2nd WORKSHOP ON
NORMS AND INSTITUTIONS
IN MULTI-AGENT SYSTEMS
at

Autonomous Agents 2001 Web Site: http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~agents2001/

    NEW: ACCEPTED PAPERS ON-LINE

• Overview
• Detailed Description
• Workshop Topics
• Workshop Format
• Submission Details
• Timetable
• Workshop Organizers
• THIS YEAR'S PROGRAM AND PAPERS
• LAST YEAR'S WORKSHOP PAPERS

OVERVIEW

The first workshop on “Norms and Institutions in MAS”, held in Barcelona at Autonomous Agents 2000, showed that the interest in this topic is on the increase. The high-level quality of participants and the interest of the discussion encouraged the organizers to organize a second event. As in the first event, the main purpose of the workshop is to enable different approaches to the study of norms and institutions, with their objectives, theoretical, conceptual, methodological and technical instruments and background competencies, to find a common ground in the context of multi-agent systems. This is indispensable to articulate an agenda for contributing to the design of better agent-based systems, and to identify and promote the most promising and challenging research directions.

  In recent years, several researchers have argued for the use of social abstractions, most notably the concepts of norms and institutions, in the context of multi-agent systems. As was shown by the first workshop, some researchers have produced theoretical work that attempts to formally define and clarify concepts of social interaction such as norms, commitments, obligations, rights, permissions, roles, responsibility. Others have produced theoretical-formal and computational or simulation-based work aimed to understand and model the (micro) foundations of social abstractions, and possibly their evolutionary or dynamic dimension. Others have been developing theoretical and experimental instruments to compare different models and mechanisms for implementing social norms in multi-agent systems and in artificial societies. More specifically, several researchers have developed architectures of agents capable of dealing with, adapting to, learning and (inter)acting in an environment endowed with social norms and electronic institutions. Others have investigated different mechanisms of implementation and enforcement of norms at the system level. Yet others have been exploring the use of electronic institutions in the design of robust open systems that are capable of coping with heterogeneity, uncertain/imperfect knowledge, limited trust and systemic dysfunction. Finally, researchers in the area of social simulation have had a long tradition in using normative concepts and phenomena in order to design, evaluate and compare different organizational structures and instruments for participatory policy-making.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION

Multi-agent systems are increasingly being considered a viable technological basis for implementing complex, open systems such as electronic marketplaces, virtual enterprises, military coalition support systems, etc. The design of open systems in such domains poses a number of difficult challenges, including the need to cope with unreliable computational and network infrastructures, the need to address incompatible assumptions and limited trust among independently developed agents and the necessity of detecting and responding to systemic failures.

Human organizations and societies have successfully coped with similar problems of coordination, cooperation, etc., in short, with the challenge of social order, mainly by developing norms and conventions, that is, specifications of behavior that all society members are expected to conform to, and that undergo efficient forms of decentralized control. In most societies, norms are backed by a variety of social institutions that enforce law and order (e.g. courts, police), monitor for and respond to emergencies (e.g. ambulance system), prevent and recover from unanticipated disasters (e.g. coast guard, firefighters), etc. In that way, civilized societies allow citizens to utilize relatively simple and efficient rules of behavior, offloading the prevention and recovery of many problem types to social institutions that can handle them efficiently and effectively by virtue of their economies of scale and widely accepted legitimacy. Successful civil societies have thus achieved a division of labor between individuals and institutions that decreases the “barriers to survival” for each citizen, while helping increase the welfare of the society as a whole.

  Several researchers have recognized that the design of open multi-agent systems can benefit from abstractions analogous to those employed by our robust and relatively successful societies and organizations. There is a growing body of work that touches upon the concepts of norms and institutions in the context of multi-agent systems. This work moves in several directions, including:

• Formal-Theoretical work (definitions of concepts related to norms and institutions, such as contracts, commitments, obligations, rights, permissions, responsibility, delegation, etc.; formal notations for expressing and communicating norms and institutions; etc., developing models of institutions, institutional roles, action, legitimacy; )

• Experimental, exploratory theoretical work (specifications of hypotheses to be check via experimental computational and simulation based studies, and possibly by cross-methological comparison between natural and artificial data)

• Architectural work  (architectures of agents with norms; architectures of electronic institutions, etc.)

