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Introduction The ubiquity, distribution, and connectedness of contemporary computer systems enable them to provide the services that are required by our information-rich society, but this has come at the expense of a dramatic increase in their size, complexity, and diversity. To provide timely services with required quality, the computer systems must interact with one another and with humans; and characterizing the participants as agents provides a convenient and powerful abstraction for designing and understanding the interactions. Agent technologies thus play essential roles in the design of complex, distributed, and service-oriented systems. The technologies govern the nature and character of the interactions, as well as the means by which the participants comprehend, coordinate, enable, implement, and cause the interactions. The AAMAS 2008 program addresses and advances the theory and practice of all these technologies. Agents and multiagent systems also introduce a paradigm shift in the way systems are analyzed, designed, and implemented by conceptualizing the system components as autonomous entities. The paradigm shift in turn addresses complexity, distribution, and interaction. Concepts of agents and multiagent systems are shaping landscapes of basic and applied research, including social simulation, games, pervasive and ubiquitous computing, robotics, user interfaces, computer-mediated collaboration, electronic commerce, information retrieval, education and training, and autonomic computing. All of these research areas are represented in the AAMAS 2008 program. The Autonomous Agents and Multiagent 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 single, high-profile forum for research in the theory and practice of autonomous agents and multiagent 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 , and AAMAS 2008 in Estoril. One of our main aims this year was to carry out some re-engineering of the topics addressed at the conference. Like all communities, the AAMAS community has evolved over the years, and some areas of research that were strongly represented as part of the events from which AAMAS was formed have become more weakly represented as time has gone on. Two such areas are virtual agents and robotics. In order to encourage submissions in these areas, AAMAS 2008 instituted special tracks for Virtual Agents and Multi-Robots, with Elisabeth André and Pedro Lima as respective chairs. These special tracks were treated identically to the Main Track, but had Program Committee and Senior Program Committee members chosen for their specific expertise in these areas. Agent System Development issues have also had a relatively small place at AAMAS in recent years. Special care was taken to recruit suitable Program Committee and Senior Program Committee members in this area, and to match them carefully to papers. In addition some special events were introduced into the program: a panel on the Future of Software Engineering and Multi Agent Systems, and a meeting of IEEE FIPA, the standards body for agent systems and a part of the IEEE Standards committee. Another innovation this year was to allow submission of four page “short papers”, with this replacing the acceptance of lower quality long papers as two or three page posters. The intention was to attract high quality papers that either reported smaller but interesting and complete results, or exciting preliminary work that was as yet lacking in the evaluation or other details expected of a full paper at AAMAS. Some papers submitted as full papers were also accepted as short papers, but were judged explicitly against the short paper criteria. AAMAS 2008 received a total of 721 submissions for the main conference, 65 of these were submitted to the Virtual Agents track and 41 to the Robotics track. Of the total number of submissions, 81 were short papers. The submissions came from 20 countries. 298 of the papers were from Europe, 244 from North America , and 179 from the rest of the world. Each paper was reviewed by at least three program committee members (guided by a senior program committee member). 141 papers were accepted as full 8-page papers (an acceptance rate of 22 %). Of the papers submitted as short papers, 22 (an acceptance rate of 27 %) were accepted as short papers and an additional 97 papers (15 %) that were submitted as long papers were accepted as short 4-page papers. Thus, overall, we have 119 short papers. AAMAS prides itself on being a nurturing environment for students working in the area. We are delighted, therefore, that there is a strong student presence among authors. 59 % of the long papers and 67 % of short papers submitted had a student as the primary author, with a 25 % acceptance rate for long papers, 33 % acceptance for short papers submitted as such, and 15 % accepted as short papers, though submitted as long. The AAMAS 2008 program is organized so that all accepted papers, both full length and short, will be presented at a poster session. Full length papers will additionally be presented in oral sessions. We consider poster presentations as an important form of detailed technical exchange which complements the oral presentations. In addition to the submitted papers, the main conference includes three invited talks. These are:
Besides the main conference program, the five-day AAMAS event consists of two days of workshops and tutorials, with a total of 10 tutorials and 27 workshops. The three day main conference includes a separate industry track with 13 papers, demonstration sessions with 34 demonstrations, a small exhibition, and a panel on the future of Software Engineering and Multi Agent Systems. A doctoral consortium preceeds the workshops and tutorials. These and other conference elements are the result of great efforts on the part of many dedicated volunteers. We are grateful to all the AAMAS 2008 conference officials and those who worked with them to put together such a successful research meeting. The chairs would like to thank all of the Program Committee and Senior Program Committee members for their hard work putting together this year's program. Overall, the reviews were quite detailed and the reviewers were very responsive during the discussion phase. We are especially grateful to Franziska Klügl for her hard work in assembling this proceedings. Lin Padgham and David Parkes, Program co-Chairs
