[agents] Call for Papers: AAMAS 2020

[AAMAS 2020]

# Call for Papers: AAMAS 2020
Nineteenth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent
Systems
9-13 May 2020, Auckland, New Zealand
https://aamas2020.conference.auckland.ac.nz


## Important Dates
Abstract Submission: 12 November 2019 (23:59 UTC-12)
Full Paper Submission: 15 November 2019 (23:59 UTC-12)
Rebuttal Phase: 7-9 January 2020 (23:59 UTC-12)
Author Notification: 15 January 2020 (23:59 UTC-12)
JAAMAS Track Submission: 27 January 2020 (23:59 UTC-12)

## Conference Dates
Tutorials, Doctoral Consortium, Workshops: 9-10 May 2020
Main Conference: 11-13 May 2020


## Scope and Topics

AAMAS is the leading scientific conference for research in autonomous
agents and multi-agent systems.  The AAMAS conference series was initiated
in 2002 as the merging of three respected scientific meetings: the
International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS), the International
Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL), and the
International Conference on Autonomous Agents (AA).  The aim of the joint
conference is to provide a single, high-profile, internationally-respected
archival forum for scientific research in the theory and practice of
autonomous agents and multi-agent systems.

AAMAS 2020 is the 19th edition of the AAMAS conference, and the first time
AAMAS will be held in New Zealand.  The conference solicits papers
addressing original research on autonomous agents and their interaction,
including agents that interact with humans.  In addition to the main track,
there will be two special tracks: Blue Sky Ideas and JAAMAS.  Specific
details and topics of interest for these tracks appear below.

Topics of interest for the main track include (but are not limited to) the
following 10 areas:

Area 1 – Coordination, Organisations, Institutions and Norms
* Architectures for social reasoning
* Coordination and control models for multi-agent systems
* Monitoring agent societies
* Normative systems
* Organisations and institutions
* Policy, regulation and legislation
* Self-organisation
* Social networks
* Socio-technical systems
* Trust and reputation
* Values in multi-agent systems, including privacy, safety, security and
transparency

Area 2 – Engineering Multi-Agent Systems
* Development concerns, including deployment, scalability and complexity
* Empirical studies and industrial experience reports on engineering MAS
applications
* Formal methods and declarative technologies for specification,
verification and engineering of MAS
* Interoperability and integration
* Programming frameworks, languages, models and abstractions for all
aspects of MAS
* Software engineering methodologies and techniques for agent-based systems
* Tools and testbeds for evaluation of MAS

Area 3 – Humans and AI / Human-Agent Interaction
* Agent-based analysis of human interactions
* Agents competing and collaborating with humans
* Agents for improving human cooperative activities
* Groups of humans and agents
* Human-robot/agent interaction
* Multimodal interaction
* Multi-user/multi-agent interaction
* Social agent architectures
* Social agent models
* Socially interactive agents

Area 4 – Innovative Applications
* Challenges in moving agent-based technology to the real world
* Deployed applications of agent-based systems
* Emerging applications of agent-based systems
* Integrated applications of agent-based and other technologies
* User studies of deployed agent-based systems

Area 5 – Knowledge Representation, Reasoning and Planning
* Agent theories and models
* Coalition formation (non-strategic)
* Communication and argumentation
* Distributed problem solving
* Logics for agent reasoning
* Ontologies for agents
* Single- and multi-agent planning and scheduling
* Reasoning about action, plans and change in multi-agent systems
* Reasoning about knowledge, beliefs, goals, norms and strategies in
multi-agent systems
* Reasoning and problem solving in agent-based systems
* Teamwork, team formation, teamwork analysis
* Verification of multi-agent systems

Area 6 – Learning and Adaptation
* Adversarial machine learning
* Co-evolutionary algorithms
* Deep learning
* Evolutionary algorithms
* Learning agent-to-agent interactions (negotiation, trust, coordination)
* Learning agent capabilities (agent models, communication, observation)
* Multi-agent learning
* Reinforcement learning
* Reward structures for learning

