Introduction

The Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems (AAMAS) conference series brings together researchers from around the world to share the latest advances in the field. It was initiated in 2002 as a merger of three highly successful related events: the International Conference on Autonomous Agents (AGENTS), the International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS), and the International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL). The AAMAS conference series provides a marquee, high-profile forum for research in the theory and practice of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. AAMAS 2002, the first of the series, was held in Bologna, followed by AAMAS 2003 in Melbourne, AAMAS 2004 in New York, AAMAS 2005 in Utrecht, AAMAS 2006 in Hakodate, AAMAS 2007 in Honolulu, AAMAS 2008 in Estoril and AAMAS 2009 in Budapest. You are now about to enter the proceedings of AAMAS 2010 as held in Toronto, Canada.

In addition to the general track for the AAMAS 2010 conference, submissions were invited to two special tracks: a robotics track and a track on virtual agents The aims of these special tracks was to give researchers from these areas a strong focus and to provide a forum for discussion and debate within the encompassing structure of AAMAS, which we hoped to guarantee by appointing leaders in the field as track chairs (Michael Beetz for the robotics track, Stacy Marsella for the virtual agents track). The special track chairs managed both the reviewer allocation and the review process itself with their own chosen PC members: decisions concerning acceptance of papers were taken in discussion and in full agreement with the AAMAS 2010 Program Co-chairs.

Only full paper submissions were solicited for AAMAS 2010.  The general, robotics, and virtual agents tracks received 570,  57, and 58 submissions respectively, for a total of 685 submissions, a total that is slightly higher compared to the previous AAMAS.

After a thorough and exciting review process, eventually 163 papers were selected for publication as full papers each of which was allocated 8 pages in the proceedings.  Another 136 papers were selected as Extended Abstracts and allocated 2 pages each in the proceedings.  Both full papers and extended abstracts are presented as posters during the conference

Of the submissions, 178 have a student as first author, which indicates an exciting future for the field. Representation under all submissions of topics (measured by first keyword) was broad, with top scores in areas of `classic AI' such as learning (13 submitted papers) and planning (18), and areas stressing the multi-agent aspect, such as teamwork, coalition formation, and coordination (12), auctions and mechanism design (12), robot teams, multi-robot systems and robot coordination (16), distributed problem solving (21), and game theory (22).

AAMAS 2010 is unique, in offering a number of distinct opportunities to co-locate activities with the International Workshop on Description Logics (DL), the International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS), the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS), International Conference on the Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR), and the International Workshop on Non-Monotonic Reasoning (NMR). Not only has this led to opportunities to co-register for several of these events but, during the AAMAS 2010 conference, there are also joint KR/AAMAS paper sessions with contributions from both conferences, and two joint ICAPS/AAMAS paper sessions. On top of that, AAMAS is hosting joint ICAPS/AAMAS demos, and invited keynote presentations for both KR/AAMAS and for ICAPS/AAMAS.

We thank the organisers of the 2010 KR and ICAPS conferences who have made these joint sessions possible. We also thank the PC and SPC members of AAMAS 2010 for their thoughtful reviews and extensive discussions. We thank Michael Beetz and Stacy Marsella for making the robotics and the virtual agents tracks a success. We thank Alex Rogers for putting together the proceedings. Last but not the least, we thank David Shield for his patience and support regarding Confmaster during every stage between the the submission process and the actual AAMAS 2010 event.

Wiebe van der Hoek and Gal A. Kaminka,
AAMAS 2010 Program Co-Chairs  

Michael Luck and Sandip Sen,
AAMAS 2010 General Co-Chairs