[agents] Prelim. CFP Human-Agent Interaction Workshop at AAMAS 2013

[Sarvapali Ramchurn]

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			CFP: Second International Workshop on
				
			Human-Agent Interaction Design and Models
				
			takes place in conjunction with
				
				AAMAS 2013
			6th-7th May, St. Paul, Minnesota, USA
				
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As the boundaries of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems continue to expand, there is an increasing need for agents to interact with humans.  In fact, the field of multi-agent systems has matured from conceptual models to applications within the real-world (e.g., Energy and sustainability, disaster management, or health care).  One significant challenge that arises when transitioning these conceptual models to applications is addressing the inevitable human interaction.  To this end, this workshop examines major challenges at the intersection of human-agent systems. In particular, we focus on the challenges of designing and modelling human-agent interaction. While the former takes a human-centric view of human-agent systems and focuses on the design of human-agent coordination mechanisms, trust issues in human-agent interaction, interaction techniques, and human activity recognition, the latter is concerned with finding better models of human behaviour in a variety of settings so that autonomous and multi-agent systems can appropriately interact with human agents (e.g., agent-human negotiation strategies or health care agents encouraging physical therapy for a variety of recovering patients).  

Hence, this workshop aims to establish a forum for researchers to discuss common issues that arise in designing and modelling human-agent interaction in different domains.


Invited talk: TBA


Topics Covered 
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In designing multi-agent systems applications where such applications involve humans, it is important to consider the key principles by which the interaction between agents and humans will be established. In particular, the technical issues to be addressed by researchers, and which will be the key discussion points, at this workshop include but are not limited to:

- Flexible autonomy – how should the delegation of tasks to agents be performed such that the right degree of autonomy be given to individual agents or teams of such agents to optimise the performance of tasks by a human controller or teams of humans interacting with (teams of) agents.

- Trust between humans and agents – when humans delegate tasks to agents or vice-versa, they need to be able to capture the uncertainty in the other party being able to correctly complete tasks. Such uncertainty may be modelled using  past interactions (trust) or information gathered from other agents (reputation). Developing effective trust and reputation models and mechanisms for human-agent interaction is therefore key to establishing long term relationships between humans and agents.

- Presentation and interaction techniques – to allow users  to understand the actions of large collections of agents as they reason and act on behalf of users.

- Human activity recognition – to recognise human activity to allow agents to reason about human interaction so they might exploit this understanding to augment and support the action of users.

- Enhanced models of human behaviour and theory of human behaviour

- Relationships between human behaviour models and their assumptions

- Comparison of approaches in applying models of human behaviour (e.g., bounded rational or psychological models)

- Applications of human behaviour models

- Cooperative and competitive agent-human systems

- Behavioural game theory

- Techniques for learning human behaviour (e.g., machine learning, crowdsourcing, and human computation)

- Evaluation techniques for models of human behaviour

- Techniques for model selection or augmenting agent learning through human modelling

- Benchmarks and evaluation methodologies for evaluating agent-human interactions


Important dates 
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- January 30, 2013 - Submission deadline.
- March 8, 2013 - Notification of acceptance.
- May 6-7, 2013 -  Workshop takes place.


Submission Instructions 
------------------------


Submissions should conform to the LNCS Springer format,  Authors are
encouraged to use the style file found here  or see
http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0 for more
details.

Submissions may be of two types:

Long papers: These are full-length research papers detailing work in
progress or work that could potentially be published at a major
conference. These should not be more than *16* pages long (excluding
appendices and assuming the LNCS format above).

Short papers: These are position papers or demo papers that describe
either a project on human-agent systems, an application that has not yet
been evaluated, or initial work. These should not be more than *8* pages
long (excluding appendices and assuming the LNCS format above).

Authors can submit their papers through the HAIDM 2013 Easychair
submission site at: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=haidm2013



Review 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.


Organising Committee 
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- Sarvapali D. Ramchurn, University of Southampton, UK 
- Rajiv Maheswaran, University of Southern California, USA 
- Rong Yang, University of Southern California, USA 
- Joel Fischer, University of Nottingham, UK 
- Long Tran-Thanh, University of Southampton, UK

Programme Committee
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TBA