Ambient Systems, Networks and Technologies (ANT-2012)

         The 3rd International Conference on Ambient Systems, Networks and Technologies (ANT-2012)
       
                                             27-29 August, 2012
                                       Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada

                            Website:http://cs-conferences.acadiau.ca/ant-12/
             ****************************************************************************

IMPORTANT DATES
===============
- Full Paper Submission:      February 29, 2012 (Extended)
- Acceptance Notification:    April 10, 2012
- Camera-Ready Submission:    May 10, 2012
- Workshops Proposals:        December 10, 2011

ANT-2012 accepted papers will be printed in the conference proceedings published by Elsevier Science in the open-access Procedia Computer Science series (on-line and CD). Procedia Computer Sciences is hosted on www.Elsevier.com and on Elsevier content platform ScienceDirect (http://www.sciencedirect.com), and will be freely available worldwide. All papers in Procedia will also be indexed by Scopus (http://www.scopus.com) and Engineering Village (Ei) (http://www.engineeringvillage.com). This includes EI Compendex (http://www.ei.org/compendex). The papers will contain linked references, XML versions and citable DOI numbers. All accepted papers will also be indexed in DBLP (http://dblp.uni-trier.de/). Selected papers will be invited for publication in special issues of international journals.

Conference Tracks:
=================
- Agent Systems, Intelligent Computing and Applications
- Automatic Networks and Communications
- Data Management
- Emerging Networking, Tracking and Sensing Technologies
- Multimedia and Social Computing
- Multimodal Interfaces
- Service Oriented Computing for Systems & Applications
- Smart Environments and Applications
- Systems Security and Privacy
- Systems Software Engineering
- Vehicular Networks and Applications
- General Track

COMMITTEES
=========

General Chairs
Nick Cercone, York University, Canada
Albert Zomaya, The University of Sydney, Australia

Program Chairs
Hossam Hassanein, Queen's University, Canada
Muhammad Younas, Oxford Brookes University, UK
Takahiro Hara, Osaka University, Japan

Advisory Committee
Ali Ghorbani, University of New Brunswick, Canada
Katia Sycara, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Erol Gelenbe, Imperial College, UK
Vincenzo Loia, University of Salerno, Italy
Ralf Steinmetz, Technische Universitaet Darmstadt, Germany
Peter Thomas, Manifesto Research, Australia
Sajal K. Das, The University of Texas at Arlington, USA
Timothy K. Shih, Tamkang University, Taiwan

Workshops Chairs
Senol Erdogan, Maltepe University, Turkey
Markus Aleksy, ABB Corporate Research Center, Germany

Program vice Chairs
Rainer Unland, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
Reiner Wichert, Fraunhofer-Institut for Computer Graphics IGD, Germany
Jiang Li, Howard University, USA
Tarek Sheltami, KFUPM, Saudi Arabia
Eric Pardede, La Trobe University, Australia
Irena Mlynkova, Charles University, Czech Republic
Abdelfettah Belghith, University of Manouba, Tunisia
Anis Koubaa, Al-Imam University, Saudi Arabia/CISTER Research Unit, Portugal
Keivan Kian-Mehr, University of Western Ontario, Canada
Tansel Ozyer, TOBB Econo & Tech University, Turkey
Thomas Grill, University of Salzburg, Austria
Mohyuddin, King Abdullah International Medical Research Center, Saudi Arabia
Zakaria Maamar, Zayed University, UAE
Jamal Bentahar, Concordia University, Canada
Abdallah Mhamed, Telecom SudParis, France
Wail Mardini, Jordan University of Science and Technology, Jordan
Ridha Khedri, McMaster University, Canada
Luis Javier Garc抋 Villalba, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
Agustinus Waluyo, Monash University, Australia
Bharat Jayaraman, University at Buffalo (SUNY), USA
Soumaya Cherkaoui, Sherbrooke University, Canada
G. Ram Mohana Reddy, National Institute of Technology Karnataka, India
Adnan Al-Anbuky, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand

International Journals Chair
Nauman Aslam, Northumbria University, UK

Local Arrangement Chairs
Ramiro Liscano, University of Ontario, Canada
Bessam Abdulrazak, Sherbrooke University, Canada

Publicity Chairs
Weiwei Fang, Beijing Jiaotong University, China
Djamal Benslimane, Lyon 1 University, France
Thais Regina de Moura Braga Silva, Federal University of Vicosa, Brazil
Wael M El-Medany, University of Bahrain, Bahrain

International Liaison Chairs
Karim Djouani, South African Institute of Technology, South African
Verdi Marchm, HP Labs Singapore, Singapore

Awards Chairs
Maytham Safar, Kuwait University, Kuwait
Bernady Apduhan, Kyushu Sangyo University, Japan

Steering Committee Chair
Elhadi Shakshuki, Acadia University, Canada

Optimisation in Multi-Agent Systems (OPTMAS V)

Fifth International Workshop on Optimisation in Multi-Agent Systems (OPTMAS V)

To be held in conjunction with the *Eleventh International Conference on Autonomous and Multi-Agent Systems  (AAMAS 2012)*

4 or 5 June 2012

cfp at:https://sites.google.com/site/optmas2012

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

Call
----
This workshop invites works from different strands of the multi-agent systems community that pertain to the design of algorithms, models, and techniques to deal with multi-agent optimisation problems. In so doing, this workshop aims to provide a forum for researchers to discuss common issues that arise in solving optimisation problems in different areas and elaborate common benchmarks to test their solutions.

