Call for Papers

Current ICT solutions exhibit unprecedented levels of sophistication, only achievable via the interconnection of hundreds or thousands of software components. In many scenarios, these components are supplied by third parties and they may come and go (i.e., we have an open ecosystem of components), they may have various degrees of autonomy (i.e., they may “not do as told”), and they interact with one another as well as with digital and physical assets, whilst competing and/or collaborating to achieve individual and global goals.

The design, engineering, analysis and verification (among other activities) of such systems require novel metaphors, formalisms, mechanisms, techniques, and tools stemming from the study of coordination, organisations, (artificial and electronic) institutions, and norms. More recently, a new generation of socio-technical systems, combining human and software participants and components, raise the importance of the study of the topics within the remit of the proposed workshop.

The proposed workshop, a long-standing satellite event of past versions of AAMAS, IJCAI and ECAI for more than 10 years, is to bring together researchers and practitioners in autonomous agents and multi-agent systems working on the scientific and technological aspects of social coordination, organisational theory, normative (multi-agent) systems, artificial or electronic institutions and norm-aware agents.

We invite contributions of papers on:

• mathematical, logical, computational, philosophical and pragmatic issues related to the topics above;
• modelling, animation and simulation techniques for open MAS;
• exploration of the topics above in socio-technical systems;
• tools, prototypes and real-life systems adopting COIN-related approaches;
• experimental investigation of the effectiveness of COIN-related technologies;
• human-oriented representation and application of COIN-related topics (e.g., norms in natural language for humans, norms and coordination for practical planning); and
• challenging or innovative ideas relevant to the field.

The workshop complements the main AAMAS program by allowing a more relaxed and in-depth discussion of MAS from a social perspective and has proven to be an event that encourages debate, and fosters collaboration among researchers in these topics. COIN has a B-rating on the Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia (CORE) conference ranking list http://portal.core.edu.au/conf-ranks/2160/, and has a B4 rating by the Qualis ranking from CAPES http://qualis.capes.gov.br.

Important Dates

(These dates are subject to later updates)

• February 7, 2017 February 17, 2017: Deadline for paper submissions
• March 2, 2017 March 15, 2017: Paper notifications sent
• March 9, 2017 March 22, 2017: Camera-ready copy due
• May 8 or 9, 2017: Date of workshop

Instructions for Authors

For preparation of papers please follow the instructions for authors available at the Springer LNCS Web page. The length of each paper including figures and references may not exceed 16 pages. All papers must be written in English and submitted in PDF format. For submission of papers, please use the EasyChair site at: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=coin2017

Submission of a paper should be regarded as an undertaking that, should the paper be accepted, at least one of the authors will attend the workshop to present the work.

Proceedings

Preliminary proceedings will be available before the conference. They will also be distributed to AAMAS 2017 registrants in electronic form.

As with previous COIN workshops, we will have an LNCS post-proceedings. Authors will be invited to submit revised and extended versions of their paper for consideration for a Springer LNCS volume combining the post-proceedings of this workshop with those for a second COIN workshop to be held later in 2017.

Revised papers must take into account the discussion held during the workshop; hence, only papers that are presented during the workshop will be considered for inclusion in the post-proceedings volume.