PRIMA-2011 Call for Workshop Proposals

[Song, Insu]

Dear Colleague,

The organising committee of the 14th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems (PRIMA-2011) invites workshop proposals for the upcoming conference.  The workshops will be held before the conference on November 14th, 2011 in Wollongong, Australia.  PRIMA-2011 workshops are intended to facilitate active exchange, interaction and comparison of approaches, methods and various ideas that are relevant to specific topics in areas related to intelligent agent systems and multi-agent systems.  The workshops will facilitate a forum for participants to showcase their research work and initiate open discussions for topics and issues of the current interest.  Proposals promoting exploration and discovery of new research areas and application fields of agent systems and multi-agent systems are also highly welcomed.  In alignment with the conference theme for PRIMA-2011 of “Agents for Sustainability”, the workshop programme seeks to especially encourage thought leadership in the agent community as to how agent computing can be applied to enhance sustainable practices in our world, from agriculture to personal resource usage to the design and operation of more sustainable cities. Workshops addressing this theme, across the range from innovative early work to reports on systems in production, are welcomed, as also are workshops that continue to explore the “Agents and Services” theme of PRIMA-2010, which addressed connections to service science and service-oriented computing.

Important Dates:
Workshop proposal submission due: June 3rd, 2011
Notification to workshop proposers: June 17th, 2011
Each workshop organiser sends out call for workshops papers: June 20th, 2011
Due date for full workshop papers submission: August 12th, 2011
Workshop paper acceptance notification: September 16th, 2011
Early registration deadline: September 27th, 2011
Camera-ready papers due: September 30th, 2010.
Registration deadline: November 1st, 2011
Workshop date: November 14th and 15th, 2011


Workshop Organisation:
The workshop organisers will be responsible for forming the workshop programme committee, advertising the workshop, reviewing and selecting papers in a fair and transparent manner, both for the workshop and for a post-conference volume of combined workshop post-proceedings. The duration of workshops may be full-day or half-day.  The workshop organisers should ensure the presence of authors of accepted papers. During the workshop, we expect the workshop organisers to actively engage with the audience and speakers to foster discussion and exchange of ideas by including mechanisms other than traditional paper presentations.

Workshop Topics:
We encourage workshop proposals of interesting and promising new initiatives, research and application challenges in "Agents for Sustainability" and "Agents and Services", and more generally in intelligent agent systems and multi-agent systems.  The workshops should provide a vibrant forum for researchers and industry practitioners to share their research results and practical development experiences in those fields.

Suggested workshop topics include, but are not limited to:

Agent-based system development:
Agent programming and communication languages
Agent development environments
Agent-oriented software engineering
Case studies on implemented systems

Agent communication:
Agent communication languages and protocols
Agent commitments
Network structures and analysis

Agent-based Simulation:
Emergent behaviour
Simulation-specific issues
Single and Multi-agent Learning
Computational architectures for learning and adaptation

Agent Reasoning:
Logics for Agents and Multi-Agents
Reasoning (single and multi-agent)
Planning (single and multi-agent)
Cognitive models
Ontological reasoning

Interface Agents:
Practices of Interface Agents
Interface Multi-Agents
Virtual Agents
Collaborative Interface Agents
Autonomous Interface Agents

Agent societies and social networks:
Artificial social systems
Trust and reputation
Social and organisational structure
Privacy, safety and security
Normative Multi-Agent Systems
Ethical and legal issues

Agent Theories, Models and Architectures:
BDI, and other models of agency
Modelling the dynamics of MAS
Formal verification of MAS

Agent Technologies for Service Computing:
Service composition with agent collaboration
Service brokering and agency
Personalised services with agent adaptation
SLA definition and monitoring as agent goals

Agent Cooperation and Negotiation:
Cooperation, Coalition formation and Coordination
Distributed problem solving
Formal models for modelling other agents and self
Argumentation, Persuasion, Negotiation and Bargaining

Agent Systems:
Software agents
Mobile agents
Agent-Based Assistants
Agent-Based Virtual Enterprise
Embodied Agents and their Applications
Socially Situated Planning Software and Pervasive Agents

Real-world Robotics:
Coordination in multi-robot systems
Modelling and analysis of multi-robot systems
Tools that are relevant for multi-robot studies
Applications of multi-robots to real-world problems

WWW and Semantic Web Agents:
Web-based agents
Ontology agents
Semantic Web agents
Human Agent Interaction

Other Related Areas:
Collective intelligence
Service science
P2P, Grid computing
Financial markets and algorithmic trades
Ubiquitous computing, ambient intelligence
Knowledge and Data Intensive Systems
Perceptive Animated Interfaces
Tools and Standards
Ubiquitous Software Services
Virtual Humans
Workshop Proposal Submission

Workshop proposals should include the following elements:
* Title of the workshop.
* The names, affiliations, mailing addresses and e-mail addresses of the proposed workshop chairs.
* A description of the topic of the workshop and its relevance to the conference (not exceeding 300 words)
* Duration of the workshop (full-day or half-day).
* A list of proposed programme committee members for the workshop.
* A list of related workshops held in the last three years, and their relation to the proposed workshop
* An outline of the process to be followed for reviewing and selecting papers.
* A description of the experience of the proposed chairs with respect to organising a workshop.
* A brief description of how the workshop will be advertised.
* Any specific requirements other than a room and data projector
 
After the acceptance of a workshop proposal the organiser(s) should:
* Create a Call for papers/participation for the workshop
* Create a Web page for the workshop, the link of which will be published on the Conference Web site
* Create a Board of Reviewers (Program Committee)
* Review and select papers
* Schedule the workshop activities
 
All submitted papers will be reviewed on the basis of technical quality, relevance, significance, originality, and clarity.

The above described workshop proposals must be submitted via e-mail to both scranefield at infoscience.otago.ac.nz and insu.song at jcu.edu.au by June 3rd, 2011.

We look forward to your support in making PRIMA-2011 workshops an exciting event.

PRIMA-2011 Workshop Chairs:
Stephen Cranefield
University of Otago, New Zealand
Email: scranefield at infoscience.otago.ac.nz

Insu Song
James Cook University Australia, 
Email: insu.song at jcu.edu.au