!

 

Abstract submission: October 27, 2009
Full paper submission: October 30, 2009

 

Notification: November 10, 2009
Camera ready: November 20, 2009


Topics of Interest include (but are not limited to):

 

RESEARCH

  • Collaboration frameworks
  • Models of teamwork and joint action
  • Organisation/Institutes/Norms
  • Auctioning/Negotiation
  • Task/Resource allocation
  • Behaviour modelling/monitoring
  • Adherence/Intervention mechanisms
  • Incentive frameworks
  • Intervention mechanisms
  • Agreement technology
  • Contract networks/formation
  • Cloud computing

APPLICATION AREAS

  • Collaborative care planning/management
  • Disaster planning/management
  • Traffic planning/management
  • Transport/Logistics
  • Applications in primary and preventative healthcare
  • Chronic disease planning/management
  • Epidemiological agent models
  • Unmanned air/land vehicles
  • Robotic soccer/Robotic rescues
  • Weather forecast
  • Artificial and natural immune systems
  • Social networks (e.g., LinkedIn, Facebook,...)
  • Smart grid network (e.g., electricity/gas metering)

 

Submission and Publication

 

Call for Papers (CFP) in TXT format

Call for Papers (CFP) in PDF

CARE 2009 Poster in PDF

 

Submission is to be done electronically at EasyChair at: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=care2009. Submissions should be formatted according to LNCS specification and submitted as a PDF file. Instructions and templates can be found at: www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html.

 

CARE 2009 seeks two types of submissions:

 

- Full paper of 8-12 pages.

- Short paper of 2-4 pages (such as position and early result papers) are welcome with the option of extending it to a full paper for the post-proceedings.

 

Submissions will be peer-reviewed by three reviewers per paper. Selection criteria will include relevance, significance, impact, originality, technical soundness, quality of presentation. Some preference may also be given to papers which address emergent trends or important common themes, or which enhance balance of workshop topics. Since this workshop is associated with the AI'09 conference, accepted papers should be relevant to the AI research community.

 

Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings. CARE 2009 plans to offer a best paper award for the best full paper submission, and a selection of papers is planned to be published as post-proceedings with a major international publisher, subject to an appropriate number and quality of submissions.


Workshop Officials

GENERAL CHAIR
Christian Guttmann (Monash University, Australia)

CO-CHAIRS

Michael Georgeff (PrecedenceHealthCare, Australia)
Frank Dignum (University Utrecht, Netherlands)

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Philippe Pasquier (Simon Fraser University, Canada)
Iyad Rahwan
(British University of Dubai, United Arab Emirates)
Kobi Gal
(Harvard University, United States of America)
Simon Thompson
(British Telecom Research Laboratories, United Kingdom)
Cees Witteveen
(Delft University of Technology, Netherlands)
Mathijs de Weerdt
(Delft University of Technology, Netherlands)
Gord McCalla
(University of Saskatchewan, Canada)
Andrew Gilpin
(Hg Analytics, United States of America)
David Morley
(SRI International, United States of America)
Kumari Wickramasinghe
(Monash University, Australia)
Liz Sonenberg
(Melbourne University, Australia)

Sascha Ossowski
(University Rey Juan Carlos, Spain)
Samin Karim
(Accenture, Australia)

Lawrence Cavedon (NICTA and RMIT University, Australia)
Michael Winikoff (University of Otago, New Zealand)
Rafael Bordini
(Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil)
Wayne Wobcke
(University of New South Wales, Australia)

Marcelo Blois Ribeiro (Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil)
more to be announced...

    

Sponsors

phc-logo.png

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The Finkel
Foundation