[robocup-rescue-s] 2nd CFP: Safety and Security in Multiagent Systems (SASEMAS '05) at AAMAS-05

From: Amy Unruh (unruh@cs.mu.oz.au)
Date: Thu 24 Feb 2005 - 01:24:20 GMT


Call for Papers:
2ND INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON SAFETY AND SECURITY IN MULTIAGENT SYSTEMS
(SASEMAS '05)
<http://sasemas.org/2005>

To be held in conjunction with the Fourth International Joint
Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2005),
  Utrecht, The Netherlands.
  <http://www.aamas2005.nl/>
  July 25, 2005 or July 26, 2005.

Important dates:
   Paper Submission: March 14th, 2005
   Notifications: April 18th, 2005
   Workshop: July 25, 2005 or July 26, 2005

Sponsored by The Boeing Company

---------------------
Overview
---------------------
As intelligent autonomous agents and multi-agents systems applications
become more pervasive, it becomes increasingly more important to
understand the risks associated with using these systems. Incorrect or
inappropriate agent behaviour can have harmful effects, including
financial cost, loss of data, and injury to humans or systems.

Thus, security and safety are two central issues when developing and
deploying such systems. We refer to a multiagent system's security as
the ability of the system to deal with threats that are intentionally
caused by other intelligent agents and/or systems, and the system's
safety as its ability to deal with any other threats to its goals.

In complex and rich environments, such as multiagent system
environments, it is often necessary to involve the agents of the system
in achieving some of these design goals, by making the goals explicit
for the agent itself. For example, the agent must be aware of
user-specified safety conditions if it is going to avoid violating
them. This often means that an agent needs to be able to identify,
assess, and mitigate many of the risks it faces. This is particularly
true when the agent is going to be deployed in dangerous environments
without immediate user input; for example, command of a spacecraft
where communication with mission control involves considerable delays.

Moreover, agents often integrate such activities as deliberately
planning to achieve their goals, dynamically reacting to obstacles and
opportunities, communicating with other agents to share information and
coordinate actions, and learning from and/or adapting to their
environments. Because agents are often situated in dynamic
environments, these activities are often time-sensitive. These aspects
of agents make the process of developing, verifying, and validating
safe and secure multiagent systems more difficult than for conventional
software systems. Hence, new and different techniques and perspectives
are required to assist with the development and deployment of such
systems.

This workshop will serve as a forum to gather academics, researchers,
practitioners, and students from the fields of safety, security and
multiagent systems.

-----------------------------
Intended Participants
-----------------------------
The workshop will present new developments, lessons learned from real
world cases, and will provide a forum for the exchange of ideas and
discussion on areas related to safety and security of multiagent
systems. This workshop will be of interest to researchers and
developers of agent systems for a wide range of emerging applications.
The workshop will also be of interest to those that use agent
technology in safety and security critical applications, since these
are the people that must be convinced of the safety and the security of
these systems.

-----------------------------
Challenge Problems
-----------------------------
In order to make many of these issues more concrete, we are introducing
a separate competition that will be associated with this workshop.
This competition will consist of challenge problems for the design of
safe and secure intelligent autonomous agents and multi-agent systems.
This year there will be a track that focuses on safety issues and we
are attempting to create a separate track that focuses on security
issues. Both tracks will be extensions to the RoboCup Rescue
Simulation platform.

Additional details will be available at:
  <http://www.sasemas.org/2005/challenge.html>

-----------------------------
Best Paper Awards
-----------------------------
This year, we will be awarding two prizes, one for the best paper and
one for the best runner-up paper. The winner of the best paper award
will receive a prize of US$100, and the runner-up will receive a US$50
prize.

-----------------------------
Student Support
-----------------------------
There will be limited support available for students submitting papers.

-----------------------------
Publication
-----------------------------
Selected papers from last year's SASEMAS workshop will appear in a
post-proceedings volume published by Springer Verlag in the LNCS/LNAI
series. We also intend to have Springer-Verlag publish selected papers
from this year's workshop as a post-proceedings LNAI volume.

-----------------------------
Formatting guidelines
-----------------------------
We encourage submission in Springer Lecture Notes Series format. The
length of papers is recommended to be 12 to 15 pages long in this
format. (See the Springer LNCS home page:
http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html)

All non-presenting participants should submit a one-page position
statement which presents their perspective on safe agents. Position
papers from industry participants are especially encouraged.

All submissions must include the author's name(s), affiliation,
complete mailing address, phone number, fax number and email address.

