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CALL FOR PAPERS

In conjunction with WI 2018

1st International Workshop on
Blockchain Technologies for Multi-Agent Systems
--- BCT4MAS 2018 ---

Santiago -- December 3, 2018
http:bct4mas.santannapisa.it
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IMPORTANT DATES:
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- Deadline for Submission: 9 September 2018
- Notification of Acceptance: 1 October 2018
- Camera-ready: 12 October 2018
- Workshop day: 3 December 2018

AIM and SCOPE
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Multi-agent systems (MAS) are composed of loosely coupled entities (agents) interconnected and organized in a network. Every agent has the ability to solve problems and attain its goals by interacting with each other through collaboration, negotiation, and competition patterns. MAS are increasingly dealing with sensitive data. Therefore, enforcing the notion of reputation, ensuring trust and reliability, is essential for modern MAS.
Blockchain (BCT) is a P2P distributed ledger technology providing shared, immutable, transparent, and updatable (append-only) registers of given values characterizing a given network (e.g., all the actions intercurred among the participants and information about the participants themselves).
However, employing the BCT ``as-is'' and by itself in dynamic and quickly evolving scenarios can represent an unlucky choice. The reasons span from fundamental properties of BCT, to application/domain specific constraints. Reaching consensus in distributed multi‐stakeholder networks with possible unaligned interests can be considerably complex or unsustainable.
Therefore, if properly managed, combining BCT and MAS can represent a win-win solution:
(i) the adoption and adaption of BCT can help to overcome trust and reliability limitations broadly known in MAS literature, enabling secure, autonomous, flexible and even profitable solutions.
(ii) MAS can contribute with its features to address limitations of BCT.

CfP
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Human beings are increasingly connected through uncountable interlinked electronic devices that perform ubiquitous computing. As a consequence, scientific research is pushing towards the design and development of autonomous and collaborative systems and devices that interact and compete with each other, often emulating humankind dynamics.
Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are widely used for the development of intelligent distributed systems, including cases that deal with highly sensitive data, such as ambient assisted living, healthcare, and energy trading. An agent can be rationalized as an autonomous entity observing its surrounding environment through a perception layer, and possibly interacting with it, as well as with other agents. These intelligent agents are also able to perform distributed reasoning exploiting their knowledge base. It can be extended and updated, thus renewing their plans to achieve the desired goals. In MAS, a solution to given problem to be solved is delivered through autonomous actions and interactions between many agents rather than by any single “smart” agent. Hence, MAS are generally composed of loosely coupled agents interconnected and organized in a network, each of them having the ability to solve problems and attain its goals by interacting with each other through collaboration, negotiation, and competition patterns.
Recently, BCT has been proposed as a peer-to-peer distributed ledger technology that can provide a shared, immutable, and transparent history of all the events intercurred among all the participants in a given network. Currently, MAS require trusted mediators storing the transactions among the agents. These mediators can be replaced with a distributed ledger technology: BCT properties can ensure that no corruption of topics or moderators would impact on the reliability of the network.
For example, systems handling societal information and dealing with hundreds/thousands of nodes to manage sensitive information can benefit from the combination of MAS and BCT. Such systems need the crucial feature guaranteed by MAS, as much the traceability and immutability ensured by the BCT.
This workshop aims at offering a common ground to researchers from diverse areas to share experiences about possible outcomes of combining MAS and BCT.

RELEVANT TOPICS
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Participants are invited to submit papers on all research and application aspects of BCT4MAS, including, but not limited to:

- Theoretical track:
- Main properties of blockchain technology
- Self-aware and smart contracts
- Reputation management
- Decision-making for policy
- Secure identity assurance
- Security and privacy management
- Trust and data integrity
- Procurement
- Conflict resolution in business collaboration
- Task allocation, coordination, and supervision
- Agreement technologies and artificial institutions
- Big data management in highly distributed environments
- Anonymization of distributed data

- Applied track
- Distributed energy grids
- Collaborative governance
- Distributed Autonomous Organisations (DAO)
- Distributed artificial intelligence
- Swarm robotics
- Coordination models in Internet-of-Things (IoT)
- E-commerce and demand-supply relationships
- Software life-cycle management
- E-government
- Sharing economy


PAPER SUBMISSION
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Participants are invited to submit SHORT papers (up to 8 pages) and FULL paper (from 8 up to 16 pages) in length, addressing the topics of the workshop.

Accepted papers, presented at the workshop by one of the authors, will be published in the LNAI Proceedings of RTcMAS (with an ISBN).
Quality, relevance, and originality will impact on the acceptance of the submitted papers. Either full research reports, work-in-progress reports, and literature reviews are all welcome.

Papers must be edited using the LNCS format:

http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0

and be submitted electronically as PDF files via EasyChair at:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=bct4mas

Papers will be reviewed by at least three PC members. If a paper is accepted, at least one author must register for the workshop and present the paper at the workshop in person.

PROGRAM CHAIRS
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Davide Calvaresi -- University of Applied Science Western Switzerland, Switzerland - Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Italy.
Alevtina Dubovitskaya -- University of Applied Science Western Switzerland, Switzerland.
Michael Schumacher -- University of Applied Science Western Switzerland, Switzerland.
Kuldar Taveter -- Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia.

PROVISIONAL PROGRAM COMMITTEE
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Alexander Norta, Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia
Sascha Ossowski, University Rey Juan Carlos, Spain
Andrea Omicini, Alma Mater Studiorum-Università di Bologna, Italy
René Schumann, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland
Jean-Paul Calbimonte, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland
Stéphane Galland, Université de Technologie de Belfort-Montbéliard
Rik Eshuis, Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands
Luciano Garcia Banuelos, University of Tartu, Estonia
Ingo Weber, CSIRO, Australia
Cristina Cabanillas, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria
Avigdor Gal, Technion -- Israel Institute of Technology, Israel
Guido Governatori, CSIRO, Australia
Munindar P. Singh, North Carolina State University
Ermo Täks, Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia
Elli Androulaki, IBM Research, Switzerland
Maria Dubovitskaya, IBM Research, Switzerland
Fusheng Wang, Stony Brook University, USA
Nicola Falcionelli, Università Politecnica delle Marche, Italy
Paolo Sernani, Università Politecnica delle Marche, Italy
Aldo F Dragoni, Università Politecnica delle Marche, Italy