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AAMAS Awards There are a number of awards associated with the AAMAS conference, some of which are known in advance, and some of which are announced at the conference. The list of the awards to be made at AAMAS 2008 is as follows: ACM SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award The ACM SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award is an annual award for excellence in research in the area of autonomous agents. The award is intended to recognize researchers in autonomous agents whose current work is an important influence on the field. The award is an official ACM award, funded by an endowment created by ACM SIGART from the proceeds of previous Autonomous Agents conferences. Candidates for the award are nominated through an open nomination process. The 2008 ACM SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award recipient is Yoav Shoham . He will be presenting a plenary talk entitled Computer Science and Game Theory IFAAMAS Influential Paper Award The International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems set up an influential paper award in 2006 to recognize publications that have made seminal contributions to the field. Such papers represent the best and most influential work in the area of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. These papers might, therefore, have proved a key result, led to the development of a new sub-field, demonstrated a significant new application or system, or simply presented a new way of thinking about a topic that has proved influential. The award is open to any paper that was published at least 10 years before the award is made. The paper can have been published in any journal, conference, or workshop. The award is funded by the Agent Theories, Architectures and Languages foundation. The 2008 IFAAMAS Influential Paper Award paper was not available at the time of going to press. Previous awards are as follows: 2007 J. S. Rosenschein and M. R. Genesereth (1985) “Deals Among Rational Agents”, Proceedings of the 9th International JointConference on Artificial Intelligence , Los Angeles , California , August 1985, pages 91-99. A. Rao and M. Georgeff (1991) “Modelling rational agents within a BDI-architecture” Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning , Cambridge, MA, pages 473-484. B. J. Grosz and S. Kraus (1996) „Collaborative Plans for Complex Group Actions”, Artificial Intelligence 86, pages 269-358. 2006 Cohen, P. R. and Levesque, H. (1990) “Intention is choice with commitment”, Artificial Intelligence , 42(2-3), pages 213-261 Davis , R. and Smith, R. (1983) “Negotiation as a Metaphor for Distributed Problem Solving”, Artificial Intelligence , 20(1), pages 63-109.
The IFAAMAS Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award This award was started in 2007 and is named for Professor Victor Lesser, a long standing member of the AAMAS community who has graduated a large number of outstanding PhD students in the area. To be eligible for the 2008 award, a dissertation had to have been written as part of a PhD awarded in 2007, and had to be nominated by the supervisor with three supporting references. Selection is based on originality, depth, impact and written quality, supported by quality publications. The 2008 IFAAMAS Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award recipient is Radu Jurca for the dissertation entitled “Truthful Reputation Mechanisms for Online Systems”.
Pragnesh Jay Modi Best Student Paper Award The Pragnesh Jay Modi Best Student Paper Award is made annually at the AAMAS conference to the paper that is judged to be the best paper at the conference whose main author is registered as a student at the time of paper submission. Typically the student is registered for a PhD, although undergraduate and masters student papers may also be considered. The winning paper may have multiple authors, not all required to be students, but to be eligible, the main author of the paper must be a student. The award is named for Pragnesh Jay Modi (1975--2007), an active and influential member of the AAMAS research community who died tragically young in April 2007. Jay obtained his PhD from the University of Southern California in 2003, and at the time of his death was a junior Faculty member at Drexel University , Philadelphia . Jay's PhD thesis has been foundational in the area of distributed constraint optimization (DCOP), and among his many accomplishments were an NSF-CAREER award and IEEE Intelligent Systems magazine's award for “AI's 10 to watch”. Nominations for the award are made by Program Committee members, Senior Program Committee members and Program Chairs, with selection from a short-list being made by Senior Program Committee members. Nominations for the 2008 Pragnesh Jay Modi Best Student Paper Award are:
Best Paper Award This award is for a selected paper which does not have a student as primary author. Nominations are made by Program Committee members, Senior Program Committee members and Program Chairs, with selection from a short-list being made by Senior Program Committee members. Nominations for 2008 Best paper are:
This award is for a selected paper from the Industry track.
Three Awards selected from the Demonstration Track: Best Academic Software Demo
This award is for a selected member of the Senior Program Committee based on outstanding contribution to the management of the paper selection process, including reviewing, encouraging discussion, obtaining extra reviews if needed, and dealing with any issues arising in the course of paper selection.
This award is for a selected member of the Program Committee based on outstanding quality of reviews and discussion of papers. |
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