Workshop on

Trust in Agent Societies

(12th edition)

To be held at Eighth International Conference on

Autonomous Agents & Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 2009)

Europa Congress Center - Budapest, Hungary

May 11 2009

Call for participation/papers

Trust (along with related concepts such as privacy, reputation, security) has become a major research topic in computer science. The multiagent community potentially has a lot to offer, but several conceptual and technical problems must be addressed before it can make practical contributions. Although there is increasing interest in this area within the AAMAS community, this area will need continued support as an affiliated workshop so that the AAMAS community maintains a venue for research into trust, reputation, and related topics.

NEWS

2/5/2009 Workshop date: May 11th 2009

1/8/2009 Web System for the submission of papers

1/8/2009 Final Call for Papers

DESCRIPTION OF THE WORKSHOP

The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers who can contribute to a better understanding of trust and reputation in agent societies. Most agent models assume trustworthy communication to exist between agents. However, this ideal situation is seldom met in reality. In the human societies, many techniques (e.g. contracts, signatures, long-term personal relationships, reputation) have been evolved over time to detect and prevent deception and fraud in communication, exchanges and relations, and hence to assure trust between agents. Artificial societies will need analogous techniques.

Trust is more than secure communication, e.g., via public key cryptography techniques. For example, the reliability of information about the status of your trade partner has little to do with secure communication. With the growing impact of electronic societies, trust and privacy become more and more important.

Trust is important in applications such as human-computer interaction to model the relationship between users and their personal assistants. Different kinds of trust are needed: trust in the environment and in the infrastructure (the socio-technical system) including trust in your personal agent and in other mediating agents; trust in the potential partners; trust in the warrantors and authorities (if any). Another growing trend is the use of reputation mechanisms, and in particular the interesting link between trust and reputation. Many computational and theoretical models and approaches to reputation have been developed in the last few years.

Trust appears to be foundational for the notion of "agency" and for its defining relation of acting "on behalf of". It is also critical for modeling and supporting groups and teams, organizations, co-ordination, negotiation, with the related trade-off between individual utility and collective interest; or in modeling distributed knowledge and its circulation. In several cases the electronic medium seems to weaken the usual bonds in social control: and the disposition to cheat grows stronger. In experiments of cooperation supported by computers it has been found that people are more leaning to defeat than in face-to-face interaction, and a preliminary direct acquaintance reduces this effect. So, computer technology can even break trust relationships already held in human organizations and relations, and favor additional problems of deception and trust.

We encourage an interdisciplinary focus of the workshop - although focused on virtual environments and artificial agents - as well as presentations of a wide range of models of deception, fraud, reputation and trust building.

Just to mention some examples: AI models, BDI models, cognitive models, game theory, and organizational science theories. Suggested topics include, but are not restricted to, the following. Here "mechanisms" include considerations of architecture, design, and protocols.

1. • Models of trust and of its functions
   

2. • Models of deception and fraud; approaches for detection and prevention
   

3. • Models and mechanisms of reputation
   

4. • Role of control and guaranties mechanisms
   

5. • Models and mechanisms for privacy and access control
   

6. • Theoretical aspects, e.g., autonomy, delegation, ownership
   

7. • Integration of conventional and agent-based mechanisms
   

8. • Policies, interoperability, protocols, ontologies, and standards
   

9. • Scalability and distribution across multiple domains or within the global domain
   

10. • Test-beds and frameworks for computational trust and reputation models
    

11. • Legal aspects
    

12. • Application studies (e.g., e-commerce, e-health, e-government)
    

SUBMISSION: CRITERIA, FORMATS, and PROCEDURE

The workshop welcomes submissions of original, high-quality works addressing issues that are clearly relevant to trust, deception, fraud, and reputation, in agent-based systems, from a theoretical or an applied perspective. Papers will be peer-reviewed by at least two referees from a group of reviewers selected by the workshop organizers with the help of the program committee. Submitted contributions should be original and not submitted elsewhere. As in the past years, we expect to publish a post-proceedings with Springer.

Authors can submit papers (maximum length 12 pages) in PDF format through the EasyChair system (http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=trust09).

