The Second International Workshop On
Collaboration Agents: Autonomous Agents for Collaborative Environments

  September 20, 2004 - Beijing, China 
http://www.cs.unb.ca/~ghorbani/cola/2004

                        Workshop Program                        Online Proceedings

Autonomous agents have long been recognised as particularly promising tools for mundane tasks such as information seeking and distribution. Many researchers have recognised the power of multiple agents collaborating to achieve these and other tasks. However, in only a few cases, have agents been utilised to bring people together (or at least schedule them), and recent developments are producing architectures of agents that can go further, facilitating interactions as humans might. We believe that it is in the bringing together of people that agents can finally realise their potential. 

This workshop is intended to bring to the fore the state of the art of research and development of agents that bring people together, through, for example, scheduling, monitoring, or facilitating meetings, distributing information and building societies, and maintaining links between people whenever they can. The workshop will not focus on, for example, the development of interface of search agents - forums exist to bring this 
research to the fore. Our interest is in the building of a community of researchers in the area to allow the growth of a highly exciting field, one in which agents help people come together. 

Topics of interest

• collaborative and competitive behaviour of multiple agents 
• Conflicts, conflict resolution and negotiation 
• Developed, developing, or planned architectures 
• Knowledge management and collaboration agents
• Lessons learned from implemented systems
• Privacy and security in collaboration agents 
• Trust and reputation in collaborative environments
• Technical and philosophical issues in the design of collaboration agents

Workshop format

The workshop will consist of some short introductory remarks by the organizers and then mostly of presentations of submitted works, followed by an open discussion session, where the state of the field, current problems and new directions will be examined. Recommendations concerning relevant emerging agent technologies will be considered.

Participation in this workshop is by invitation only and invitees must be registered 
for the 2004 WI/IAI conferences. Also, attendance is limited, therefore, in case that 
a selection becomes necessary, we ask researchers that just want to attend the workshop 
without contributing a paper to send a short email to ghorbani@unb.ca expressing 
their particular interest in the workshop.

Submitted papers should be formatted in the style of IEEE-Computer Society 
Format: http://www.computer.org/cspress/instruct.htm
The page limit for the final version is 12 pages. We only accept electronic 
submissions. Please send your manuscripts (PDF format only) to ghorbani@unb.ca.

Workshop organizers and PC members can submit papers subject to the following extra conditions:

• Papers will be submitted blind, i.e. given a double-blind review.

• None of the reviewers of those papers will be organizers of the workshop.

• Any decisions regarding those papers will be in camera, not including the author.

Important dates

• July 16, 2004 Deadline for submission of papers 
• July 30, 2004 Notification of acceptance
• August 9, 2004 Final copy due
• September 20, 2004 Workshop 

• Ali Ghorbani
  Professor
  Faculty of Computer Science
  University of New Brunswick 
  Fredericton, NB, Canada 
  Email: ghorbani@unb.ca

• Stephen Marsh
  National Research Council
  Ottawa, Canada
  Email: steve.marsh@nrc.gc.ca 

• Harold Boley (National research Council, Canada)
• Brahim Chaib-draa (Laval University, Canada)
• Brian Corrie (NewMIC, Vancouver, Canada)
• Ralph Deters (U. of Saskatchewan, Canada)
• Hamada H. Ghenniwa (University of Western Ontario, Canada)
• Henry Hexmoor (University of Arkansas, USA)
• Peter Kropf (Neuchatel U., Switzerland)
• Zakaria Maamar (Zayed University, UAE)
• Wathiq Mansoor (Zayed University, UAE)
• Andrew Patrick (National research Council, Canada)
• Weiming Shen (National research Council, Canada)
• Bruce Spencer (National research Council, Canada)
• Said Tabet (The Macgregor Group, USA)
• Mihaela Ulieru (U. of Calgary, Canada)
• Julita Vassileva (U. of Saskatchewan, Canada)
• Harko Verhagen (Stockholm University, Sweden)

• To be decided