Do you CARE? -- 2nd CFP: 3rd International Workshop on Collaborative Agents - REsearch and Development (CARE) 2011, Taipei, Taiwan

[Christian Guttmann]

Apologies for cross-postings.
(Please CHECK the new initiatives of CARE below!)

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Second CALL FOR PAPERS
Third International Workshop on
*Collaborative Agents -- REsearch and development (CARE) 2011*

Abstract submission: Jan 28th, 2011
Full paper submission: Jan 30th, 2011

http://www.ku.ac.ae/EBTIC/Space4Care/care.html
Taipei, Taiwan, 2-3 May 2011
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The workshop is held in conjunction with the International Conference on 
Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS) 2011.


Workshop Summary
================

Do you care? For the lifetime value of customers, patients, products, 
information, and plan execution? If yes, then how do you work together 
with those that care for the same entity? Collaborative care is today's 
primary means to achieve complex outcomes and to increase the lifetime 
value of the cared entities. Collaboration enables agents to 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. How can we 
create computational models, representations, algorithms and protocols 
to enable the next generation of intelligent collaborative care 
technologies? How can we build technologies that support collaboration 
under this complexity and uncertainty?

This workshop aims to foster discussions on computational models of 
collaboration support 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. The CARE workshop series not only addresses a gap in the 
existing agent and AI landscape, but also tries to push the boundaries 
of existing work by addressing a problem that is relatively new to the 
agent community and that presents the community with exciting applications.

Application domains include healthcare, e-services, intelligent 
campuses, intelligent work places, business process management, 
telecommunications, and distance learning. For example, it includes the 
long term care of patients with a chronic disease (patient care), 
support of students in their studies (student care), and service 
provision in telecommunication (customer care). In many cases, caring 
requires a team of collaborators to work together under various 
constraints and market conditions. A team needs to achieve desired 
outcomes while decreasing costs associated with required activities.

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
===============

Abstract submission: 28th January 2011
Paper submission deadline: 30th January 2011
Notification of acceptance/rejection: 27th February 2011
Camera-ready copies due: 13th March 2011
Workshop Date: 2nd or 3rd May 2011


Topics of interest include, without limitation:
===============================================

. How can we support/guide collaborative teams. How can we offer 
flexibility in the way how teams execute plans. How can we make team 
members follow agreed procedures (Incentives? Or more fundamental, by 
designing a new market?).
. How to enable agents to form and follow joint agreements, guidelines 
and contracts in complex organisational and market driven domains 
(agreement adherence).
. How to enable agents to monitor and change agreements, if required 
(agreement variation).
. How can adherence and variation be achieved under uncertain and 
incomplete information (comprehensive formation/maintenance framework).
. How to enable an effective communication infrastructure for 
collaborative care (possibly including humans and agents).
. How to build a model of the features of individuals (customer/patient 
behaviour).
. How to build comprehensive customer lifecycle management systems for 
customers, including telecommunication consumers, students and patients.
. How to deploy lifecycle management systems in real world applications, 
such as healthcare, telecommunication, and smart campuses.
. How to design markets that are adequate for agents to act with 
incomplete and uncertain information of the behaviour of collaborating 
agents.
. How to build MAS that work efficiently in partially regulated markets 
(where governance policy or partnership agreements govern part of the 
market).
. What are the implications of partial regulation on the management of 
contractual relationships and service delivery.
. How organisational structures influence the negotiation of agents and 
the distribution/execution of tasks.
. How to cope with collaborators that exhibit unreliable and 
non-conformant behaviour, e.g. where agreements are made but are not 
always conformed with.
. How can interventions assist in managing contractual relationships and 
service delivery.
. How can we make individuals encourage to perform activities to stay 
on-track and achieve desired outcomes (incentive frameworks).
. How can we enable flexible, goal-driven and contextualised plan 
creation and business process management (including intelligent 
execution, monitoring, management, and optimization of business processes).
. How to assign transaction costs to actions in planning, assignment, 
and execution in organisational structures.
. 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.
. How to build an effective monitoring-recognition-intervention framework.
. Can lessons learnt in game theoretic computation inform collaborative 
agent settings.
. What role does learning and adaptivity play in building organisational 
MAS.
. How to deal with partially regulated markets (free markets are 
possibly an unrealistic paradigm as they don't really existent).


Submission and Publication
==========================

Authors should submit their papers via the easychair conference 
management system:
<http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=care2011>

Papers should be formatted using Springer LNCS style
http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html
and have a maximum of 12 pages.

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.

Post-Proceedings are planned to be published with Springer as for the 
CARE 2009 and 2010.