Camera-ready papers must follow the LNCS formatting instructions. Please download the appropriate instructions and templates from Springer.

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission: February, 15

Notification: March, 1

Camera Ready Copy: March, 15

Workshop Date: May, 11

WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS

Rino Falcone - ISTC-CNR - Italy, rino.falcone@istc.cnr.it (contact person);

Suzanne Barber - The University of Texas - USA;

Jordi Sabater-Mir - IIIA-CSIC - Spain;

Munindar Singh - North Carolina State University – USA

WORKSHOP ORGANIZER TO CONTACT:

Rino Falcone - rino.falcone@istc.cnr.it

tel. +39 06 44595253 - fax +39 06 44595243

ISTC-CNR Institute of Cognitive Science and Technology, 

Via San Martino della Battaglia, 44

00185 Roma – ITALY.

PREVIOUSLY ORGANIZED RELATED WORKSHOPS

Previous workshops on “Deception, Fraud and Trust” at AGENTS'98, AGENTS'99, AGENTS'00 and AGENTS '01, AAMAS'02, AAMAS'03, AAMAS'04, AAMAS'05, AAMAS'06, AAMAS’07 and AAMAS’08 were successful in terms of number of participants as well as inspiring discussions. The one at AAMAS'02 incorporated a special track on “privacy”; the one at AAMAS’07 incorporated a special track on “Trust Testbed Competition”; the one at AAMAS’08 incorporated two special tracks on “Formal Models of Trust” and “Reputation Models”.

The results of the previous workshops are:

- Two special issues of Applied Artificial Intelligence (V 14, N 8 and 9, 2000 October);

1. - A Kluwer Academic Publishers book: "Trust and Deception in Virtual Societies" (2001);
   

2. - A Springer special issue in LNCS/LNAI State-of-the-Art Survey: "Trust in Cyber-societies: Integrating the Human and Artificial Perspectives" (2001)
   

3. - A Springer special issue in LNCS/LNAI State-of-the-Art Survey: "Trust, Reputation, and Security: Theories and Practice " (2003).
   

4. - A Springer special issue in LNCS/LNAI State-of-the-Art Survey: "Trusting Agents for Trusting Electronic Societies" (2005).
   

5. - A Springer special issue in LNCS/LNAI State-of-the-Art Survey: "Trust in Agent Societies" (in press).
   

A PRELIMINARY WORKSHOP AGENDA

Full-day workshop; two sessions of contributed papers organized according to concepts, mechanisms, and applications; possible invited speech by a very reputed scholar on Trust (socio-philosophical-economical approach); a final panel for discussing the new challenges in the field.

Each presentation will be given enough time for discussion.  Each session will be introduced by a brief relation (by one of the organizers) presenting the state of the art with respect the topic (concepts, mechanisms, and applications) and concluded from a general discussion on the critical points and possible advances (even on the basis of the contributions).

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Suzanne Barber - Computer Science, The University of Texas, USA

Cristiano Castelfranchi - Cognitive Science, ISTC  National Research Council, Italy

Robert Demolombe - Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse, IRIT,  France

Torsten Eymann - Department of Information Systems, University of Bayreuth

Rino Falcone - Cognitive Science, ISTC  National Research Council  Italy

Wander Jager - Economics, University of Groeningen, The Netherlands

Andrew Jones - Department of Computer Science, King's College London, U.K.

Catholijn Jonker - Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Churn-Jung Liau – Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica, Taiwan

Stephane Lo Presti - Computer Science, University of Southampton, U.K.

Brendan Neville - Imperial College, London, U.K.

Mario Paolucci - Cognitive Science, ISTC  National Research Council, Italy

Jordi Sabater-Mir - Computer Science, IIIA-CSIC, Spain

Sandip Sen - Computer Science, University of Tulsa, USA

Onn Shehory - IBM Haifa Research Lab, Israel

Munindar Singh - Computer Science - North Carolina State University, USA

Chris Snijders - Sociology, Utrecht University,The Netherlands

Leon Van der Torre - Faculty of Sciences, Technology and Communication, University of Luxembourg

Last updated on 10 Feb 2009