CARE 2011 - Workshop

Third International Workshop

on

Collaborative Agents - Research and development

CARE 2011

in conjunction with AAMAS 2011

Paper submission deadline               30th January 2011
Notification of acceptance/rejection
           27th February 2011
Camera-ready copies due               13th March 2011
Workshop Date            2nd or 3rd May 2011

Do you care? For the lifetime value of customers, patients, products, information, and plan execution? If yes, then how do you work together with those that care for the same entity? Collaborative care is today's primary means to achieve complex outcomes and to increase the lifetime value of the cared entities. Collaboration enables agents to achieve complex goals that are difficult or impossible to attain for an individual agent. This collaboration takes place under conditions of incomplete information, uncertainty, and bounded rationality, much of which has been previously studied in economics and artificial intelligence. However, many real world domains are characterised by even greater complexity, including the possibility of unreliable and non-complying collaborators, complex market and incentive frameworks, and complex transaction costs and organisational structures. How can we create computational models, representations, algorithms and protocols to enable the next generation of intelligent collaborative care technologies? How can we build technologies that support collaboration under this complexity and uncertainty?
This workshop aims to foster discussions on computational models of collaboration support in distributed systems, addressing a range of theoretical and practical issues. We seek contributions of members in research and industry that use the agent paradigm to approach their problems. The CARE workshop series not only addresses a gap in the existing agent and AI landscape, but also tries to push the boundaries of existing work by addressing a problem that is relatively new to the agent community and that presents the community with exciting applications.
Application domains include healthcare, e-services, intelligent campuses, intelligent work places, business process management, telecommunications, and distance learning. For example, it includes the long term care of patients with a chronic disease (patient care), support of students in their studies (student care), and service provision in telecommunication (customer care). In many cases, caring requires a team of collaborators to work together under various constraints and market conditions. A team needs to achieve desired outcomes while decreasing costs associated with required activities.
The one day workshop will feature a mixture of invited talks, discussions and submitted contributions describing current work or work in progress in collaborative agent research and technology. The workshop environment fosters open discussions among all participants, particularly encouraging students to discuss their research topics and seek feedback from senior agent researchers.
Topics of interest include, without limitation:
    * How can we support/guide collaborative teams. How can we offer flexibility in the way how teams execute plans. How can we make team members follow agreed procedures (Incentives? Or more fundamental, by designing a new market?)
    * How to enable agents to form and follow joint agreements, guidelines and contracts in complex organisational and market driven domains (agreement adherence).

    * How to enable agents to monitor and change agreements, if required (agreement variation).
    * How can adherence and variation be achieved under uncertain and incomplete information (comprehensive formation/maintenance framework).
    * How to enable an effective communication infrastructure for collaborative care (possibly including humans and agents).
    * How to build a model of the features of individuals (customer/patient behaviour).
    * How to build comprehensive customer lifecycle management systems for customers, including telecommunication consumers, students and patients.
    * How to deploy lifecycle management systems in real world applications, such as healthcare, telecommunication, and smart campuses.
    * How to design markets that are adequate for agents to act with incomplete and uncertain information of the behaviour of collaborating agents.
    * How to build MAS that work efficiently in partially regulated markets (where governance policy or partnership agreements govern part of the market).
    * What are the implications of partial regulation on the management of contractual relationships and service delivery.
    * How organisational structures influence the negotiation of agents and the distribution/execution of tasks.
    * How to cope with collaborators that exhibit unreliable and non-conformant behaviour, e.g. where agreements are made but are not always conformed with.
    * How can interventions assist in managing contractual relationships and service delivery.
    * How can we make individuals encourage to perform activities to stay on-track and achieve desired outcomes (incentive frameworks).
    * How can we enable flexible, goal-driven and contextualised plan creation and business process management (including intelligent execution, monitoring, management, and optimization of business processes).
    * How to assign transaction costs to actions in planning, assignment, and execution in organisational structures.
    * How can transaction costs influence the social outcome of the system which is further influenced by the organisational context under which the collaboration takes place.
    * How to build an effective monitoring-recognition-intervention framework.
    * Can lessons learnt in game theoretic computation inform collaborative agent settings.
    * What role does learning and adaptivity play in building organisational MAS.
    * How to deal with partially regulated market (free markets are possibly an unrealistic paradigm as they don't really existent).