Contact
=======

Dr. Christian Guttmann (primary contact)
christian.guttmann at kustar.ac.ae

Prof. Michael Luck
michael.luck at kcl.ac.uk

Prof. Milind Tambe
tambe at usc.edu


Registration and Accommodation
=============================

http://www.aamas2011.tw/AttendingAAMAS2011.html


Workshop Officials
==================

GENERAL CHAIRS
Dr. Christian Guttmann (primary contact)
christian.guttmann at kustar.ac.ae

Prof. Michael Luck
michael.luck at kcl.ac.uk

Prof. Milind Tambe
tambe at usc.edu

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Prof. Dr. Gord McCalla (University of Saskatchewan, Canada)
Asst. Prof. Dr. Philippe Pasquier (Simon Fraser University, Canada)
Prof. Dr. Rainer Unland (University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany)
Prof. Dr. Rafael Bordini (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil)
Prof. Dr. Toby Walsh (NICTA and UNSW, Australia)
Prof. Dr. Gal Kaminka (Bar Illan University, Israel)
Dr. Kumari Wickramasinghe (Monash University, Australia)
Dr. Sherief Abdallah (British University of Dubai, UAE)
Prof. Dr. Liz Sonenberg (Melbourne University, Australia)
Dr. Fredrik Heintz (Linkoping University, Sweden)
Dr. Samin Karim (University of Melbourne, Australia)
Prof. Dr. Michael Thielscher (University of New South Wales, Australia)
Prof. Dr. Victor Lesser (University of Massachusetts, USA)
Prof. Dr. Cees Witteveen (Delft University of Technology, Netherlands)
Asst. Professor Birna van Riemsdijk (Delft University of Technology, 
Netherlands)
Prof. Dr. Cristiano Castelfranchi (Institute of Cognitive Sciences and 
Technologies, Italy)
Prof. Dr. Leonardo Garrido (Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico)
Prof. Dr. Matthias Klusch (German Research Center for Artificial 
Intelligence, DFKI, Germany)
Dr. Inon Zuckerman (University of Maryland, USA)
Prof. Dr. Wayne Wobcke (University of New South Wales, Australia)
Dr. Neil Yorke-Smith (American University of Beirut, Lebanon, and SRI 
International, USA)
Birgit Burmeister (Daimler AG, Germany)
Prof. Dr. Magnus Boman (Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden)
Dr. Simon Goss (Defence Science and Technology Organisation DSTO, 
Australia)
Dr. Wei Chen (Intelligent Automation, Inc., United States of America)
Prof. Dr. Zakaria Maamar (Zayed University, UAE)

Novel extensions to CARE'11
===========================

We plan to introduce two novel extensions to CARE'11 to create an 
environment that encourages productivity and creative thinking and 
discussions among all participants, particularly among the junior 
research members. These activities are aimed at placing an emphasis on 
getting to know each other, and breaking down the usual boundaries of 
inhibition among a research and engineering audience. They are meant to 
"break the ice" and to create an atmosphere of open discussion and 
exchange. In other words, we aim at making the workshop as a workshop is 
meant to be -- participants should constructively talk with each other 
about the research they are pursuing.

The first initiative is a "Crazy and dangerous idea session".

* Each accepted author has 5 min to sketch out a possible (crazy) future 
direction of CARE
* Only one slide is allowed to explain the idea (drawings on 
whiteboards/screen allowed)
* There has to be a clearly identifiable "out of the box" thinking. It 
should go towards: how can we peel off the main stream? How is CARE 
already different to the main stream and other research directions, and 
how can we extend this?

The second initiative is to allow a reviewer to provide a limited text 
to the workshop audience (still anonymous by the organiser). The idea is 
to extend the current blind reviewing process by transferring valuable 
reviewer information to the audience to enhance discussion (reviewers 
often have read papers most rigorously, have deeper reflections on its' 
content, but these reflections are seldom discussed in a broader 
audience). The details are as follows.

* A paragraph (at most 200 words) by each reviewer as a comment, they 
may include 1-3 challenging and constructive questions/extensions about 
an accepted paper.
* The reviewers and the authors can each agree/disagree to make the 
comment section public. The comments would then be handed to the 
audience before the talks.

The above initiatives are expected to enhance the atmosphere among 
participants significantly. The future of this workshop's research 
direction will therefore benefit from these initiatives.

Online Discussion Groups
For the purpose of announcements and future collaboration on the 
workshop topics, professional network groups on Linkedin have been 
created: CARE and AAMAS. CARE has reached a membership of 50 research 
professionals, and AAMAS has now 300 professional members (mostly 
professors, senior researchers and PhD students that have made 
significant contribution to the field of agents, or have a keen interest 
in the subject matter). These two forums are used extensively to discuss 
AAMAS as well as CARE specific topics.


-- 
Christian Guttmann, PhD
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~xtg/
http://www.ku.ac.ae/EBTIC/Staff/Christian_Guttmann.html


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