-----------------------------
Submission procedure
-----------------------------
Paper Submission: March 14th, 2005
Notifications: April 18th, 2005

Submitted papers must be in PDF or postscript format.
We will require on-line submission of papers through the workshop's
site,
  <http://www.sasemas.org/2005>.
Automatic submission will be enabled on the site by the end of February.

Position statements from non-presenting workshop participants may be
mailed to: <workshop@sasemas.org>
The position papers may be in PDF, postscript, or text format.

Multiple submission policy for papers: Papers that are being submitted
to other AI conferences, whether verbatim or in essence must reflect
this fact on the title page. Papers that do not meet this requirement
are subject to rejection without review.

---------------------------
Proposed Topics
-----------------------------
This workshop will explore issues related to the development and
deployment of "safe and secure agents and multiagent systems".

Relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

- Definitions of safety and security for single agents or entire
systems.
What does it mean for an agent to be "safe", or to be "secure" and to
"behave appropriately"? How can answers to the above questions be
lifted to multiagent systems?

- Verification/validation of agent and multiagent systems.
How can agents, working in complex, open systems, be shown to be "safe"
or "secure"? Can a multiagent system, which is composed of "safe"
agents, be itself "unsafe"? Can the composition of "secure" agents lead
to an "insecure" system?

- Design, mechanisms and deployment.
What are the tradeoffs between safety/security, and performance? What
mechanisms can be used to ensure/improve the safety and/or security of
an agent and/or multiagent system; e.g. how can agents be designed for
robustness in a given environment?
Do old-style methodologies, formal specification, declarative
languages, and user-friendly interfaces have roles to play for
agent-building environments?

  - User requirements, agent behavior, and trust.
How can the user be made safe from agents performing "risky" actions?
How can trust and reputation mechanisms be supported? How
can a multiagent society be made safe from its member agents performing
"malicious" actions?

- Autonomy and Autonomous Reasoning.
How can agents reason about their own safety, e.g., determining the
types and degrees of dangers inherent in different courses of action?
How can adjustable autonomy be used to ensure agents behave reasonably?

- Learning/adaptive agents.
How can agents that are self-modifying be shown to be safe and to avoid
security related risks? In hostile environments, how can agents learn
what is safe and secure to do and what is not?

- Application areas.
Which application areas would benefit from agent technology but would
also be very sensitive to safety or security issues?

----------------------
Organizing Committee
----------------------

Program Chair: Haralambos Mouratidis
Email: <haris@uel.ac.uk>
School of Computing and Technology, University of East London
Longbridge Road, RM8 2AS, Dagenham, London, U.K.

General Chair: Mike Barley
Computer Science Department, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019
Auckland, New Zealand

Publication Chair: Fabio Massacci
Facoltá di Ingegneria, Universitá di Trento, Dipartimento Informatica e
Telecomunicazioni
Via Sommarive, 14 - 38050 POVO (Trento) - Italy

Publicity Chair: Amy Unruh
Dept. of Computer Science and Software Engineering, The University of
Melbourne
Victoria 3010, Australia

Technical Chair: Nathan Schurr
Computer Science Department
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, CA 90089

Contact email: <info@sasemas.org>

-------------------
Program Committee
-------------------

Eduardo Alonso (City University of London - UK)
James Bailey (University of Melbourne - Australia)
Steve Chien (JPL-USA)
Subrata Das (Charles River Analytics - USA)
Paolo Giorgini (University of Trento - Italy)
Henry Hexmoor (University of Arkansas - USA)
Jan Jurjens (TUM - Germany)
Tom Karygiannis (NIST - USA)
Ed Kazmierczak (University of Melbourne - Australia)
Igor Kotenko (SPIIRAS, Russia)
Vic Lesser (University of Massachussets - USA)
Antonio Mana (University of Malaga - Spain)
Gordon Manson (University of Sheffield - UK)
Fabio Martinelli (CNR/IIT - IT)
Eduardo Fernandez Medina Paton (Universidad de Castilla - La
Mancha-Spain)
David Musliner (Honeywell - USA)
Marian Nodine ( Telcordia - USA)
Lin Padgham (RMIT - Australia)
Stefan Poslad (Queen Mary University of London - UK)
Anita Raja (University of North Carolina - USA)
Marco Roveri (IRST-Italy)
Nora Erika Sanchez (ITESM-Mexico)
Paul Scerri (CMU - USA)
Diana Spears (University of Wyoming - USA)
Michael Weiss (University of Toronto - Canada)
Eric Yu (University of Toronto - Canada)
Wei Zhang (Boeing - USA)

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