new list, mbe interesting

_Avery_Andrews · April 30, 1994, 5:26pm

[Avery.Andrews, 940430]

From @CSLI.Stanford.EDU:bug-sdl-request@cogsci.ucsd.edu Sat Apr 30 12:23:15 1994

Message-Id: <199404300206.TAA05848@morue.usc.edu>
Sender: cod@morue.usc.edu

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Date: Fri, 29 Apr 1994 19:06:49 -0700
From: COR-List@treska.usc.edu
To: cor-list@treska.usc.edu
Subject: COR-List Number 1
Reply-To: cor-list@treska.usc.edu
Status: R

COR-List Digest 28 April 1994 Issue Number 001

Topics:
Announcing The Computational Organization Research (COR) List

Administrivia:
  Please send submissions to "COR-List@treska.usc.edu". Send other
  requests, such as requests to subscribe or changes in your e-mail
  address, to "COR-List-Request@treska.usc.edu".

================================================================

ANNOUNCING THE COMPUTATIONAL ORGANIZATION RESEARCH (COR) LIST

Computational Research in Organization Theory, Analysis, and Design
Theory, Analysis, and Design of Computational Organizations

AIMS:
-----

COR-List exists to publish news items; requests for assistance;
research lab reports; journal, conference and meeting announcements;
position notices; events calendars; comments on publications; paper
abstracts; and other items of interest in the area of Computational
Organization Research.

BACKGROUND
----------

A growing collection of communities worldwide is now actively
researching organizational phenomena using computational methods.
There are pressing research issues in organization theory and
organization development that are highly amenable to solution by
computational modeling, theorizing, and experimentation.
Computational methods may provide several advantages for studying some
organizational phenomena:

  Organization theory, analysis, and design problems can be hard partly
  because of scale and complexity. By analogy, there have been several
  recent initiatives on topics of modeling, analysis and simulation of
  large-scale physical and biological phenomena, such as airflow and the
  human genome, to better understand underlying structures and to solve
  particular configuration problems. The structural and configuration
  problems of organizations are equally impactful and scientifically
  challenging.

  For the study of organizational issues, the theory, modeling
  technology, and infrastructure is ready, and the impacts of improved
  effectiveness and flexibility of organizations could be great.

  Networks and concurrent-system technologies have made possible
  wide-area interactions, virtual organizations, and controllable
  interactive agents.

  Representation, and implementation technologies and theory have
  advanced to the point where we now have insightful and useful tools
  for theorizing about and modeling organization-level phenomena. These
  include coordination languages and algorithms, organization
  ontologies, computational organization theories, etc.

  Advances in computer aided design have also created useful tools that
  begin to bring computer aided organization design into reach.
  Computational modeling and evaluation of organization, mentioned here,
  supports progress on computational organization design. Techniques of
  optimization, qualitative reasoning, iteration and search, developed
  for other applications, also support computational organization
  design.

  High-powered desktop computing creates demand for generally-available
  tools for organization monitoring, analysis and design. These
  computers, along with very fast high-performance simulation
  capabilities on supercomputers, add the capability to do complex
  analyses with reasonable response times.

  The infrastructure that exists for such research comprises existing
  working collaborations among key groups, as well as transferable
  analytical and modeling software (e.g. experimental testbeds,
  declarative theories, sharable ontologies, coordination languages and
  algorithms, etc.).

The time is ripe to draw together the community and begin to establish
forums for discussion and dissemination of information about
activities and research. Computational systems for complex
organization analysis do exist, and are in actual application or pilot
use in major organizations, e.g. for organizational design, analysis,
re-configuration, re-engineering, and process change. In addition,
large research grants have been made to a number of research centers
to study organization problems computationally. It has become clear
through a set of recent meetings and publications that enough of an
interdisciplinary organization-studies community has emerged, with
enough familiarity with each others' work and enough basic
interdisciplinary knowledge to make real inroads. As a followup to
these recent meetings and to growing interest, and after discussion
with a number of people and groups, the COR-List has been founded.

