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

EXTENDED DEADLINE

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

Full paper submission: Feb 11th, 2011

http://www.ku.ac.ae/EBTIC/Space4Care/care.html
Taipei, Taiwan, 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
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Paper submission deadline: 11th February 2011
Notification of acceptance/rejection: 27th February 2011
Camera-ready copies due: 13th March 2011
Workshop Date: 3rd May 2011


Topics of interest include, without limitation:
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• 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
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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
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Dr. Christian Guttmann (primary contact)
christian.guttmann@kustar.ac.ae

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

Prof. Milind Tambe
tambe@usc.edu


Registration and Accommodation
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http://www.aamas2011.tw/AttendingAAMAS2011.html


Workshop Officials
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GENERAL CHAIRS
Dr. Christian Guttmann (primary contact)
christian.guttmann@kustar.ac.ae

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

Prof. Milind Tambe
tambe@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. Mathias 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)
Dr. 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
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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