Extended deadline for workshop proposals, PRIMA-2011 (Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems)

[Stephen Cranefield]

CALL FOR WORKSHOP PROPOSALS (extended deadline)

14th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems (PRIMA-2011)
Wollongong, Australia
14-18 November, 2011

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 14 or 15 November, 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.

Springer have agreed in principle to publish a joint volume of PRIMA-2011 workshop post-proceedings as an LNAI volume (subject to verification later on the basis of the workshop CFPs).

IMPORTANT DATES

Workshop proposal submission due:  15 June
Notification to workshop proposers:  22 June
Each workshop organiser sends out call for workshop papers:  30 June
Due date for full workshop papers submission:  12 August
Workshop paper acceptance notification:  16 September
Early registration deadline:  27 September
Camera-ready papers due:  30 September
Registration deadline:  1 November
Workshop date:  14 or 15 November
Main PRIMA conference: 16-18 November

WORKSHOP ORGANISATION

The workshop organisers will be responsible for forming the workshop programme committee, advertising the workshop, and 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 15 June, 2011 (extended deadline).

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