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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Call for Papers

COINE 2021 is co-located with the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), London, UK, 3-7 May, 2021 (https://https://aamas2021.soton.ac.uk/)

Updated Submission deadline: 26th February, 2021 (more details below)

Overview

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.

Coordination, organizations, institutions, norms and ethics are five key governance elements for the regulation of open multi-agent systems. 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 Workshop Series Website), and produced 12 volumes of post-proceedings in Springer’s Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence.

Continuing this tradition, the goal of the COINE 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.

We invite submissions that address any of the following aspects:

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.

A specific emphasis of this year’s iteration of COINE lies on the response to growing interest in the concept of norms applied to social and human-centric AI, so we will also aim to establish better mutual awareness between COINE and that community by making explicit references in our scope for research in development methodologies and education of trustworthy AI.

To leverage a broader understanding on how COINE-related themes are employed in these research disciplines, we will invite established researchers from the respective fields in order to highlight their perspectives on and adoption of COINE theory and technologies. Building on those insights, we will use this workshop to provide a platform to discuss the potentially varying viewpoints and facilitate the exploration of synergies as well as collaborative opportunities across community boundaries.

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/. COIN holds a B4 rating by the Qualis ranking from CAPES (Brazil).

Important Dates (Updated)

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=coine2021

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 2021 registrants in electronic form.

As with previous COIN(E) workshops, COINE will publish post-proceedings in Springer’s LNCS series. Authors will be invited to submit revised and extended versions of their paper for consideration in these post-proceedings.

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.