Special Issue on Agent Communication

Call for Papers
Special Issue on Agent Communication
ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology

Agent communication research seeks to address challenges in the
development of applications involving multiple autonomous and
heterogeneous agents. Agent communication differs from communication
as studied in traditional distributed systems in its emphasis of
high-level abstractions that enable flexible interaction yet support
verifying compliance. Broad applications include business
interactions, contracts and compliance, virtual enterprises,
negotiation, argumentation and decision support, and so on.

We invite quality submissions that develop new insights, high-level
abstractions, patterns, languages, formal theories, reasoning, and
methodologies for communication in multiagent systems.

Broad topics include

Protocols
Dialogs and argumentation
Virtual organizations, institutions
Commitments, norms, and other social concepts
Trust and deception
Correctness properties and their verification
Tying communication with agent design and execution strategies
Architecture, middleware, patterns, and programming language support
Standardization of communication primitives
Application-specific modeling and insights

Key Dates
*July 25, 2010 - Submissions*
October 15, 2010 - Decisions
December 15, 2010 - Final versions
Publication - Early 2011

Submission
On-Line Submission (will be available before July 25, 2010):
http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tist (please select Special Issue:
Agent Communication as the manuscript type).

Each paper will be reviewed by at least three expert reviewers.
Details of the journal and manuscript preparation are available on at
http://tist.acm.org/

Guest Editors

Amit K. Chopra (also Contact editor)
University of Trento, Italy
chopra@disi.unitn.it

Alexander Artikis
National Centre for Scientific Research Demokritos, Greece
a.artikis@iit.demokritos.gr

Jamal Bentahar
Concordia University, Canada
bentahar@ciise.concordia.ca

Frank Dignum
Utrecht University, The Netherlands
dignum@cs.uu.nl 

Eighth German Conference on Multi-Agent System Technologies (MATES 2010)

M A T E S  2 0 1 0  
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Eighth German Conference on Multi-Agent System Technologies 

September 21 - 23, 2010, 
Karslruhe, Germany

http://www.alg.ewi.tudelft.nl/mates2010

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FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS 
==================================================


AIMS & SCOPE

The German Conference on Multi-Agent system Technologies (MATES) provides an interdisciplinary forum for researchers, users, and developers to present and discuss latest advances in research work as well as prototyped or fielded systems of intelligent agents and multi-agent systems. The conference covers the whole range of agent- and multi-agent technologies and aims to promote its theory and applications. For the eighth time, the German special interest group on Distributed Artificial Intelligence organizes this international conference in cooperation with the steering committee of MATES and thereby continues this successful track of events. 

Building on the successful predecessors from 2003 to 2009, MATES 2010 will be co-located with the 33st German Conference on Artificial Intelligence (KI 2010) and will take place from September 21 to 24, 2010 in Karlsruhe. The participants of MATES 2010 will also have full access to the concurrently running program of the KI 2010 conference. 

TOPICS OF INTEREST

Topics of interest of MATES 2010 include all aspects of agent-oriented computing and agent technologies. We solicit both basic as well as applied research papers on recent advances in the area of intelligent agents and multi-agent systems in general. 

Also papers reporting on the successful application of agent technologies in any kind of domain are very welcome. 
MATES 2010 encourages especially submissions from recent and emerging areas of interest such as autonomic computing, distributed coordination and robust multi-agent systems.  Additionally, we encourage the submission of elaborated vision and challenge papers that discuss mid-term and long-term directions for research and application. 

