The organising committee of the 15th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems (PRIMA-2012) invites workshop proposals for the upcoming conference. The workshops will be held before the conference on 3rd or 4th of September, 2012 in Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia. PRIMA-2012 workshops are intended to facilitate active exchange, interaction and comparison of approaches, methods and various ideas that are relevant to specific topics in areas related to intelligent agent systems and multi-agent systems. The workshops will facilitate a forum for participants to showcase their research work and initiate open discussions for topics and issues of the current interest. Proposals promoting exploration and discovery of new research areas and application fields of intelligent agent systems and multi-agent systems are also highly welcomed.

Springer has agreed in principle to publish a joint post-proceedings of PRIMA-2012 and PRICAI-2012 workshops as an LNAI volume (subject to verification later on the basis of the workshop CFPs).

[Important Dates]
Workshop proposal submission due: January 31, 2011 Notification to workshop proposers: February 15, 2012 Each workshop organiser sends out call for workshops papers: February 20th, 2012 Due date for full workshop papers submission: June 1st, 2012 Workshop paper acceptance notification: June 30th, 2012 Camera-ready papers due: July 15th, 2012.
Workshop date: September 3rd and 4th, 2012

[Workshop Organisation]
The workshop organisers will be responsible for forming the workshop programme committee, advertising the workshop, reviewing and selecting papers in a fair and transparent manner, both for the workshop and for a post-conference volume of combined workshop post-proceedings. The duration of workshops may be full-day or half-day. The workshop organisers should ensure the presence of authors of accepted papers. During the workshop, we expect the workshop organisers to actively engage with the audience and speakers to foster discussion and exchange of ideas by including mechanisms other than traditional paper presentations.

[Workshop Topics]
We encourage workshop proposals of interesting and promising new initiatives, research and application challenges in intelligent agent systems and multi-agent systems. The workshops should provide a vibrant forum for researchers and industry practitioners to share their research results and practical development experiences.

Suggested workshop topics include, but are not limited to:

Agent-based system development:
Agent programming and communication languages Agent development environments Agent-oriented software engineering Case studies on implemented systems

Agent communication:
Agent communication languages and protocols Agent commitments Network structures and analysis

Agent-based Simulation:
Emergent behaviour
Simulation-specific issues
Single and Multi-agent Learning
Computational architectures for learning and adaptation

Agent Reasoning:
Logics for Agents and Multi-Agents
Reasoning (single and multi-agent)
Planning (single and multi-agent)
Cognitive models
Ontological reasoning

Interface Agents:
Human Agent Interaction
Practices of Interface Agents
Interface Multi-Agents
Virtual Agents
Collaborative Interface Agents
Autonomous Interface Agents

Agent societies and social networks:
Artificial social systems
Trust and reputation
Social and organisational structure
Privacy, safety and security
Normative Multi-Agent Systems
Ethical and legal issues

Agent Theories, Models and Architectures:
BDI, and other models of agency
Modelling the dynamics of MAS
Formal verification of MAS

Agent Technologies for Service Computing:
Service composition with agent collaboration Service brokering and agency Personalised services with agent adaptation SLA definition and monitoring as agent goals

Agent Cooperation and Negotiation:
Cooperation, Coalition formation and Coordination Distributed problem solving Formal models for modelling other agents and self Argumentation, Persuasion, Negotiation and Bargaining

Agent Systems:
Software agents
Mobile agents
Agent-Based Assistants
Agent-Based Virtual Enterprise
Embodied Agents and their Applications
Socially Situated Planning Software and Pervasive Agents

Real-world Robotics:
Coordination in multi-robot systems
Modelling and analysis of multi-robot systems Tools that are relevant for multi-robot studies Applications of multi-robots to real-world problems

WWW and Semantic Web Agents:
Web-based agents
Ontology agents
Semantic Web agents

Other Related Areas:
Collective intelligence
Service science
P2P, Grid computing
Financial markets and algorithmic trades Ubiquitous computing, ambient intelligence Knowledge and Data Intensive Systems Perceptive Animated Interfaces Tools and Standards Ubiquitous Software Services Virtual Humans Workshop Proposal Submission

Workshop proposals should include the following elements:
* Title of the workshop.
* The names, affiliations, mailing addresses and e-mail addresses of the proposed workshop chairs.
* A description of the topic of the workshop and its relevance to the conference (not exceeding 300 words)
* Duration of the workshop (full-day or half-day).
* A list of proposed programme committee members for the workshop.
* A list of related workshops held in the last three years, and their relation to the proposed workshop
* An outline of the process to be followed for reviewing and selecting papers.
* A description of the experience of the proposed chairs with respect to organising a workshop.
* A brief description of how the workshop will be advertised.
* Any specific requirements other than a room and data projector

After the acceptance of a workshop proposal, the organiser(s) should:
* Create a Call for papers/participation for the workshop
* Create a Web page for the workshop, the link of which will be published on the Conference Web site
* Create a Board of Reviewers (Program Committee)
* Review and select papers
* Schedule the workshop activities

All submitted papers will be reviewed on the basis of technical quality, relevance, significance, originality, and clarity.

The above described workshop proposals must be submitted via e-mail to both [email protected] and [email protected]-u.ac.jp by December 15th, 2011.

We look forward to your support in making PRIMA-2012 workshops an exciting event.

[PRIMA-2012 Workshop Chairs]
Sherief Abdallah
British University in Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Email: [email protected]

Hiromitsu Hattori
Kyoto University, Japan
Email: [email protected]-u.ac.jp