[agents] Call for Interest to ANAC 2014

[Katsuhide Fujita]

(Please, distribute it among potentially interested colleagues)

*** Call for Interest to ANAC 2014 ***

*** We would like to know your intention to participate in ANAC 2014!!! Please do so before the end of January 2014. ***
Visit http://www.itolab.nitech.ac.jp/ANAC2014 and give us your intention to participate.

*** ANAC2014 ****
The Fifth International Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC 2014)
To be held in conjunction with the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS 2014), Paris, France, 5th-9th May 2014.

*** Overview of ANAC2014 ***
The ANAC competition brings together researchers from the negotiation community and provides a unique benchmark for evaluating practical negotiation strategies in multi-issue domains. The four previous competitions have spawned novel research in AI in the field of autonomous agent design which are available to the wider research community. The focus of this year's competition is on nonlinear utility functions. The goals of the competition are 
* to encourage the design of practical negotiation agents that can proficiently negotiate against unknown opponents and in a variety of circumstances,
* to provide a benchmark for objectively evaluating different negotiation strategies,
* to explore different learning and adaptation strategies and opponent models, and
* to collect state-of-the-art negotiating agents and negotiation scenarios, and making them available to the wider research community.

*** Entrants ***
The aim for the entrants to the competition is to develop an autonomous negotiation agent. Performance of the agents will be evaluated in a tournament setting, where each agent is matched with all other submitted agents, and each pair of agents will negotiate in a number of non-linear negotiation scenarios. Negotiations are repeated several times to obtain statistically significant results. The winning agent will be the one with the highest overall score.

A negotiation scenario consists of a specification of the objectives and issues to be resolved by means of negotiation. This includes the preferences of both negotiating parties about the possible agreements. The preferences of a party are modelled using nonlinear, multi-issue utility functions.

*** Main updates with respect to ANAC 2013 ***
This year we extend the utility model to "nonlinear utility functions".

*** Venue ***
The conference will be held at the Paris Marriott Rive Gauche Hotel & Conference Center
17 Boulevard Saint Jacques Paris, 75014, France 

*** Organising Committee ***
Dr. Reyhan Aydogan, Delft University of Technology
Tim Baarslag, Delft University of Technology
Prof. Katsuhide Fujita, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology
Dr. Koen Hindriks, Delft University of Technology
Prof. Dr. Takayuki Ito, Nagoya Institute of Technology
Prof. Dr. Catholijn Jonker, Delft University of Technology


*** Prizes ***
Prizes will be announced. 

*** Contact ***
For any questions, the main contact is ito at nitech.ac.jp