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Eleventh International Workshop

Trust in Agent Societies

to be held at:
Autonomous Agents & Multi-Agent Systems Conference (AAMAS 2008)
May 12 and 13 (One and Half Day), 2008.
Estoril, Portugal

Presentation

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 secure and reliable communication to exist between
agents. However, this ideal situation is seldom met in reality. In fact,
many techniques (e.g. contracts, signatures, long-term personnel
relationships, reputation) have been evolved over time to detect and prevent
deception and fraud in human 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 modelling distributed knowledge and its circulation. In
several cases the electronic medium seems to weaken the usual bonds in
social control: and the habit or disposition to cheat grow 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.

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Call for papers

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 ³mechanisms² include
considerations of architecture, design, and protocols.

*   Models of trust and of its functions;
*   Models of deception and fraud; approaches for detection and
prevention;
*   Models and mechanisms of reputation;
*   Role of control and guaranties mechanisms;
*   Models and mechanisms for privacy and access control;
*   Theoretical aspects, e.g., autonomy, delegation, ownership;
*   Integration of conventional and agent-based mechanisms;
*   Policies, interoperability, protocols, ontologies, and standards;
*   Scalability and distribution across multiple domains or within the
global domain;
*   Test-beds and frameworks for computational trust and reputation
models;
*   Legal aspects;
*   Application studies (e.g., e-commerce, e-health, e-government) of
the above.

This year, also given the maturity of the workshop, we will have a longer
(one and half day) event with the main workshop integrated with two internal
sessions:
- the first one about the "Formal models of Trust" (it will be hold in the
afternoon of the first day with the sponsorship of the French project
"ForTrust": http://www.irit.fr/ForTrust). In this section we will collect
works in the field of applied logic and applied mathematics who can
contribute to a better understanding of the formal principles governing
trust reasoning and collective trust dynamics;
- the second one about the "Reputation models" (it will be held in the
morning of the second day with the sponsorship of the eRep project:
http://megatron.iiia.csic.es/eRep/). In this section we will collect works
that specifically address a) models of Reputation systems, including
targeted simulation experiments and experiments with human participants, b)
theory-driven and empirically backed-up guidelines for designing reputation
technologies, c) analysis and discussion, possibly backed up by actual data,
of existing Reputation Systems.

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Important dates

Workshop submissions deadline: January 25, 2008
Workshop paper acceptance notifications: February 25, 2008
Camera ready copies: March 7, 2008

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Preparation and submission of papers

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, either from a theoretical or an applied perspective.

We will also have two specific sessions on the "Formal models of Trust" and
on the "Reputation models".
Who is interested to send a paper in these sessions has to label the paper
with: FOR FORMAL MODELS or FOR REPUTATION MODELS.

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 before, we expect to publish a post-proceedings with Springer.

Authors can submit an extended abstract (4-5 pages) or a long paper (12
pages). Papers (extended abstracts or long papers) must be sent to Rino
Falcone. The preferred mode of submission is as a URL to a PDF file; if that
is impossible, the submission can be sent as an email attachment. The
preferred layout is the two-column AAAI standard.

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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

We will have also two workshop track organizers:
- Andreas Herzig & Emiliano Lorini (for the Formal models of Trust)
- Mario Paolucci & Jordi Sabater-Mir (for the Reputation Models)

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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

Programme committee

Andrew Jones - Department of Computing, Imperial College London, UK
Suzanne Barber - Computer Science, The University of Texas - USA
Cristiano Castelfranchi - Cognitive Science, ISTC  National Research
Council - Italy
Rosaria Conte - Cognitive Science, ISTC  National Research Council - Italy
Kerstin Dautenhahn - Computer Science, The University of Hertfordshire, U.K.
Robert Demolombe - Computer Science, CERT/ONERA - France.
Torsten Eymann - Department of Information Systems, University of Bayreuth.
Rino Falcone - Cognitive Science, ISTC  National Research Council  Italy
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.
Jeremy Pitt - Computer Science, Imperial College London - UK
Jordi Sabater-Mir - Computer Science, IIIA-CSIC - Spain
Carles Sierra Computer Science, CSIC - Spanish Scientific Research Council
Munindar Singh -Computer Science- North Carolina State University - USA
Onn Shehory  -Computer Science, IBM Haifa Res. Labs - Israel
Chris Snijders - Sociology, Utrecht University - The Netherlands
Wander Jager - Economics, University of Groeningen, The Netherlands
Leon Van der Torre - Faculty of Sciences, Technology and Communication,
University of Luxembourg

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Official web site

Workshop page:
http://www.istc.cnr.it/T3/events/aamas/trust2008.html
AAMAS 2007:
http://gaips.inesc-id.pt/aamas2008/

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