ACM Symposium on Applied Computing. March 8 - 12, 2009. Honolulu, Hawaii.

Call for papers

We are pleased to solicit original, unpublished and novel papers for publication and presentation in the 2009 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC) Track on Agreement Technologies (http://www.iiia.csic.es/~jar/sacat09). Articles describing novel ideas and applications in all areas of agreement technologies are of interest.
The 2009 ACM SAC Track on Agreement Technologies will be held at Honolulu, USA from March 8-12, 2009.

The ACM Symposium on Applied Computing is recognized as a primary forum for applied computer scientists and application developers from around the world to interact and present their work. SAC 2009 is sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Applied Computing (SIGAPP) and is presented in cooperation with other ACM Special Interest Groups. For more information on ACM SAC 2009, please visit http://www.acm.org/conferences/sac/sac2009/.

Aims and scope

Nowadays, most transactions and interactions for both business and leisure applications are mediated by computers and computer networks.
 From email to virtual worlds, the way people work and enjoy their free time has changed dramatically in less than a generation. This change has led IT research and development to focus on aspects such as new Human-Computer Interfaces or enhanced routing and network management tools. However, the greater impact of this pervasive use has been on the way that applications are conceived and developed. These applications require components to which more and more complex tasks can be delegated, components that show increasing levels of intelligence, components that are capable of sophisticated modes of interacting with one another and with human users, as increasingly they are massively distributed, sometimes embedded in all sort of appliances and sensors.

There is therefore a need for the development of models, frameworks, methods and algorithms for constructing large-scale open distributed computer systems where autonomy, interaction and mobility are the key characteristics. We envision that such technologies can be structured around the concept of agreement among computational agents. The notion of agreement as the glue that puts together computational agents in an open system is based on three fundamental concepts:

• (1) a normative context, that determines “the rules of the game”, i.e. how the interactions between agents are intended to take place,
  
• (2) the establishment of an agreement for action between the agents that respects the normative context, and
  
• (3) the fulfilment of any agreements reached by the participants.

Under the umbrella of agreement technologies we consider the techniques and tools that enable software components to reach and fulfil agreements on the mutual provision of services. For agreement technologies to succeed in building next generation open distributed systems there are many, diverse challenges: the semantic alignments between the different ontologies employed by agents; the need for negotiation, argumentation, coordination and social choice models to allow agents to reach agreements with one another; the development of trust and reputation models that deal with agents failing to honour their commitments even when agreements are signed; formal models and tools for virtual organisations and institutions defining normative contexts (the rules of the game), within which to reach agreements; the need for learning models to adapt the rules of the game within which to reach agreements; the adaptability of agents to cope with different normative contexts within which to reach agreements that may even change over time and a better understanding of agreement mechanisms by means of game and decision theoretic results.

Topics covered include but are not limited to:

• Negotiation
• Argumentation
• Computational social choice
• Decision and game theoretic foundations for agreement
• Multi-agent resource allocation
• Trust and reputation
• Coordination and distributed decision making
• Semantics of agreement (e.g. ontology representation, ontology alignment)
• Models and tools for virtual organisations and institutions
• Adaptability of virtual organisations and institutions
• Middleware for virtual organisations and institutions
• Normative contexts for virtual organisations and institutions
• Applications of agreement technologies (e.g. web service composition, contract automation, supply chain automation, sensor networks, etc.)

Paper submission

Original papers from the above-mentioned or other related areas will be considered. All papers should represent original and previously unpublished work that are currently not under review in any conference or journal. Both basic and applied research papers are welcome. Each submitted paper will be fully refereed and undergo a blind review process by at least three referees. The accepted papers in all categories will be published in the ACM SAC 2009 proceedings.

