[agents] 2nd CFP Optimisation in Multi-Agent Systems (OPTMAS) @ AAMAS 2013

Tue Jan 15 11:42:24 EST 2013

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

               	      CFP: Sixth International Workshop on

          	Optimisation in Multi-Agent Systems (OPTMAS VI)
          	^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

                      To be held in conjunction with the

   Twelfth International Conference on Autonomous and Multi-Agent Systems
       				     (AAMAS 2013)

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

Workshop Website
---------------------------
optmas2013.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.

Important dates
-----------------------

* February, 9, 2013 - Submission of contributions to workshops
(deadline extended)

* February 27, 2013 - Workshop paper acceptance notification

* March 8, 2013 - Submission of camera-ready version

* May 6 or 7, 2013 - Workshop takes place in conjunction with AAMAS 2013.

Invited Talk
------------------------

Invited speech given by Prof. Kagan Tumer
(http://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~ktumer/)

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 algorithms 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 include
(but are not limited to):

- Techniques to model and solve optimisation problems in which the actors
are partly or completely distributed and can only communicate with their peers.

- 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.

- Techniques to manage and disseminate relevant information across
different agents.

- Dealing with privacy concerns: solving complex optimization problems
while leaking as little private information as possible

- Problems that require anytime algorithms.

- Algorithms that need to provide guarantees on the quality of the solution.

- Mechanisms whose properties can be significantly affected if the
solution computed is not the optimal one.

- Techniques to deal with optimizations that have to be repeated with
possibly only slight changes in the input data.

- 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.

- Techniques to deal with agents that are tied to physical devices.
This involves computation and communication constraints that need to
be considered in the coordination techniques, as well as the
possibility of failures of the devices and communication links.

- Benchmarks for optimisation algorithms in dynamic environments.

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

Submission
-----------------

Submissions should conform to the LNCS Springer format,  Authors are
encouraged to use the following style file
ftp://ftp.springer.de/pub/tex/latex/llncs/latex2e/llncs2e.zip or see
http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0 for more
details.

Submission should not be more than *16* pages long (excluding
appendices and assuming the LNCS format above).

Authors can submit their papers through the OPTMAS 2013 Easychair
submission site:
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=optmas2013

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.

Publication
-----------------

Best papers from OPTMAS 2008 and OPTMAS 2009 were selected for
publication in the
special issue on Optimisation in Multi-Agent System of the Journal of
Autonomous and Multiagent Systems.

We have negotiated a special issue on Optimisation in Multi-Agent
System with the Computer Journal, and we are now selecting best papers
from OPTMAS 2010, OPTMAS 2011 and OPTMAS 2012.
We plan to continue this initiative for the following editions of OPTMAS.

Organizing committee
--------------------------------

Dr. Jesús Cerquides Bueno, IIIA - CSIC, Spain
Dr. Alessandro Farinelli, University of Verona, Italy
Dr. Sarvapali D. Ramchurn University of Southampton, UK
Dr. Juan Antonio Rodriguez-Aguilar,IIIA - CSIC, Spain
Dr. Meritxell Vinyals, University of Southampton, UK
Dr. Archie Chapman, University of Sydney, Austrlia

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

Roie		        Zivan		        Ben Gurion University of the Negev
Sam		        Miller		        University of Southampton
Long		        Tran-Thanh	University of Southampton
Kate		        Larson		University of Waterloo
Maria		Polukarov	        University of Southampton
Toni		        Penya-Alba	IIIA-CSIC
Bo		        An		        Chinese Academy of Sciences
Pradeep		Varakantham	Singapore Management University
Greet		Vanden Berghe	KaHo Sint-Lieven
Akshat		Kumar		UMass Amherst
Chongjie 	        Zhang		University of Massachusetts Amherst
Francesco	        Delle Fave	        University of Southern California
Robert N.	        Lass		        Drexel University
William		Yeoh		        New Mexico State University
Sven		        Koenig		University of Southern California
Sameer		Singh		University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Onn		        Shehory		IBM Haifa Research Lab
Emma		Rollon		Department of Software, Technical University of
Catalonia, Barcelona
Makoto		Yokoo		Kyushu University
Patricia	        Gutierrez	        IIIA CSIC
Katsutoshi	        Hirayama 	        Kobe University
Ana L. C.	        Bazzan		Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul
Hala		        Mostafa		BBN Technologies
Paul		        Scerri		Carnegie Mellon University
Yoonheui	        Kim		        University of Mass. at Amherst
Georgios	        Chalkiadakis	Technical University of Crete
Marc		        Pujol-Gonzalez	IIIA-CSIC

-- 
Dr. Alessandro Farinelli
Computer Science Department
University of Verona
Ca' Vignal 2, Strada Le Grazie 15, 37134 Verona, Italy
Phone: +39 045 802 7072
Fax: +39 045 802 7068
E-mail: alessandro.farinelli at univr.it
Web Page http://profs.sci.univr.it/~farinelli/