Computational Accountability and Responsibility in Multiagent Systems

Individual and organizational actions have social consequences that call for the implementation of recommendations of good conduct at multiple levels of granularity. For firms, business ethics is the essence of a healthy society (OECD reports) and, indeed, a growing number of companies issue voluntary codes of conduct to commit to values like legal compliance, accountability, privacy, and trust. Government agencies, on the other side, identify transparency as a key value that promotes accountability, public participation, collaboration, and effectiveness. United Nations continuously stress ``the need for a robust, yet flexible, accountability framework to assess progress and achieve results, as well as ensure that all actors honour their commitments'' (General Assembly President John Ashe, 2014).

The CARe-MAS Workshop aims at providing a discussion forum for researchers and practitioners who are investigating issues related to computational accountability and responsibility in multi-agent systems. In other words, CARe-MAS concerns the use of Artificial Intelligence techniques and approaches --with particular care to multiagent systems-- to help supporting the realization of accountability frameworks which, in turn, help organizations to respect their commitments, help individuals in organizing their work, help managers in taking decisions, improve infrastructure and procedures, and so forth. The development of such specialized management systems introduces challenges and requirements for handling ethical issues, e.g. serving the requirements of transparency, accountability, and privacy preservation. We believe that such challenges can be faced with the support of intelligent systems, with plenty of potential applications in fields like finance and business transactions, fair business practices, resource management, consumer protection, economic systems, corruption, sales and marketing, health care, public administration, smart cities, and decision support.

The workshop will be held in October in conjunction with PRIMA 2017, in Nice, France.