First IJCAI Workshop on Social Simulation

First IJCAI Workshop on Social Simulation
July 12, 2009
Pasadena Conference Center

Colocated with the Twenty First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-09)

Aims and Scope

Agent-based Social Simulation is a recent multi-disciplinary effort that has increasingly established new challenges for the Artificial Intelligence and Multiagent Systems community, by bringing the agent technology to face complex phenomena such as the ones found in social sciences. At the same time, social scientists have been discovering how the computer and especially the advances in artificial intelligence and multi-agent systems can provide a new and exciting tool to tackle the problems of their field, providing a paradigm shift in social sciences. The exchange between researchers in both areas has proven mutually fruitful, as much inspiration in MAS has come from Social Sciences, and these have benefited from more rigorous and operational concepts as well as from principled methodologies with which to face experiments with heterogeneous artificial agents.

Social Simulation brings together the multi-agent simulation (MAS) and agent-based social simulation (ABSS) communities. The focus of MAS is on the solution of complex problems related to the construction, deployment and efficient operation of agent-based systems, while the focus of ABSS is on simulating and synthesizing social behaviors in order to understand real social systems (human, animal and even electronic) via the development and testing of new theories. Both these communities are now well-established and have many common issues, but there are few opportunities for crossover of ideas between the two communities.

General Topics

This workshop aims at presenting the most recent advances in multi-agent-based exploratory social simulation from a strong computer science and Artificial Intelligence stance. To promote a multi-disciplinary and cross-influential approach, this workshop will focus both on ideas coming from Artificial Intelligence as a new technology to provide insights into ABSS community and the ideas coming from social sciences as new metaphors to provide insights into MAS community.

The main themes of the workshop will include:

1. General issues (Agent and environment modeling; Standards for simulators including inter-operability; Self-organization, scalability, robustness in MABS; MABS applications; and Methodologies and techniques that link MAS and ABSS works);
2. MAS issues (Grid-computing for MABS; Visualization and analytic tools; Managing interactions in large-scale systems; Simulation languages and formalisms; and Complexity); and
3. ABSS issues (Formal and agent-based models of social behavior and social order; Social structures and norms; Cognitive modeling and social simulation; The emergence of cooperation and coordinated action; and Agent-based experimental economics).

Important Dates

• March 22, 2009: Submission of contributions
• April 17, 2009: Paper acceptance notification
• May 8, 2009: Final camera ready copy to workshop organizer
• July 12, 2009: IJCAI-09 Social Simulation Workshop