Topics of interest for MATES 2010 include, but are not limited to: 

• Adaptive agents and multi-agent learning
• Advanced theories of collaboration:
• Modelling and formation of teams, coalitions, groups, and organizations
• Agents and autonomic computing
• Agent and multi-agent architectures
• Agents and peer-to-peer computing
• Agents and pervasive computing
• Agents for Ambient Intelligence
• Agent-based service discovery, matchmaking, brokering, and composition
• Agent communication languages
• Agents for e-business and e-government
• Agent technologies in the context of service-oriented computing and architectures
• Agent to non-agent interoperability
• Agents in novel applications
• Application of agent-technologies in industrial practice
• Artificial social systems: Conventions, norms, institutions; trust and reputation
• Autonomous robots and robot teams
• Commitment, delegation, responsibility, and obligations in artificial and hybrid societies
• Complex systems and their management
• Coordination, negotiation, argumentation, and conflict resolution
• Deployed agent-based business applications
• Hybrid human and agent societies
• User modelling and interface agents
• Embodied conversational actors and believable agents
• Mobile agents
• Model-driven design of multi-agent systems
• Multi-agent planning and scheduling
• Multi-agent platforms and tools
• Multi-agent (social) simulation and (cognitive) modelling with agents
• Practical aspects of programming agent systems: Robustness, fault tolerance, scalability and performance measurement
• Roles and structures, adaptive learning and cognition in organizational models
• Semantics of the dynamics of organizational models
• Standards for agents and multi-agent systems

DOCTORAL MENTORING PROGRAM

MATES 2010 will include a doctoral mentoring program, chaired by Ingo Timm, aimed at PhD students at advanced stages of their research. 
This program will provide an opportunity for students to interact closely with established researchers in
their fields, to receive feedback on their work and to get advice on managing their careers.


PROCEEDINGS

The proceedings of MATES 2010 will appear in the Springer-Verlag series,
Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI).

AWARDS

MATES will issue a "MATES 2010 Best Paper Award".


SUBMISSION DETAILS

For the preparation of papers to be submitted, please follow the instructions for authors available at the Springer LNCS Web page:http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html
The length of each paper, including figures and references, should not exceed 12 pages. Papers that have been accepted or are under review by other conferences or journals are not eligible for submission. However, we encourage interdisciplinary contributions submitted or presented in part to a forum outside of agent technology. The only acceptable document format is PDF. All papers must be written in English. Submissions not conforming to the above requirements may be rejected without review. Papers are to submit by the EasyChair system. 
Please follow the link: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=mates2010

Important Dates

 Submission Deadline:         9. 4. 2010 
 Notification of Acceptance:  28. 5. 2010
 Camera Ready Copy:           11. 6. 2010
 Conference Date:           21. 9. 2010


CONFERENCE OFFICIALS

Program Co-Chairs:

Juergen Dix  (TU Clausthal, Germany) 
Cees Witteveen (TU Delft, The Netherlands)


Steering Committee:

Hans-Dieter Burkhard (HU Berlin, Germany)
Stefan Kirn (U Hohenheim, Germany)
Matthias Klusch (DFKI, Germany)
Jˆrg P. M¸ller (TU Clausthal, Germany)
Rainer Unland (U Essen, Germany)
Gerhard Weiss (Maastricht University, The Netherlands)


Program Committee:

Klaus-Dieter Althoff
Federico Bergenti
Ralph Bergmann
Vicent Botti
Lars Braubach
Longbing Cao
Torsten Eymann
Klaus Fischer
Maria Ganzha
Paolo Giorgini
Christian Guttmann
Koen Hindriks
Benjamin Hirsch
Wiebe van der Hoek
Stefan Kirn
Franziska Klügl
Gabriela Lindemann
Stefano Lodi
Beatriz López
Viviana Mascardi
Mirjam Minor
Daniel Moldt
Joerg Mueller
Peter Novák
Andrea Omicini
Sascha Ossowski
Marcin Paprzycki
Alexander Pokahr
Alessandro Ricci
Abdel-Badeeh Salem
Amal Seghrouchni
Ingo Timm
Rainer Unland


Doctoral Consortium:

Ingo Timm (U. Frankfurt, Germany)


CONTACTS 

Juergen Dix
Clausthal University of Technology
38678 Clausthal-Zellerfeld
Germany

Tel: +49 5323 727180
Fax: +49 5323 727189
Email  dix"at"tu-clausthal.de


Cees Witteveen
Delft University of Technology
Dept. of Software Technology

Tel. +31-15-2782521                  
Fax. +31-15-2786632
Email: C.Witteveen"at"tudelft.nl

Trading Agent Competition - TAC-2010

The Eleventh Annual Trading Agent Competition 

Call for Participation
June 7 - 8, 2010

Boston, MA, USA
Collocated with EC'10 (ACM Conf. on Electronic Commerce)

Trading in electronic markets is increasingly becoming both a commonplace economic activity and a topic of special interest within the AI, Electronic Commerce, and Multiagent Systems (MAS) research communities.

