21st International Workshop on Trust in Agent Societies

Co-located with AAMAS 2019 (http://aamas2019.encs.concordia.ca/)

May 14, 2019, Montreal - Canada

Trust is important in many kinds of interactions, including direct or computer-mediated human interaction, human-computer interaction and among social agents; it characterizes those elements that are essential in social reliability. It also informs the selection of partners for successful multiagent coordination (for example, in robotics applications). Trust is more than communication that is robust against repudiation or interference. The reliability of information about the status of a trade partner, for example, is only partly dependent on secure communication.

With the growing prevalence of social interaction through electronic means, trust, reputation, privacy and identity become more and more important. Trust is not just a simple, monolithic concept; it is multi-faceted, operating at many levels of interaction, and playing many roles. Another growing trend is the use of reputation mechanisms, and in particular the interesting link between trust and reputation. Many computational and theoretical models and approaches to reputation have been developed in recent years (for ecommerce, social networks, blogs, etc.). Further, identity and associated trustworthiness must be ascertained for reliable interactions and transactions. Trust is foundational for the notion of agency and for its defining relation of acting "on behalf of". It is also critical for modeling and supporting groups and teams, for both organization and coordination, with the related trade-off between individual utility and collective interest. The electronic medium seems to weaken the usual bonds of social control and the disposition to cheat grows stronger: this is yet another context where trust modeling is critical.

The AAMAS 2019 TRUST workshop will have the theme: The Whole World is Watching. The development of multiagent trust and reputation systems has been a vibrant topic of research at AAMAS conferences each year. This year, the workshop will aim to introduce our field of study to researchers in related subfields and to industrial representatives who may be attending the conference in order to learn more about AI. There has been increasing interest worldwide in the use of AI within private and public sector organizations, and a common concern has been the trustworthiness of the systems being used.

As our current research is presented at this workshop, a new audience will learn about our field of study and what it entails. In addition to paper presentations, the workshop will include a guest speaker and a panel discussion on how trust modeling research has evolved over time. Topics of interest include the following (a non-exclusive list):


  • Trust and risk-aware decision making
  • Game-theoretic models of trust
  • Trust and security in the context of adversarial agents
  • Deception and fraud, and its detection and prevention
  • Intrusion resilience in trusted computing
  • Reputation mechanisms
  • Validating trust models
  • Trust within socio-technical systems and organizations
  • Socio-cognitive models of trust
  • Trust within service-oriented architectures
  • Human or agent trust in agent partners
  • Trust in multi-robotic systems
  • Trust within social networks
  • Trust and ethics for multiagent systems
  • Detecting and preventing collusion
  • Improving transparency in multiagent systems
  • Detecting and addressing mistrust of multiagent systems from human users
  • Real-world applications of multiagent trust modeling


We welcome submissions of high-quality research addressing issues that are clearly relevant to trust, deception, reputation, security and control, from theoretical, applied and interdisciplinary perspectives. Submitted contributions should be original and not submitted elsewhere. Papers accepted for presentation must be relevant to the workshop and to demonstrate clear exposition, offering new ideas is suitable depth and detail. Papers will be a maximum of 12 single-columned pages (Springer style). The proceedings of the workshop will be published through CEUR-WS.org. A selected best paper will be published as a part of a best-paper volume in Springer.


The workshop will feature paper presentations and a panel of multiagent trust modeling experts, to stimulate discussion about trends in the field. The Program page lists the current description of the panel.