International Workshop on
          Cooperation in Selfish Systems (CSS)
                    incorporating
          The First International Workshop on
                Tag Systems (TagWorld I)

                 University of Bologna,
            Residential Centre in Bertinoro
                    26-29 May 2006

           http://www.davidhales.com/css-tw1
Scope:

Open decentralised systems, including information systems,
cannot rely on their sub-components to behave in a cooperative
or altruistic way. The power and benefits of individual autonomy
can therefore be wiped-out by poor cooperation at the collective
level. This contradiction between individual and collective good
is well studied in many disciplines (e.g. biology, economics,
political science etc.) and domains. Hence there are a number
of theories, methods and techniques that have been advanced
to bridge the individual / collective interest divide - e.g.
classical game theory approaches, evolutionary game theory,
incentive systems and techniques from computational sociology.
In this workshop we wish to bring together people working on
novel models and theories in this area, particularly those
harnessing evolutionary approaches. We have a specific
interest in those methods with implications and applications
within distributed information systems.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

 * Reciprocity and Indirect Reciprocity
 * Cooperation without Reciprocity
 * Incentive systems
 * Reputation systems
 * The price of anarchy in selfish systems
 * Bio- and Soci-inspired models of cooperation
 * Ideal versus bounded rational approaches
 * Evolutionary Economics approaches
 * Open problems of cooperation maintenance in distributed
   information systems

In addition, we aim to focus on emerging tag-based methods
within a set of sessions that will constitute TagWorld I - the
first international workshop on tag systems. Tags, markers
that bias interactions in evolving systems, have been
demonstrated to produce highly cooperative and co-ordinated
emergent behaviours. Tags were introduced by John Holland in
the early 1990's and since then there has been a slow
accumulation of research literature applying tags in various
ways - both to understand human and biological systems and
to create artificial systems with desirable or interesting
properties. More recently, computer scientists have been
attempting to import these desirable properties into
self-organising information systems - be they agent, peer or
grid-based systems - using variations on Tags. We aim to
bring together researchers working with tags so they can
make contact and share ideas.

 * Tag-based models for cooperation
 * Tag theory and analysis
 * Tag-based models for symbiosis and specialisation
 * Tag-based applications in information systems

Participants:

This event aims to be a true workshop, bringing together
people in a supportive atmosphere to discuss new, possibly
speculative or controversial, ideas - rather than presenting
finished papers. We are particulalry interested in participants
describing open challenges of cooperation maintenance
within information systems and hopefully finding novel
techniques towards their solution. We encourage research
students to present work-in-progess or research ideas - there
are a limited number of student grants available (see website).

Important Dates:

Abstracts due: 5 March 2006
Notification of participation: 31 March 2006
Registration deadline: 5 May
Workshop: 26-29 May 2006

Organising Committee:
David Hales, Ozalp Babaoglu, University of Bologna

Workshop website: http://www.davidhales.com/css-tw1

All queries to David Hales: [log in to unmask]


-- 
Dr David Hales, www.davidhales.com
Dept. of Computer Science, University of Bologna, Italy