Area 7 – Markets, Auctions, and Non-Cooperative Game Theory
* Auctions and mechanism design
* Bargaining and negotiation
* Behavioural game theory
* Game theory for practical applications
* Non-cooperative games: computation
* Non-cooperative games: theory & analysis

Area 8 – Modelling and Simulation of Societies
* Analysis of agent-based simulations
* Emergent behaviour
* Interactive simulation
* Modelling for agent-based simulation
* Simulation of complex systems
* Simulation techniques, tools and platforms
* Social simulation
* Validation of simulation systems
* Verification and validation of (simulated) agent-based systems

Area 9 – Robotics
* Explainability, trust and ethics for robots
* Failure recovery for robots
* Human-robot interaction and collaboration
* Knowledge representation and reasoning
* Long-term (or lifelong) autonomy
* Machine learning for robotics
* Mapping and localisation
* Multi-robot systems
* Networked systems and distributed robotics
* Robot control

Area 10 – Social Choice and Cooperative Game Theory
* Coalition formation (strategic)
* Cooperative games: computation
* Cooperative games: theory & analysis
* Social choice theory


## Information for Authors

AAMAS 2020 encourages submission of analytical, empirical, methodological,
technological, or perspective papers.  Analytical and empirical papers
should make clear the significance and relevance of their results to the
AAMAS community.  Similarly, methodological and technological papers should
make clear their scientific and technical contributions, and are expected
to demonstrate a thorough evaluation of their strengths and weaknesses in
practice.  It is strongly encouraged that papers focusing on specific agent
capabilities evaluate their techniques in the context of autonomous agent
architectures or multi-agent systems.  A thorough evaluation, conducted
from a theoretical or applied basis, is considered an essential component
of any submission.  Authors are also requested to pay particular attention
to discussing how their work relates to the state of the art in autonomous
agents and multi-agent systems research as evidenced in, for example,
previous AAMAS and related conferences and journals.  All submissions will
be rigorously peer reviewed and evaluated on the basis of the overall
quality of their technical contribution, including criteria such as
originality, soundness, relevance, significance, quality of presentation,
and understanding of the state of the art.

AAMAS 2020 seeks the submission of high-quality papers limited to 8 pages
in length in the IFAAMAS format, with any additional pages containing only
bibliographic references.  Reviews will be double blind; authors must avoid
including anything that can be used to identify themselves.  Please note
that submitting an abstract is required before submitting a full paper.
However, the abstracts will not be reviewed, and full papers must be
submitted for the review process to begin.  All work must be original,
i.e., must not have appeared in a conference proceedings, book or journal,
and may not be under review for another archival conference.  Papers will
be accepted as either full papers (8 pages + 1 page of references) or
extended abstracts (2 pages + 1 page of references).

Papers submitted to the main track must be designated by the authors into
one of the above 10 areas.  The chairs of this area will have
responsibility for the reviewing process.  In cases where the area chairs
recognise that a submission better fits another area, in consultation with
the program chairs, a submission may be transferred from one area to
another before reviewers are assigned.

In addition to submissions in the main track, AAMAS 2020 solicits papers in
two special tracks, described below.  The review process for the special
tracks will be similar to the main track, but with dedicated program
committee members and review criteria.

Detailed submission instructions can be found on the conference website:
https://aamas2020.conference.auckland.ac.nz

At least one of the authors of each accepted paper is required to register
(by the early registration deadline), attend and present the paper at the
conference.  A significant number of papers will be invited to submit
extended versions to the Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent
Systems (JAAMAS) for fast-track review.

