[agents] Updates: Best Paper Award for PRIMA2010 -- The 13th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems

[Brendon Woodford]

The 13th International Conference on Principles and Practice of
Multi-Agent Systems (PRIMA-2010)

Kolkata, India

November 12th-15th, 2010

www.prima2010.org

News Highlights
---------------

**Best Paper Award Sponsored by IBM Research**

PRIMA 2010 would recognize the highest quality research paper in the key
theme area of "agents and services" with a Best Paper Award sponsored by
IBM Research -- India. The award is aimed at encouraging top quality
research in the critical area of Service Science. One paper will be chosen
by the program committee for this award and the award carries a prize of
Indian Rupees 5000.

**Keynote Speakers**

Frank Dignum. University of Utrecht, The Netherlands
Henry Prakken, University of Groningen (Law & IT) and University of
Utrecht (Computer Science), The Netherlands
Makoto Yokoo, Kyushu University, Japan

Important Dates
---------------
Abstracts: July 24th, 2010
Papers: July 31st, 2010
Author response: August 19-22
Author notification: September 1st, 2010
Camera-ready papers: September 20th, 2010
Early registration deadline: September 27th, 2010
Registration deadline: November 1st, 2010
Workshops and Tutorials: November 12th, 2010
Conference dates: November 12th - 15th, 2010

Overview
--------

PRIMA is a leading scientific conference for research on intelligent agent
and multi-agent systems, attracting high quality, state-of-the-art
research from all over the world. The conference endeavours to bring
together researchers, developers, and academic and industry leaders, who
are active and interested in agents and multi-agent systems, their
practices and related areas. The conference has a strong focus on
practice, and is focused on becoming the premier forum for prototype and
deployed agent systems. Thus PRIMA particularly encourages reports on
development of prototype and deployed agent and multi-agent systems, and
experiments that demonstrate the capability of agents to handle real-world
challenges.

PRIMA2010 will build on the success of its predecessor workshops and
conferences held in Nagoya, Hanoi, Bangkok, Guilin, Kuala Lumpur,
Auckland, Seoul, Tokyo, Taipei, Melbourne, Kyoto, and Singapore. Since
2007, due to the need for an additional high-quality forum for
international researchers and practitioners to meet and share their work,
the meeting has been expanded from a workshop to a full-fledged
conference.

**Key Theme**

In addition to the themes listed below, a key theme for PRIMA 2010 is
agents and services, where the intent is to explore the connections
between the agent technology and services (both in the sense of service
science and service-oriented computing). We especially encourage papers
that deal with the application of agent techniques to the challenges in
the services area. There are clear relationships between the work in
services and the work on agents, and there is increasing crossover between
the two communities.

**Reviewing Process**

PRIMA 2010 will see a number of changes to the reviewing process. These
changes are designed to further raise the quality of the reviewing process
and of the accepted papers. Specifically, PRIMA 2010 will:

    * introduce an author response phase in which authors are able to
respond to reviews;
    * use double blind reviewing;
    * introduce a Senior Programme Committee (SPC), who are tasked with
overseeing the review process of specific papers.

Additionally, PRIMA 2010 will introduce a "shepherding" process for
borderline papers. This process will see a PC or SPC member working with
authors of borderline papers to provide additional support during the
revision process in order to improve the presentation of the paper.
Finally, PRIMA 2010 will replace short posters with full-length ?work in
progress? papers. This is being done in order to allow sufficient space
for papers to explain their contribution, whilst still clearly
distinguishing between full  papers and weaker papers that still have
merit.

**Publication**

The PRIMA proceedings will be published by the International Foundation
for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS), which sponsors and
publishes the proceedings of the International Conference on Autonomous
Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS). Selected papers accepted to PRIMA
will be invited to be expanded and published as a special issue with the
journal of Multiagent and Grid Systems (MAGS).
Multimedia Submission Track

**Multimedia Submissions**

For some multiagent systems it can be challenging to convey the research
contributions of the work in a traditional paper format. For example, the
novelty and contribution of some distributed robotic or agent systems
cannot be easily made clear in a paper format, but might be compelling
with a Powerpoint presentation or video.  Similarly, programming languages
or tools might be best explained via a tutorial or software package
showing their power. In recognition of this, PRIMA'10 retains the
Multimedia Submission Track used in PRIMA'09. Specifically, in addition to
regular paper submissions, we accept multimedia (non-paper) electronic
submissions of technical contributions. This type of work can be submitted
in whatever electronic format best conveys the research contributions of
the work, from Powerpoint presentations, to videos, to working code to
websites.

**Submission Details**

Submissions are through easychair:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=prima10

For multimedia submissions, please submit a single zip file.

For regular papers, please submit a PDF file in ACM SIG Proceedings
format, at most eight (8) pages long (note that this is a change from last
year, which used LNCS format). The paper should not include author details
(i.e. be anonymous). Note that abstract submissions are requested a week
before the paper deadline (i.e. 24th for abstracts, 31st for papers).

Organization
------------

**General Chairs**

B.P. Sinha (Indian Statistical Institute, India)
Chandan Mazumdar (Jadavpur University, India)
Abdul Sattar (Griffith University, Australia)

**Program Chairs**

Nirmit Desai (IBM Research, India)
Alan Liu (National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan)
Michael Winikoff (University of Otago, New Zealand)

Workshop Chairs: Hoa Khanh Dam (University of Wollongong, Australia) and
Tru Hoang Cao (Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology, Vietnam)

Tutorial Chairs: Sujata Ghosh (Gottingen University, Netherlands) and
Aniruddha Dasgupta (University of Wollongong, Australia)

Local Organizing Chair: Nabendu Chaki (University of Calcutta)
Local Finance Chair: Mridul Barik (Jadavpur University)

See the committees page for list of SPC and PC members.

Themes and Topics (See sub-areas on the Website)
------------------------------------------------
**Agents and Service Science**

**Agent-based system development**

**WWW and Semantic Web Agents**

**Agent Technologies for Service Computing**

**Agent Reasoning**

**Interface Agents**

**Agent communication**

**Agent Cooperation and Negotiation**

**Agent Systems**

**Real-world Robotics**

**Other Related Areas**

**Agent-based simulations**