• Prototyping and evaluation (prototype agent systems employing norms and electronic institutions in domains such as electronic commerce, coalition forces and disaster recovery; experimental evaluation of the effectiveness of given institutions in the face of heterogeneity, limited trust and unreliable infrastructure; etc.)

• Social simulation (modeling of social and organizational institutions using multi-agent systems; use of normative concepts and phenomena in the design, evaluation and comparison of different organizational structures, etc.)

WORKSHOP TOPICS

The purpose of this workshop is to help us better understand how these various lines of work connect to one another and how, together, they can contribute to the design and implementation of better multi-agent systems. The topics of the workshop include, but are not limited to:

• Formal definitions of normative and institutional concepts

• Notations and languages for communicating norms and institutions

• Architectures of agents with norms

• Architectures of social institutions

• Prototype systems employing the concepts of norms and institutions

• Methodologies for evaluating the effectiveness of norms and electronic institutions

• Application domains for which norms and institutions are especially useful design metaphor

• The use of norms and institutions in open environments

• Norms and institutions in electronic commerce applications

• Adaptive institutions

• Emergence of institutions

• Decentralized vs. centralized institutions and systems of enforcement

• Social simulation and its relationship to electronic institutions

• Multi-agent based approach to participatory policy-making

• Evolutionary models and algorithms for the study of institutions

WORKSHOP FORMAT

The format of the workshop will be a combination of contributed and invited presentations, panels, and discussion among the participants. There will be a limited number of sessions, each focused on a specific topic selected among the ones listed above, each including a small group of papers, with time for brief presentations and ample opportunities for discussion.

SUBMISSION DETAILS

Those wishing to participate in the workshop should submit an original research paper. Papers will be peer reviewed by at least two referees from the workshop program committee. Submitted papers should be new work that has not been published elsewhere. Paper submissions should include a separate title page with the title, authors (full address), a 300-400 word abstract, and a list of keywords. The length of submitted papers must not exceed 12 pages including all figures, tables, and bibliography. All papers must be written in English.

Submissions must be sent electronically, as a Postscript, PDF or MSWord format file, by March 16, 2001, again, to both of the co-chairs.

Those wishing to attend without presenting a paper should send a position paper of up to two pages to the co-chairs. Attendance will, of necessity, be limited.

TIMETABLE

Submissions due  March 16
Notifications sent  April 9
Camera-ready copies due April 16

WORKSHOP CHAIRS
 

Rosaria Conte Institute of Psychology National Research Council Viale Marx 15, I-00137 Rome  Italy Tel. (+39)-06-86090210 Email: conte@www.ip.rm.cnr.it

Chris Dellarocas  MIT Sloan School of Management MIT Room E53-315 Cambridge, MA USA Tel. (+1)-617-258-8115 Email: dell@mit.edu

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Les Gasser, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA 
Andrew Jones, University of Oslo, Norway 
Michael Huhns, University of South Carolina, USA 
Victor Lesser, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA 

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Mihai Barbuceanu, University of Toronto, Canada 
Jose Carmo, Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal
Cristiano Castelfranchi, National Research Council, Institute of Psychology, Roma, Italy 
Helder Coelho, AgentLink 
Frank Dignum, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands 
Mark Klein, MIT, USA 
Michael Prietula, University of Florida, USA 
Juan Antonio Rodriguez-Aguilar, Laboratory of Intelligent Software Components, Spain 
Giovanni Sartor, Queen's University of Belfast, N. Ireland 
Marek Sergot, Imperial College, UK 
Carles Sierra, Artificial Intelligence Research Insititute, Barcelona, Spain 
Harko Verhagen, Stockholm University and the Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
Gerard Weisbuch, Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris, France 
Pinar Yolum, University of North Carolina, USA