From hulthage@morue.usc.edu Mon Oct 11 18:56:51 EDT 1993 Article: 4886 of news.announce.conferences Xref: crabapple.srv.cs.cmu.edu news.announce.conferences:4886 Newsgroups: news.announce.conferences Path: crabapple.srv.cs.cmu.edu!honeydew.srv.cs.cmu.edu!bb3.andrew.cmu.edu!news.sei.cmu.edu!cis.ohio-state.edu!magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!uunet!sparky!rick From: hulthage@morue.usc.edu (Ingemar Hulthage) Subject: CFP: AAAI-94 Spring Symposium on COMPUTATIONAL ORGANIZATION DESIGN Message-ID: <1993Oct8.013855.18749@sparky.sterling.com> Sender: rick@sparky.sterling.com (Richard Ohnemus) Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA Date: Fri, 8 Oct 1993 01:38:55 GMT Approved: rick@sparky.sterling.com Expires: Sat, 16 Oct 1993 08:00:00 GMT Lines: 131 X-Md4-Signature: 69f7d186d63b99f62bf5cb7f88af398e _______________________________________________________________________________ R E M I N D E R October 15 submission deadline R E M I N D E R _______________________________________________________________________________ Call for participation in the AAAI-94 Spring Symposium on COMPUTATIONAL ORGANIZATION DESIGN at Stanford University, March 21-23, 1994 Modern private and public organizations are facing immense pressures to rapidly reconfigure their processes, products, and relationships with other organizations. The cross-functional complexity of these changes - including their impacts on the technologies that organizations use, the structures of organizations, and the integration of human and cognitive issues such as skill requirements, cognitive loads, and performance management systems - is immense. AI has found numerous applications in supporting decision-making in organizations, but few in managing the complex issues of organizational design, analysis, re-configuration, re-engineering, and process change. The problem of capturing and managing this complexity cries out for computational design/analysis support, much in the way that other large, complex design and analysis problems (e.g., architectural design, engineering design) have been supported by automated assistance. At the same time, organization theories and design approaches have reached a degree of maturity that they can profitably be brought together in the new enterprise of supporting the reconfiguration of organizations. This new avenue, which we call Computational Organization Design, encompasses both the theoretical, practical, and methodological aspects of AI, design, and organization theory. The scope of Computational Organization Design encompasses both the design of human organizations, the design of automated organizations such as intelligent networks, and the design of highly-integrated human-technology organizations in which there is an integrated division of labor between people and computing. COD is an important research area and an interesting and promising class of abstract design problems. Key research questions include: How can Design Process Models (DPMs), for organizational design, be characterized, identified and verified ? A DPM is an explicit model of the activities carried out while creating a design. Adopting a particular DPM amounts to making the hypothesis that, over a collection of design problems, applying the DPM will generate a useful percentage of highly-evaluated acceptable designs with acceptable levels of effort. Can AI, with its unique capabilities for rigorous, qualitative inference, provide powerful new capabilities to formalize and execute organization theory ? For example, most organization theory to date makes only qualitative predictions about aggregate behaviors of organizations, treating environmental constraints and contingencies like point loads at the center of mass of the organization. How can COD contribute in practical arenas such as business process reengineering and redesign ? To what extent can organization design be treated as a routine design problem, with a well defined space of possibilities and explicit evaluation criteria ? Are there any important implications of the fact that organizations are abstract objects, subject to constraints of a different nature from the constraints that physical objects are subject to ? How should a DPM for COD differ from DPM's for other applications ? What role does creative design play in COD ? Other questions are: What is the state of the art of Computational Organization Design (COD) ? What should the agenda for future research be ? The goal of this symposium is to bring together researchers from the fields of AI, Design and Organization theory in order to define and build a community of researchers active in Computational Organization Design. The format of the symposium will be designed with the aim to support this goal and will include selected presentations and extensive, but closely moderated, discussions. Anybody who wishes to participate and make a presentation should submit an extended abstract (500-1000 words) of the presentation. The character of presentations may vary widely and include: complete results, experimental data, report on work in progress, theoretical analysis and thoughtful speculations. Other prospective participants should submit a statement (approximately 500 words) explaining their interests and experiences related to COD and what they can contribute to the discussions. Please, include references to all your publications related to COD in all submission. The number of participants is limited and invitations will be made based on a review of the submissions. Submissions may be included in working notes distributed to the participants, for discussion purposes only. No other distribution of submissions will be made by the organizing committee or AAAI, without written permission of the authors. Email submissions are preferred (ASCII or LaTeX), otherwise submit four hardcopies, or (as a last resort) fax one copy. Send all submissions to arrive by October 15 1993, to: Ingemar Hulthage Institute of Safety and Systems Management University of Southern California Los Angeles, CA 90089-0021 (213) 740-4044 (voice) (213) 740-9732 (fax) hulthage@usc.edu (email) Additional organizers: Raymond E. Levitt, Department of Civil Engineering, Stanford University, rel@cive.stanford.edu Duvvuru Sriram, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, MIT, sriram@athena.mit.edu Sarosh Talukdar, Engineering Design Research Center, Carnegie-Mellon University, talukdar@edrc.cmu.edu