[agents] TAC 2010: Call for Participation

[iv]

Call for Participation
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 at cs.umn.edu