General Chairs:
Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni (LIP6 - Sorbonne University, France)
Gita Sukthankar (University of Central Florida, USA)

Program Chairs:
Bo An (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
Neil Yorke-Smith (Delft University of Technology, Netherlands)

Blue Sky Ideas Track (Chairs: Alessandro Ricci, University of Bologna and
Juan Rodríguez-Aguilar, IIIA-CSIC)
The emphasis of this special track is on visionary ideas, long-term
challenges, new research opportunities and controversial debate.  It serves
as an incubator for innovative, risky and provocative ideas, and aims to
provide a forum for publishing and presenting these without being
constrained by the result-oriented standards followed in the review process
of the main track of the conference.  Research visions and ideas could
cross disciplines, envisioning new ideas and directions relevant for the
AAMAS research community fostered by inter-disciplinary and
trans-disciplinary viewpoints.  We encourage papers to reflect on the
future of the research area and its community within the broader AI and
computer science landscape.  Therefore, we invite submissions to focus on:
novel, overlooked or under-represented application areas to which agent
research may contribute; potential paths for agent research to contribute
to the state of the art in other AI and CS areas and the other way around;
and unexplored theoretical grounds for agent research.  Overall, we aim at
papers that help guide the AAMAS community to achieve in the coming years a
leading position within AI and CS research.  It is worth noting that this
track is not the right place for preliminary work, or for papers reporting
on existing approaches.  Reviewers will assess papers based on the novelty
of the ideas presented, the rigour with which they are developed, and the
level of critical reflection applied in the exploration of these ideas.
Submissions are limited to 4 pages in length in the IFAAMAS format, with
any additional pages containing only bibliographic references.  Accepted
papers will appear in the conference proceedings and will be presented
orally at the conference.

JAAMAS Track (Chairs: Pinar Yolum, Utrecht University and Rym
Zalila-Wenkstern, University of Texas at Dallas)
AAMAS 2020 will also accept for presentation papers that have appeared in
the Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems (JAAMAS) in the 12
months period preceding the AAMAS notification date (January 2020).  These
articles also have the option to publish an extended abstract (maximum two
pages in the IFAAMAS format, excluding bibliography) in the conference
proceedings.  The articles must be original and not previously published as
a full paper in an archival conference.  The submission process for the
JAAMAS track is separate from the main paper submission process, and is
later (deadline late January).  Authors of eligible JAAMAS papers will be
contacted by email in the second half of November.  For details on JAAMAS:
http://www.springer.com/computer/ai/journal/10458

Local Chairs:
Quan Bai (University of Tasmania, Australia)
Jiamou Liu (University of Auckland, New Zealand)

Note about publication date: The official publication date is the date the
proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library.  This date may
be up to two weeks prior to the start of the conference.  Authors take note
that the official publication date affects the deadline for any patent
filings related to published work.


## General Information

All full papers accepted to the main track and the special tracks will be
presented in parallel technical sessions.  All accepted papers will be
published in the conference proceedings and indexed in the ACM Digital
Library, and will be permanently available, open access, after the
conference at: http://www.ifaamas.org/proceedings.html

In addition to the conference tracks, AAMAS 2020 will include:
* Workshops
* Tutorials
* Doctoral consortium
* System demonstrations
* Poster presentations for full papers and extended abstracts
* Invited talks and panel discussions
* Community meeting

The submission processes for the workshops and system demonstrations are
separate from the main technical paper submission process.  Information
will be posted on the relevant web pages at:
https://aamas2020.conference.auckland.ac.nz


## Policies

Policy on multiple and previous submissions
Besides the JAAMAS track, authors may not submit any paper to AAMAS 2020
that has already appeared in an archival forum.  Further, authors must
ensure that no submission to AAMAS 2020 is under review for another
archival forum between the AAMAS 2020 submission and notification dates.

Policy on harassment at the conference environment
IFAAMAS is committed to organising the AAMAS conference and its affiliated
events in an environment that is free of harassment for everyone involved:
delegates, organisers, conference workers and reviewers.  All participants
in IFAAMAS events are asked to embrace our intention to foster a
harassment-free scientific community, and to understand that IFAAMAS will
respond appropriately to incidents of harassment if they occur.  The
complete IFAAMAS harassment policy is available at:
http://www.ifaamas.org/harassment.html


For further details about AAMAS 2020 and submission instructions:
https://aamas2020.conference.auckland.ac.nz
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