International Workshop on Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, Norms and Ethics for Governance of Multi-Agent Systems (COINE), co-located with AAMAS 2021

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Objectives

Coordination, organizations, institutions, norms and ethics are five key governance elements for the regulation of open multi-agent systems. The goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers in autonomous agents and multi-agent systems working on the scientific and technological aspects of social coordination, organizational theory, normative MAS, artificial or electronic institutions, norm-aware and ethical agents.

The pervasiveness of “open systems” raises a range of challenges and opportunities for technologies in the area of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. However, achieving and maintaining a “good” society is difficult to achieve as the participating entities (including human users), their modes of interaction or the intended purpose of the system may change over time. Moreover, in the case of open multi-agent systems, the autonomy of the agents can work against the effectiveness of the society. As a further trajectory of influence, coordination techniques such as distributed ledger technology can increase the autonomy and complexity of these open systems as a whole and challenge their governance. There is therefore a need for tools and techniques for articulating interactions in order to make the system more effective in attaining collective goals, more certain for participants or more predictable.

This workshop is an evolution of the COIN (Coordination, Organizations, Institutions and Norms in Agent Systems) workshop series that ran at various conferences including AAMAS (12 times), IJCAI, AAAI and ECAI since 2006 (see COIN Series Website), and produced 12 volumes of post-proceedings in Springer’s Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence. While operating in the tradition of the COIN workshop series, this edition of the workshop adds ethics to the workshop name and acronym as an explicit focus of the workshop, and includes governance of MAS in the workshop name to highlight this as the common objective uniting the various strands of research of interest to the workshop.

Note: COINE inherited COIN’s B-rating on the Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia (CORE) conference ranking list http://portal.core.edu.au/conf-ranks/2160/.

This edition of COINE will be hosted by AAMAS 2021 and will complement the main conference program by allowing a more relaxed and in-depth discussion of MAS from a social perspective. Under its new COINE brand, this workshop will not only be of interest to its traditional sub-community of AAMAS participants (those researchers working on coordination, organisational, institutional and normative models and technologies for MAS), but also invites researchers investigating the growing field of ethical governance of MAS.

Important Dates (Updated)