Invited Talk
----------------
to be announced
(Previous invited speakers include Moshe Tennenholtz (2008), Milind Tambe (2009), Paul Scerri (2010), Sven Koenig (2011) ).

Background
----------------
The number of novel applications of multi-agent systems has followed an exponential trend over the last few years, ranging from online auction design, through in multi-sensor networks, to scheduling of tasks in multi-actor systems. Multi-agent systems designed for all these applications generally require some form of optimization in order to achieve their goal. Given this, a number of advancements have been made in the design of winner determination, coalition formation, and distributed constraints optimization algorithms among others. However, there are no general principles guiding the design of such algorithms that would enable researchers to either exploit algorithms designed in other areas or to ensure that their algorithms conform to some level of applicability to real problems.
This workshop aims to address the above issues by bringing together researchers from different parts of the Multi-Agent Systems research area to present their work and discuss acceptable solutions, benchmarks, and evaluation methods for generally researched optimization problems.
In particular, the main issues to be addressed by the workshop include (but are not limited to):

1. Techniques to model and solve optimisation problems in which the actors
are partly or completely distributed and can only communicate with their peers.
2. Algorithms to compute solutions to mechanisms that deal with different stakeholders who  may  be  self  interested  or  may  have  different computation/communication capabilities from their peers.
3. Techniques to manage and disseminate relevant information across different agents.
4. Dealing with privacy concerns: solving complex  optimization  problems while leaking as little private information as possible
5. Problems that require anytime algorithms.
6. Approximate algorithms that need to provide  guarantees  on  the  quality of the solution.
7. Mechanisms whose properties  can  be  significantly  affected  if  the solution computed is not the optimal one.
8. Techniques to deal with optimizations that have to  be  repeated  with possibly only slight changes in the input data.
9. Techniques to deal  with  situations  where  the  input  data  may  be uncertain or unreliable, requiring that the solution computed be robust to slight differences from the true values.
10. Techniques to deal with agents that are tied to physical devices. This involves computation and communication constraints that need to  be considered in the coordination techniques, as well as the possibility of failures of the devices and communication links.

Keywords
-------------
Topics include but are not limited to:

* Distributed Constraints Optimisation/Satisfaction
* Winner Determination Algorithms in Auctions
* Coalition Formation Algorithms
* Algorithms to compute Nash Equilibrium in games
* Optimisation under uncertainty
* Optimisation with incomplete or dynamic input data
* Algorithms for real-time applications

Workshop motivation
--------------------------
OPTMAS complements the objectives of the AAMAS conference by providing a forum for multi-agent algorithm designers. The workshop will be attractive to those working in the general areas of distributed optimization, auction design, coordination, learning, and uncertainty and will be a good place to present original work and discuss acceptable benchmarks and evaluation methods for generally researched optimization problems.
The aim of OPTMAS is to complement the theoretical angle taken by work presented in the main conference, and other workshops, by focusing on the implementation issues and the general trends in optimization problems that arise across a variety of multi-agent applications.

Important dates
---------------------
* 28th FEBRUARY, 2012 - Submission of contributions to workshops
* 27th MARCH, 2012 - Workshop paper acceptance notification
* 4th or 5th JUNE, 2012 - Workshop takes place in conjunction with AAMAS 2012.

Submission
---------------
Submissions should conform to the ACM SIG style (follow the formatting instructions available at the AAMAS-2012 website) and should not be more than *10* pages long (excluding appendices).

Authors can submit their papers through the OPTMAS 2012 Easychair submission site:
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=optmas2012

Reviewing process
-----------------
Papers will be reviewed by at least 2 reviewers. Criteria for selection of papers will include: originality, readability, relevance to themes, soundness, and overall quality.

Publication
-----------
Best papers from OPTMAS 2008 and OPTMAS 2009 were selected for publication in the
special issue on Optimisation in Multi-Agent System of the Journal of Autonomous and Multiagent Systems (http://www.springerlink.com/content/n7p264t41264 ).

We plan to continue this initiative for the 2010, 2011, 2012 edition. Therefore, we will negotiate the publication of selected, best papers in a quality journal (JAAMAS or similar).

Organizing committee
--------------------
Dr. Jesus Cerquides Bueno, IIIA - CSIC, Spain
Dr. Alessandro Farinelli, University of Verona, Italy
Dr. Sarvapali D. Ramchurn University of Southampton, UK
Dr. Juan Antonio Rodriguez-Aguilar,IIIA - CSIC, Spain
Dr. Meritxell Vinyals, University of Verona, Italy

Programme Committee
--------------------------------------
Mohsen Afsharchi         University of Zanjan
Ana L. C. Bazzan         Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul
Christian Blum           Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya
Archie Chapman           University of Sydney
Francesco M. Fave        University of Southampton
Katsutoshi Hirayama      Kobe University
Christopher Krenkintveld University of Texas
Sven Koenig              University of Southern California
Nikos Komodakis          University of Crete
Akshat Kumar             University of Massachusetts
Robert N. Lass           Drexel University
Victor Lesser            University of Massachusetts
Beatriz López            University of Girona
Pedro Meseguer           IIIA-CSIC
Maria Polukarov          University of Southampton
Marc Pujol               IIIA-CSIC
Talal Rahwan             University of Southampton
Norman Salazar           IIIA-CSIC
Onn Shehory              IBM Haifa Research Lab
Eric Shieh               University of Southern California
Sameer Singh             University of Massachusetts
Ruben Stranders          University of Southampton
Greet Vanden             Berghe KaHo Sint-Lieven
William Yeoh             Singapore Management University
Roie Zivan               Ben Gurion University of the Negev
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