We invite you to participate in the Eleventh Annual Trading Agent Competition (TAC-10), to be held in May and June of 2010, with the finals taking place during the EC'10 conference in Boston, Massachusetts, preceded by qualifying and seeding rounds in May and June.

Building on the success of previous Trading Agent Competition events, this year's event is again designed to spur research on common problems, promote definitions of benchmarks and standard problem descriptions, and showcase current technologies.

The competition will pit software agents -- developed by research groups, students, and others from all over the world -- against each other in challenging market games. This year, there will be three games, and up to two related challenge events:

1. TAC Ad Auctions (AA).

In the TAC/AA game, agents representing Internet advertisers bid for search-engine ad placement over a range of interrelated keyword combinations. A back-end search-user model translates placement over each simulated day to impressions, clicks, and sale conversions, yielding revenue for the advertiser. Advertiser strategies combining online data analysis and bidding tac tics compete to maximize profit over the simulated campaign horizon.

2. TAC Market Design (reverse TAC, or "CAT"). 

CAT software agents represent market makers whose goals are to attract potential buyers and sellers as customers, and then to match buyers with sellers. The market makers compete with one another in doing this, such as the London Stock Exchange competes with the NYSE for the business of stock traders.

3. TAC Supply Chain Management (SCM). 

TAC/SCM simulates a dynamic supply chain environment where agents compete to secure customer orders and components required for production of these orders. The game captures many of the complexities of actual supply chains, where both demand and supply fluctuate and each manufacturer has limited production capacity. Participants also have the option of entering two SCM Challenge events: 

• 
  
  

  a Procurement Challenge and 

• 
  
  

  a Prediction Challenge;

these will take place if enough teams (minimum 6) register for them.

The market games have been specially designed to present agents with difficult decision problems and admit a wide variety of potential bidding and negotiation strategies.

Preliminary documentation and software for participating in the AA Tournament are accessible at:

http://aa.tradingagents.org/ 

Preliminary documentation and software for participating in the CAT Tournament are accessible via sourceforge. Access details and other CAT information is available at:

http://www.marketbasedcontrol.com/blog/index.php?page_id=5

Documentation and open source software for participating in TAC SCM, including servers and sample agents, are available for download at:

http://www.sics.se/tac/

The qualifying and seeding rounds will be held in May and early June, and the first day of the final rounds is scheduled to coincide with the Trading Agent Design and Analysis (TADA) workshop to be held at EC'10.

To register for TAC-10, please fill out the registration form at:
(will be activated in the next weeks)

http://www.sics.se/tac/intent.php

The entry fee will be US$250 per team to enter one game, or $400 for all TAC games. For TAC SCM the entry fee is the same independently of the number of challenge events in which a team competes.

The entry fee is waived for teams who send a representative to the TAC finals at EC'10, if that representative registers for the TADA workshop. A given individual may represent one team for one game.

Note: Please send any questions regarding the fees to tac [at] tradingagents.org. Groups unable to afford the entry fee may also contact tac [at] tradingagents.org for special consideration.

General information about TAC can be found at:

http://www.sics.se/tac/

Exact dates for the qualifying and seeding rounds will soon be posted on this
site.

More information about the Trading Agent Analysis and Design (TADA) workshop is available at:

http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/conferences/tada2010/

Information about the Association for Trading Agent Research running TAC is available at:

http://tradingagents.org

Please circulate this announcement to anyone who may be interested in participating. Inquiries may be directed to tac-support@cs.umn.edu