Modelling Artificial Societies and Hybrid Organizations

September 15-18, 2003, Hamburg, Germany

Workshop at KI2003

the 26th German Conference on Artificial Intelligence

Hamburg, September 15-18, 2003

Actual Programme under KI2003Workshops/Workshop 8

Meanwhile, we follow a little tradition with our Fourth International MASHO workshop. This year we want to give it a special focus to Semantic Web and Web Intelligence beyond our classical MASHO-themes. Starting with thefirst MASHO at the ECAI 2000 three years ago and MASHO'01 two years ago at the KI2001 we continued with the Third International Workshop MASHO'02 during the main conference of the KI2002. The number of participants in recent MASHO's showed the growing interest in the mentioned field by researchers from Europe and world-wide. Multi Agent researchers have realized how crucial social modelling and the study of social phenomena are within their field. Due to the great interest in the previous MASHO workshops it is planned as a full-day event.

Workshop Topics

In developing agents and multi-agent systems, computer scientists typically bring their work to bear on theories and methods from social sciences. Examples include computational and agent-based approaches to the study of negotiation, social interaction, contracts, agreement, organisation, cohesion, social order, and collaboration. This has played an infuential role in the development of the interdisciplinary area "Socionics". Moreover, the influence of the web as "test-bed" for agent applications brought out a number of new research questions. So the Semantic Web provides an infrastructure that allows information accessible by the existing Web to be defined in ways that give it meaning to both humans and computer applications. The integration of the Semantic Web, intelligent agents, Web services, and wireless technologies presents an unprecedented environment for assisting users of the web. In the last few years researchers in such areas as Artificial Intelligence, Sociology, Organisation Theory, Social Networks, Semantic Web, Evolution Theory and Self-Organizing Principles have increasingly shown interest in the following research problems:

What are the similarities between human and artificial societies?
How can we represent and reason about artificial communites composed of individual computational agents?
What are the main difficulties in designing hybrid societies composed of both human and artificial agents?
What are the effects of the meeting of natural and web-intelligence?
How can human semantics be depict by semantic webs?
What are the effects of the increasing involvement of artificial societies in social life?
Where are the major problems that need to be addressed when it comes to dealing with artificial worlds?
How can human societies benefit from the Semantic Web? Studies showing explicit examples of human societies supported by the Semantic Web in ways impossible without the Semantic Web are especially welcome
In what ways do social systems influence the development of the Semantic Web?

The workshop aims at exchanging and intergrating ideas from different aspects of agent-oriented approaches in connection with such topics as organisational knowledge, semantics, structure and behaviour.

Of particular interest is recent work in any of the following areas:

modelling of artificial and hybrid organizations
agent and organisational behaviour
commitment, responsibility and obligations in artificial and hybrid organisations
semantics of the dynamics of organisational models
semantic web
agent specifications in artificial and hybrid societies
organisational roles and structures
adaptive learning and models of organisational cognition
web intelligence
simulation of artificial and hybrid organisations
self-organizing systems and emergent organisations

Because of the intersdisciplinary character of the covered content scientists from different fields are encouraged to participate. This gives the hope of interesting and fruitful discussions in the workshop.

Submission Process

For the MASHO workshop innovative and recent papers written in English are welcome for submission. The papers will be reviewed by at least two programme committee members. Selection criteria will focus on relevance to the special topic, originality with respect to the state of the art, and potential for discussion.

Depending on the quality of the workshop contributions it is planned to publish the proceedings of the workshop as a Special Issue of a respective DAI Journal.

Submissions should be electronic in postscript format to lindeman@informatik.hu-berlin.de with subject MASHO-02. Please, don't number the pages. Submitted papers must not exceed 10 pages and must conform to the Springer lncs-style, see www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html.

Important Dates

16 June 2003	Deadline for submission
28 July 2003	Notification to authors
15 August 2003	Deadline for final versions
September 2003	MASHO Workshop in Hamburg

Programme Committee

       Cristiano Castelfranchi, University of Siena, Italy
       Rosaria Conte, National Research Council & University of Siena, Italy
       Frank van Harmelen, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
       Thomas Malsch, TU Hamburg-Harburg, Germany
       Ivica Mitrovic, University of Split, Croatia
       Daniel Moldt, University Hamburg, Germany
       Sascha Ossowski,Rey Juan Carlos University, Spain
       Pietro Panzarasa, Queen Mary University London, United Kingdom
       Michael Schillo, Deutsches Forschungszentrum Künstliche Intelligenz, Saarbrücken, Germany
       Ingo Schulz-Schaeffer, TU Berlin, Germany
       York Sure, University Karlsruhe, Germany
       Ingo Timm, TU Ilmenau, Germany

Organizing Committee

Gabriela Lindemann // Primary Contact//
Humboldt University Berlin
Department of Computer Science
Rudower Chaussee 25
D-10099 Berlin, Germany
Tel: + 49 +30 2093 3170
Fax: + 49 +30 2093 3168

Catholijn M. Jonker
Department of Artificial Intelligence
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
De Boelelaan 1081a, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Tel: +31.20.4447743 or 7700
Fax: +31.20.4447653