[agents] MSDM Workshop 2012: Deadline Extended to *March 6*

[Akshat Kumar]

In response to requests from authors, we have decided to extend the
submission deadline for the MSDM workshop to *March 6*.

Please see our workshop homepage for a revised schedule of other
important dates.

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                         CALL FOR PAPERS
                       AAMAS 2012 Workshop
 Multiagent Sequential Decision Making Under Uncertainty (MSDM)
=================================================================

The Seventh Workshop in the MSDM series
June 4 or 5, 2012
Valencia, Spain
http://gaips.inesc-id.pt/~switwicki/msdm2012/

In sequential decision making, an agent's objective is to choose
actions, based on its observations of the world, in such a way that it
expects to optimize its performance measure over the course of a
series of such decisions. In environments where action consequences
are non-deterministic or observations incomplete, Markov decision
processes (MDPs)and partially observable MDPs (POMDPs) serve as the
basis for principled approaches to single-agent sequential decision
making. Extending these models to systems of multiple agents has
become the subject of an increasingly active area of research over the
past decade and a variety of models have emerged (e.g., the MMDP,
Dec-POMDP, MTDP, I-POMDP, and POSG). The high computational complexity
of these models has driven researchers to develop multiagent planning
and learning methods that exploit the structure present in agents'
interactions, methods that provide efficient approximate solutions,
and methods that distribute computation among the agents.

The MSDM workshop serves several purposes. The primary purpose is to
bring together researchers in the field of MSDM to present and discuss
new work and preliminary ideas. Moreover, we aim to identify recent
trends, to establish important directions for future research, and to
discuss some of the topics mentioned below such as challenging
application areas (e.g., cooperative robotics, distributed sensor
and/or communication networks, decision support systems) and suitable
evaluation methodologies. Finally, a goal of the workshop is to make
the field more accessible to newcomers, by seeking to bring order in
the large number of models and methods that have been introduced over
the last decade.


Topics
------

Multiagent sequential decision making comprises (1) problem
representation, (2) planning, (3) coordination, and (4) learning. The
MSDM workshop addresses this full range of aspects. Topics of
particular interest include:

- Challenging conventional assumptions
 ...model specification: where do the models come from?
 ...what is an appropriate level of abstraction for decision making?
- Novel representations, algorithms and complexity results
- Comparisons of algorithms
- Relationships between models and their assumptions
- Decentralized vs. centralized planning approaches
- Online vs. offline planning
- Communication and coordination during execution
- Dealing with...
 ...large numbers of agents
 ...large numbers of / continuous states, observations and actions
 ...long decision horizons.
- (Reinforcement) learning in partially observable multiagent systems
- Cooperative, competitive, and self-interested agents
- Application domains
- Benchmarks and evaluation methodologies
- Standardization of software
- High-level principles High-level principles in MSDM: past trends and
future directions


Important Dates
----------------

February 28, 2012  - Paper submission due
March 27, 2012     - Notification of Acceptance
April 10, 2012     - Camera-ready copy submission due
June 4 or 5, 2012  - Workshop


Submission instructions
-----------------------

Authors are encouraged to submit papers up to 8 pages in length, as
per the instructions on the workshop homepage:
http://gaips.inesc-id.pt/~switwicki/msdm2012/. Each submission will be
reviewed by at least two Program Committee members. The review process
will be "single-blind"; thus authors do not have to remove their names
when submitting papers.


Organizing Committee
--------------------
Prashant Doshi        University of Georgia
Stefan Witwicki       INESC-ID, Instituto Superior Técnico / GAIPS
Jun-young Kwak        University of Southern California
Frans A. Oliehoek     Maastricht University
Akshat Kumar          University of Massachusetts Amherst


Program Committee
-----------------

Christopher Amato     Aptima, Inc.
Raphen Becker         Google
Daniel Bernstein      University of Massachusetts Amherst
Aurélie Beynier       University Pierre and Marie Curie (Paris 6)
Alan Carlin           University of Massachusetts Amherst
Brahim Chaib-Draa     Laval University
Georgios Chalkiadakis Technical University of Crete
François Charpillet   INRIA
Ed Durfee             University of Michigan
Alessandro Farinelli  University of Verona
Alberto Finzi         Università di Napoli
Claudia Goldman       GM Advanced Technical Center Israel
Michail Lagoudakis    Technical University of Crete
Janusz Marecki        IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Francisco S. Melo     INESC-ID Lisboa
Hala Mostafa          BBN Technologies
Abdel-Illah Mouaddib  Universit de Caen
Enrique Munoz De Cote National Institute of Astrophysics Optics and
Electronics, Mexico
Brenda Ng             Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Praveen Paruchuri     Carnegie Mellon University
David Pynadath        University of Southern California
Xia Qu                University of Georgia
Zinovi Rabinovich     Bar-Ilan University
Anita Raja            University of North Carolina at Charlott
Paul Scerri           Carnegie Mellon University
Jiaying Shen          SRI International, Inc.
Matthijs Spaan        Delft University of Technology
Katia Sycara          Carnegie Mellon University
Karl Tuyls            Maastricht University
Pradeep Varakantham   Singapore Management University
Jianhui Wu            Amazon
Makoto Yokoo          Kyushu University
Shlomo Zilberstein    University of Massachusetts Amherst