[agents] Final CFP - OPTMAS Workshop @ AAMAS 08 (Deadline Extended)

[sdr]

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                      CFP: First International Workshop on


                 Optimisation in Multi-Agent Systems (OPTMAS)

                ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

                       To be held in conjunction with the
          Seventh Joint Conference on Autonomous and Multi-Agent Systems
                                  (AAMAS 2008)
                                 12/13 May 2008
                        cfp at: http://www.optmas08.org

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Call
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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: Prof. Moshe Tennenholtz will be giving an invited talk at the workshop. See http://iew3.technion.ac.il/Home/Users/Moshet.html#part1 for a short bio of the speaker.
.

Background
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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 solutions 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 will 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. Dealing with privacy concerns: solving complex optimization problems while leaking as little private information as possible

4. Problems that require anytime algorithms.

5. Algorithms that need to provide guarantees on the quality of the solution.

6. Mechanisms whose properties can be significantly affected if the solution computed is not the optimal one.

7. Techniques to deal with optimizations that have to be repeated with possibly only slight changes in the input data.

8. 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.

9. General heuristics and approximate solutions to multi-agent optimisation problems.

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

Important dates
---------------

* February 1st (NEW), 2008 - Submission of contributions to workshop
* February 25th, 2008 - Workshop paper acceptance notification
* May 12/13 - Workshop takes place in conjunction with AAMAS 2008

Submission
----------

Submissions should conform to the ACM SIG style (see http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates for more details) and should not be more than *8* pages long (excluding appendices).

Papers will have to be submitted through the following page:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=optmas2008 in PDF format. See the conference site for more details: http://www.optmas08.org.

For any questions email: optmas2008 at easychair.org


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.


Organizing committee
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Nicholas R. Jennings - University of Southampton, UK

Adrian Petcu - EPFL, Switzerland

Alex Rogers - University of Southampton, UK

Sarvapali D. Ramchurn - University of Southampton, UK


Programme Committee
-------------------

Michael Rothkopf - RUTCOR, State University of New Jersey, USA

Juan Antonio Rodriguez - IIIA, CSIC, Spain

Carles Sierra - IIIA, CSIC, Spain

Paul Scerri - Robotics Institute, CMU, USA

Marius Silaghi - Florida Institute of Technology, USA

Alessandro Farinelli - University of Southampton, UK

Zinovi Rabinovich - University of Southampton, UK

Jesus Cerquides - University of Barcelona, Spain.

Sven Koenig - University of Southern California, USA

David Parkes - Harvard University, USA

Makoto Yokoo - Kyushu University, Japan

Ioannis Vetsikas - University of Southampton, UK

(More to be confirmed)