Submit your paper electronically in either PDF or postscript format. The author(s) name(s) and address(es) must not appear in the body of the
paper, and self reference should be in the third person. This is to facilitate blind review. The body of the paper should not exceed 4,000
words.
Submission is entirely automated by an eCMS paper management tool, which is available from the main SAC Web Site:
http://sac.cs.iupui.edu/SAC2009. Authors must first register their own account by obtaining a password, and then follow the instructions.

Authors will use this system for formal paper submission and other correspondence. The camera-ready version of the accepted paper should be prepared using the ACM format available at http://www.acm.org/conferences/sac/sac2009/downloads09.htm . Accepted full papers should not exceed 5 pages in a double column format (with the option, at additional expense of 80USD per extra page, to add three more pages). Accepted poster papers will be published as extended 2-page abstracts in the symposium proceedings. Authors of accepted papers must be prepared to sign a copyright statement and must pay the registration fee and guarantee that their paper will be presented at the conference. To submit a paper, author need to strictly follow guidelines at http://www.acm.org/conferences/sac/sac2009/. We strongly suggest to use
the available camera ready templates, and adhere to the 5 page limitation.

After completing the submission, please send also an email to: sacat09@iiia.csic.es. The body of the email should include the title of the paper, the author(s) name(s) and affiliation(s), and the address (including e-mail, telephone, and fax) to which correspondence should be sent. The subject of the email should be "SAC2009 AT track submission".Registration is required for paper and poster inclusion in the Conference Proceedings, and for event attendance.

Publication

Papers accepted for the Special Track on Agreement Technologies will be published by ACM both in the SAC 2009 proceedings and in the Digital
Library.

Important dates

• Aug 16, 2008: Paper Submissions Due
• Oct 11, 2008: Notification of paper acceptance/rejection
• Oct 25, 2008: Camera-ready copies of accepted papers
• March 8 - 12, 2009: Special Track on Agreement Technologies.

Please notice that the submission deadline is STRICT. By no means we shall grant any extension.

Organizers

• Jesús Cerquides – University of Barcelona, Spain
• Peter McBurney – University of Liverpool, UK
• Pablo Noriega – IIIA-CSIC, Spain
• Juan A. Rodriguez-Aguilar, IIIA-CSIC, Spain

Program committee

• Josep Ll. Arcos, IIIA-CSIC
• Alexander Artikis, National Centre for Scientific Research “Demokritos”, Greece
• Vicent Botti, Polytechnical University of Valencia, Spain
• Carlos Chesñevar, Universidad Nacional del Sur, Argentina
• Mehdi Dastani, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
• John Debenham, University of Sydney, Australia
• Ulle Endriss, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• Marc Esteva, IIIA-CSIC, Spain
• Alessandro Farinelli, University of Southampton, UK
• Shaheen Fatima, Loughborough University, UK
• Andrea Giovannucci, University Pompeu Fabra, Spain
• Lluís Godo, IIIA-CSIC, Spain
• Hiromitsu Hattori, Kyoto University, Japan
• Takayuki Ito, Nagoya Institute of Technology, Japan
• Maite López-Sánchez, University of Barcelona, Spain
• Mike Luck, King’s College, UK
• Sascha Ossowski, University Rey Juan Carlos, Spain
• Andrea Omicini, University of Bologna, Italy
• Simon Parsons, City University of New York, USA
• Henry Prakken, Utrecht University & University of Groningen, The Netherlands
• Iyad Rahwan, British University of Dubai, Dubai
• Sarvapali Ramchurn, University of Southampton, UK
• Alessandro Ricci, University of Bologna, Italy
• Marco Schoerlemmer, IIIA-CSIC, Spain
• Sandip Sen, University of Tulsa, USA
• Onn Shehory, IBM, Israel
• Carles Sierra, IIIA-CSIC, Spain
• Simeon Simoff, University of Western Sydney, Australia
• Elizabeth Sklar, City University of New York, USA
• Wamberto Vasconcelos, University of Aberdeen, UK
• Danny Weyns, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium

Information

For further information please contact: sacat09@iiia.csic.es