COINE 2024 : International Workshop on Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, Norms and Ethics for Governance of Multi-Agent Systems

About COINE

The pervasiveness of “open systems” raises a range of challenges and opportunities for developing technologies in the area of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems (MAS). In open MAS, artificial and human autonomous agents, their modes of interaction and the pursued goal of the system may change over time. Additionally, the agents’ autonomy, which can be influenced and amplified by coordination techniques, can work against the system’s effectiveness. The success of these systems relies on effective governance to maintain an equilibrium between the agents’ (artificial and human) autonomy and the predictability of the system. Hence, there is a need for methods, techniques, mechanisms and tools that can balance the equilibrium between these two forces to make the system mode effective in attaining its purposeful goals.

Coordination, organizations, institutions, norms and ethics are five key governance elements for the regulation of open MAS. The goal of the 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/policy-aware and ethical agents.

We seek to attract papers that address:

mathematical, logical, computational, philosophical, legal, and pragmatic issues related to the challenges identified above;
modeling, animation and simulation techniques for governance of open MAS;
tools, prototypes and actual working open MAS involving COINE technologies;
experimental investigation of the effectiveness of COINE technologies;
challenging or innovative ideas relevant to the field.

The COINE workshop (see COIN Series Website)is an evolution of the COIN (Coordination, Organizations, Institutions and Norms in Agent Systems) workshop series that ran at various conferences and produced 16 volumes of post-proceedings in Springer’s Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (see COIN Series Proceedings).

Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, Norms and Ethics is one of the 11 areas of interest for AAMAS. This workshop complements the AAMAS main program by allowing a more relaxed and focused discussion of MAS from a social perspective. Previous editions of COINE have proven to foster collaboration among researchers in the relevant topics.
Target Audience

Continuing its 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.
Submission Guidelines

The instructions for authors is available at the Springer LNCS web page.

We admit three types of papers formatted according to the Springer LNCS style:

Full research papers (16 pages)
Short research papers (10 pages) : ‘Early-innovation’ papers are work-in-progress papers and these will be reviewed with an emphasis on novelty/originality of the idea.
Blue sky ideas (up to 16 pages) : These papers have the same scope of the blue sky ideas track of AAMAS 2024 focused on COINE topics (see AAMAS 2024 Blue Skye ideas).

The page lengths include figures and references. All papers must be written in English and submitted in PDF format. Information about the paper type should be included at the end of the title of the paper – (Full), (Short) or (Blue Sky ideas).

Papers must be electronically submitted before the submission deadline through the workshop conference system available at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=coineaamas2024.

All contributions will be single-blind peer-reviewed by at least two independent PC members. The evaluation criteria of contributions will be based on originality, quality, clarity, and its relevance to the workshop.

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. Authors of accepted papers will be allowed to present their work online or in-person conditional to they register to the workshop. Presentations will be delivered in the New Zealand Time Zone.
Proceedings

The workshop proceeding including the accepted papers will be available before the conference.

Similar to previous COINE workshops, COINE 2024 will publish post-proceedings in Springer’s LNCS series. Authors will be invited to submit a revised and extended version of their papers for consideration to be published in the post-proceedings.