[agents] CFP Optimisation in Multi-agent Systems (OPTMAS)

[Juan Antonio Rodriguez]

=============================================================================
                Preliminary  CFP: Second International Workshop on 
                      
	        
	         Optimisation in Multi-Agent Systems (OPTMAS II)

                ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
		
                       To be held in conjunction with the 
          Seventh Joint Conference on Autonomous and Multi-Agent Systems 
                                  (AAMAS 2009)
                                 11-12 May 2008
                        cfp at: http://www.optmas09.org

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


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. 
Note: The authors of the best papers selected from Optmas 2008 and 2009 will be invited to submit to a special issue of the Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems -http://www.springer.com/computer/artificial/journal/10458  (see below).

********** Invited speaker: Professor Milind Tambe ************
Speaker Bio: Milind Tambe is a Professor of Computer Science at University of Southern California(USC). He received his Ph.D. from the School of  Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He leads the TEAMCORE Research Group at USC, with research interests  in multi-agent systems, specifically multi-agent and agent-human teamwork. He is a fellow of AAAI (Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) and recipient of several awards including ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) SIGART Agents Research award.


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 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
---------------
*** NOTE THESE ARE TENTATIVE DATES *****
* Feburary 9th, 2009 - Submission of contributions to workshop
* March 1st, 2009 - Workshop paper acceptance notification
* May 11 or 12 2009 - Workshop takes place in conjunction with AAMAS 2009

Special Issue of JAAMAS
-----------------------

The authors of the best papers selected from Optmas 2008 and 2009 will be invited to submit an extended version of their work or new related work to a special issue of the Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems - http://www.springer.com/computer/artificial/journal/10458. 

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). 

More submission instructions will be posted on the optmas website soon (www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~sdr/optmas2).

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

Juan Antonio Rodriguez-Aguilar - IIIA, CSIC, Barcelona, Spain

Alex Rogers - University of Southampton, UK

Alessandro Farinelli - University of Southampton, UK

Sarvapali D. Ramchurn - University of Southampton, UK


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

Andrea Giovannucci, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain

Kate Larson, University of Waterloo, Canada

Rajiv Maheshwaran, University of Southern California, USA

Maria Polukarova, University of Southampton, UK

Talal Rahwan, University of Southampton, UK

Paul Scerri, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Carles Sierra, IIIA, CSIC, Spain

Marius Silaghi, Florida Institute of Technology, USA

Sebastian Stein, University of Southampton, UK

Makoto Yokoo, Kyushu University, Japan

Onn Shehory, IBM, Israel

Robin Glinton, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Adrian Petcu, SAP Research, Zurich

Nathan Schurr, Aptima Inc., USA

Ulle Endriss, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands

Andrea Roli, University of Bologna, Italy

Christian Blum, Technical University of Catalonia, Spain

Jesús Cerquides, University of Barcelona, Spain

Rica Gonen, Yahoo Inc.

Sven Koenig, University of Southern California, USA