INTENDED FOCUS
--------------

The intended focus of this list is captured in its name: Computational
Organization Research. General guidelines might be:

  COMPUTATIONAL: The list is concerned with disseminating information
  about explicitly computational approaches to organizational phenomena.
  Example areas might include computational models and representations
  of organizational knowledge, explicit organizational ontologies,
  simulations of organizational activity or structuring, computational
  approaches to building organization theories, coordination algorithms,
  computational approaches to organization design, computational tools
  for organization analysis, and and the study of "computational
  organizations"---those organizations made up completely or partly of
  computational participants.

  ORGANIZATION: The list is intended to focus on mid-range,
  organization-level phenomena--as versus theories of individual
  participants (e.g. cognition or psychology) or macro-scale phenomena
  (macroeconomic behavior, societal-level dynamics). This line is hard
  to draw, however, and macro-mezzo-micro links are of explicit
  interest, as are implications for agent-oriented and societal-level
   phenomena.

  RESEARCH: The bias of this list is primarily toward organizational
  research. It is clear, however, that much good organization research
  is driven by clear applied problems, and that the best tools embody
  clear principles and theory. This line, too is hard to draw, and
  research may include issues in the practical application of
  organizational tools such as business process reengineering tools or
  enterprise integration tools.

CURRENT COMMUNITIES
-------------------

Several current communities, focus groups, and workshops concerned
with various aspects of COR include:

Mathematical Organization Theory [e.g., contact: Richard Burton (Duke)
Kathleen Carley (CMU), Michael Cohen (Michigan), Michael Masuch
(Amsterdam), Michael Prietula (CMU)]

Distributed AI/Multiagent Systems (DAI/MAS) [E.g., contact: USA:
Michael Huhns (MCC), Vic Lesser (UMASS); Europe: Yves Demazeau
(LIFIA/Grenoble), Jeff Rosenschein (Hebrew Univ); Pacific Rim: Toru
Ishida (Kyoto Univ); Mario Tokoro (Keio Univ)]

Computational Organization Design [E.g., contact: Ingemar Hulthage
(USC), Ray Levitt (Stanford)]

RELATED INTERNET RESOURCES
--------------------------

There are several other internet lists with related subject-matter but
somewhat different focus:

BPR-List: BPR-List focuses specifically on problems and approaches to
business process reengineering. [bpr-l@duticai.twi.tudelft.nl]

DAI-List: The DAI-List specifically takes an Artificial Intelligence
orientation to artificial multi-agent and distributed problem solving
systems. [Moderated by Michael N. Huhns, (dai-list@mcc.com,
dai-list-request@mcc.com]

EINET: The EI net mailing list focuses specifically on problems and
approaches to Enterprise Integration Technology.
[all-iceimt@einet.net]

INFOSYS: INFOSYS covers Information Systems. [Moderated by Dennis W.
Viehland (d.viehland@massey.ac.nz. Message listserv@american.edu with
"SUBSCRIBE INFOSYS YOURFIRSTNAME YOURLASTNAME".]

OMTNet: Organization & Management Theory Network. The OMT-List's focus
is theory, but it is not specialized to explicitly computational
approaches. [Moderated by: Dwight Lemke, OMT@vaxa.cis.uwosh.edu; Back
issues of the Digest are available via gopher in the Management
Archives at the University of Minnesota: chimera.sph.umn.edu.]

SUBSCRIPTIONS
-------------

To subscribe to COR-List, send email with your current email address
to:

COR-List-Request@treska.usc.edu

Very soon the addresses of COR-List will simplify to

COR-List@usc.edu
COR-List-Request@usc.edu

(The treska.usc.edu address will continue to work.)

MODERATORS
----------

  Ingemar Hulthage and Les Gasser
  Computational Organization Design Lab
  Institute of Safety and Systems Management
  USC
  Los Angeles, CA 90089-0021

Phone: (213) 740-4044/4046
Email: {hulthage|gasser}@usc.edu

End of COR-List Issue #1
*********************************