[agents] Call for Participation - Automated Negotiating Agent Competition - ANAC 2018 at IJCAI

[Reyhan Aydogan]

*The Ninth International Automated Negotiating Agent Competition (ANAC
2018)*



Website: http://web.tuat.ac.jp/~katfuji/ANAC2018/

Held at IJCAI 2018 in Stockholm, Sweden, in July 2018 as part of the IJCAI

competition track.



*Motivation, impact, and expected outcomes*

The Automated Negotiating Agent Competition (ANAC) is an international
tournament
that has been running since 2010 to bring together researchers from the
automated negotiation, multi-agent, and human-agent communities ANAC
provides a unique benchmark for evaluating practical negotiation strategies
in multi-issue domains.



The previous competitions have spawned novel research in AI in the field of
autonomous agent design which are available to the wider research
community.



This year, we pose the following negotiation research challenges:



   - *Repeated multilateral  negotiation for arbitrary domains* (Genius
   framework <http://ii.tudelft.nl/genius/>)
   - *Negotiation strategies for the Diplomacy game *(Bandana framework
   <http://www.iiia.csic.es/~davedejonge/bandana>)
   - *Human-agent negotiation* (IAGO framework
   <http://people.ict.usc.edu/~mell/IAGO>)



We invite innovative and novel agent strategies to compete in ANAC

2018. After the competition, submitted agents will be made available to

the negotiation research community as part of a negotiating agent

repository within the aforementioned frameworks. Both Genius and all

agents thus submitted will fall under the GNU license agreement
<https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/license.html> GPL

version 3.



The finalists are very welcome to submit an article explaining their
negotiation strategy to the ACAN Workshop at AAMAS/IJCAI/ECAI/ICML 2018 and
present their strategy at the workshop, which will be held in conjunction
with IJCAI in Stockholm.

*Challenges (details at **the **ANAC website
<http://ii.tudelft.nl/negotiation/index.php/Automated_Negotiating_Agents_Competition_(ANAC)>*
*)*

1. *Repeated multilateral negotiation for arbitrary domains
<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XDf2XqrDaytm1f4_AdVceedD5tfEjurn-bhQCUU5XGg/edit>*

In multilateral negotiation league,  entrants will to design and implement
an intelligent negotiating agent, which negotiates with two opponents and
is able to learn from its previous negotiations. The participants will
develop their agents in the GENIUS platform <http://ii.tudelft.nl/genius/>.
Challenges regarding this league are to design winning strategies for
bidding, opponent modeling and bid acceptance strategies when negotiating
repeatedly with agents in a multilateral setting. More info here
<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XDf2XqrDaytm1f4_AdVceedD5tfEjurn-bhQCUU5XGg/edit>
.

2. Negotiation strategies for the Diplomacy game



In the Diplomacy game league, entrants to the competition have to develop a
negotiation algorithm for the game of Diplomacy. Diplomacy is a strategy
game for 7 players. Each player has a number of armies and fleet positioned
on a map of Europe and the goal is to conquer half of the "Supply Centers".
What makes this game very interesting and different from other board games,
however, is that players need to negotiate with each other in order to play
well. Players may team up and create plans together to defeat other players.



Every participant in this competition must implement a negotiation
algorithm using the BANDANA framework
<http://www.iiia.csic.es/~davedejonge/bandana/>. This negotiation algorithm
will then be combined with an existing non-negotiating agent (the D-Brane
Strategic Module) to form a complete negotiating Diplomacy player.

3. Human-agent negotiation



The Human-Agent Negotiation league  is proposed in order to further explore
the strategies, nuances, and difficulties in creating realistic and
efficient agents whose primary purpose is to negotiate with humans.
 Previous work on human-agent negotiation has revealed the importance of
several features not commonly present in agent-agent negotiation, including
retractable and partial offers, emotion exchange, preference elicitation
strategies, favors-and-ledgers behavior, and myriad other topics.  To
understand these features and better create agents that use them, this
competition is designed to be a showcase for the newest work in the
negotiating agent community.



The Human-Agent Negotiation competition will involve each entrant submitting
an agent that will be tested against human subjects in a study run through
the University of Southern California.  All agents must be compliant with the
IAGO <http://people.ict.usc.edu/~mell/IAGO> (Interactive Arbitration Guide
Online) framework <http://people.ict.usc.edu/~mell/IAGO> and API, which
will allow standardization of the agents and efficient running of subjects
on MTurk.  Agents will all be run on the same set of multi-issue bargaining
tasks.

For details, you can contact mell at ict.usc.edu.



*Prizes*

The prize money will be at least 1000 euros divided over the leagues. The
prize will be shared among the top agents.



*Competition Schedule*

Deadline for submitting agents: *May 21st, 2018*



Please fill out the intention form to participate

(http://tinyurl.com/ANAC2018Intention
<https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdjVRoUP3CRYt_CGSyrqqpLVuI-dj8USZ_NSS7sbN3FsRnUmw/viewform>)
to be added to mailing list and

receive updates and answers to frequently asked questions.



*References on ANAC*

Several papers have been published about the setup and results of

previous ANAC competitions:



   - The First Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC 2010)
   <http://ii.tudelft.nl/negotiation/images/3/34/ANAC2010.pdf> (ext. link
   <http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-24696-8_7>)


   - The Second Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC2011)
   <http://mmi.tudelft.nl/sites/default/files/The%20Second%20Automated%20Negotiating%20Agents-pub.pdf>
   (ext. link <http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30737-9_11>)


   - Evaluating Practical Negotiating Agents: Results and Analysis of the
   2011 International Competition
   <http://mmi.tudelft.nl/sites/default/files/aij-anac2011-pub_0.pdf> (ext.
   link <http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.artint.2012.09.004>)


   - A Baseline for Non-Linear Bilateral Negotiations: The full results of
   the agents competing in ANAC 2014
   <http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/tb1m13/pub/A_Baseline_for_Non-Linear_Bilateral_Negotiations-The_full_results_of_the_agents_competing_in_ANAC_2014.pdf>
   (ext. link <http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/399235/>)


   - The Automated Negotiating Agents Competition, 2010-2015
   <http://homepages.cwi.nl/~baarslag/pub/The_Automated_Negotiating_Agents_Competition-2010-2015.pdf>
   (ext. link
   <http://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/2609>)



*Main Organising Committee:*



   - Dr. Reyhan Aydogan, Ozyegin University & Delft University of Technology
   - Dr. Tim Baarslag, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI)
   - Prof. Dr. Katsuhide Fujita, Tokyo University of Agriculture and
   Technology
   - Prof. Dr. Takayuki Ito, Nagoya Institute of Technology
   - Prof. Dr. Catholijn Jonker, Delft University of Technology



*League Organising Committee:*

   - Dr. Reyhan Aydogan, Ozyegin University & Delft University of Technology
   - Dr. Tim Baarslag, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI)
   - Prof. Dr. Katsuhide Fujita, Tokyo University of Agriculture and
   Technology
   - Dr. Dave de Jonge, Western Sydney University
   - Johnathan Mell, The University of Southern California



*Website URL*

For more details, please visit the competition webpage :

   - http://web.tuat.ac.jp/~katfuji/ANAC2018/
   - General ANAC website: http://ii.tudelft.nl/anac/
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