[agents] 2nd CFP: MassiveMAS at AAMAS 2015 (Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems at Scale)

[Long Tran-Thanh]

[Apologies for multiple copies of this announcement]

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Preliminary Call for papers
MassiveMAS 2015
First International Workshop on
Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems at Scale
https://massivemas.wordpress.com/
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Held in conjunction with AAMAS 2015
May 4-8, 2015, Istanbul, Turkey
The MassiveMAS workshop will take place on May 4 or 5
------------------------------------------------------------------------

*Workshop description

Many recent real-world problems could be modelled as a massive multi-agent systems. Examples range from smart grids and crowdsourcing systems, to financial markets (e.g., high frequency trading) and extremely large data systems (where the massive amount of data induces the large-scale property). Some of the problems that demand solutions within these domains are well known to this community, and include strategic planning, coordination, or task allocation. However, when small scale MAS solutions (and so called toy problems) are ported to large-scale MAS they typically suffer from scaling issues, unreliability or their solutions need assumptions whose results are inconclusive at best. Such issues arise due to the large number of participating agents (e.g., hundreds of thousands of homeowners in smart grids, or crowd-workers in crowdsourcing systems), or the large amount of data agents have to deal with (e.g., real-time trading data in high frequency trading, or large amount of entries in databases). Currently, such challenges are typically being addressed by the community either by limiting the agents' reasoning capabilities (assuming bounded rationality, suboptimal planning or limited information) or by limiting the agents' influence to local neighborhoods, significantly decreasing their action space. However, in this new ever-connected world, many applications, such as smart grids, or high frequency trading systems, require full agent models integrated at big scales that can exert their influence more widely. Thus, existing techniques, that rely on limiting either the agents' reasoning or action space, will fail in efficiently tackling the problems that occur in the abovementioned systems at scale.

To this end, this workshop aims to examine the major challenges induced by bringing together a nascent community of researchers from different research areas to genuinely discuss how to tackle these problems within large-scale autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. In particular, we aim to focus on addressing the challenges of adapting existing agent technologies to large-scale systems, and on novel approaches and solutions, that provide new, more efficient ways to describe the behaviour of agent-based systems at scale. These technical issues and the key discussion points to be addressed by researchers, include, but are not limited to, the following:

Novel models:
   Meta-agent based agent models: models with meta-agents that act on the behalf of groups of agents
   Community-based agent models: agent-type clustering and bootstrapping
   Dynamic, open system models: models with dynamically changing agent populations and behaviours
Computational aspects:
   Large-scale coordination & planning
   Large-scale single and multi-agent learning
   New performance metrics, analysis, and evaluation framework for massive MAS algorithms
Simulations:
   Large-scale simulation frameworks
   Real-time simulation at scale
   Benchmarking existing massive MAS techniques
Applications:
   Large-scale smart grids and energy systems
   Agent technologies for Big Data
   Large-scale crowdsourcing systems
   Large-scale voting systems
   Complex financial systems & high frequency trading
   Agent technologies for security
   Agent technologies for disaster management
   Agent technologies for social networks

*Important dates and deadlines

Deadline for the submission of full papers: February 11
Notification of acceptance/rejection: March 10
Deadline for the receipt of camera-ready papers: March 19
Workshop: May 4 or 5, 2015 (TBC)

*Submission instructions

Authors should submit full papers electronically in PS or PDF format on
EasyChair (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=massivemas2015).

Papers must be written in English, with a maximum length of 14 pages
(excluding references). Please format papers according to the Springer
LNCS Style (http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0).

Templates for Word and Latex are available. The receipt of submissionswill be acknowledged by email.
Submitted papers will be reviewed by the program committee.

Note: Workshop attendees need not register for the main AAMAS conference,but are encouraged to do so.

*Publication

TBA

*Advisory Committee:

Ana Bazzan, Instituto de Informatica, UFRGS, Brazil
Nick Jennings, University of Southampton, UK
Peter Stone, University of Texas Austin, USA

*Program Committee (confirmed):

Muddassar Alam, ,University of Southampton, UK
Giorgios Chalkiadakis, Technical University of Crete, Greece
Thach-Thao Duong, Griffith University and NICTA QLD, Australia
The Anh Han, Tesside University, UK
Trong Nghia Hoang, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Ramachandra Kota, IBM Research India, India
Cam-tu Nguyen, Nanjing University, China
Trung Thanh Nguyen, Masdar Institute of Technology, UAE
Oliver Parson, University of Southampton, UK
Tao Qin, Microsoft Research Asia, China
Amirthalingam Ramanan, University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka
Lampros C. Stavrogiannis, University of Southampton, UK
Botond Szabó, CREST, France
Ngoc Cuong Truong, University of Southampton, UK
William Yeoh, New Mexico State University, USA
Jia Yuan Yu, IBM Research Ireland
Dengji Zhao, University of Southampton, UK


*Workshop Organizers

Enrique Munoz de Cote
INAOE, Mexico

Matthijs Spaan
Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

Long Tran-Thanh
University of Southampton, UK

Matteo Venanzi
University of Southampton, UK

*Contact

Please contact Long Tran-Thanh (l.tran-thanh at soton dot ac dot uk) with any
inquiries.

Long Tran-Thanh
Senior research fellow,
--
Agents, Interaction, and Complexity Group,
Electronics and Computer Science,
University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ
--
http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ltt08r
tel: +44 (0) 2380593256