Introduction

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 provides a marquee, 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 Melbourne (2003), New York (2004), Utrecht (2005), Hakodate (2006), Honolulu (2007), Estoril (2008), Budapest (2009) and Toronto (2010). You are now about to enter the proceedings of AAMAS 2011, held in Taipei, Taiwan, as AAMAS celebrates its 10th anniversary as the successful merger of three related events that had run for some years previously.

In addition to the general track for the AAMAS 2011 conference, submissions were invited to three special tracks: a Robotics track, a Virtual Agents track and an Innovative Applications track. The aims of these special tracks were to give researchers from these areas a strong focus, to provide a forum for discussion and debate within the encompassing structure of AAMAS, and to ensure that the impact of both theoretical contributions and innovative applications were recognized. Each track was chaired by a leader in the field: Maria Gini for the robotics track, James Lester for the virtual agents track, and Peter McBurney for the innovative applications track. The special track chairs provided critical input to selection of Program Committee (PC) and Senior Program Committee (SPC) members, and to the reviewer allocation and the review process itself. The final decisions concerning acceptance of papers were taken by the AAMAS 2011 Program Co-chairs in discussion with, and in full agreement with the special track chairs.

Only full paper submissions were solicited for AAMAS 2011. The general, robotics, virtual agents, and innovative applications tracks received 452, 31, 51, and 41 submissions respectively, for a total of 575 submissions.

After a thorough and exciting review process, 126 papers were selected for publication as Full Papers each of which was allocated 8 pages in the proceedings and allocated 20 minutes in the Program for oral presentation. Another 123 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, more than half (338) 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 counts in areas such as teamwork, coalition formation, and coordination (31), distributed problem solving (30), game theory (30), planning (26), multiagent learning (24), and trust, reliability and reputation (17).

We thank the PC and SPC members of AAMAS 2011 for their thoughtful reviews and extensive discussions. We thank Maria Gini, James Lester and Peter McBurney for making the Robotics, the Virtual Agents and the Innovative Applications tracks a success. We thank Michael Rovatsos for putting together the proceedings. Finally, we thank David Shield for his patience and support regarding Confmaster during every stage between the submission process and the actual AAMAS 2011 event. The Program represents the intellectual motivation for researchers to come together at the Conference, but the success of the event is dependent on the many other elements that make up the week —especially the tutorials, workshops, and doctoral consortium. We thank all members of the Conference Organising Committee for their dedication, enthusiasm, and attention to detail, and wish to particularly thank Von-Wun Soo as Chair of the Local Organising Committee for his contributions.

Kagan Tumer and Pınar Yolum,
AAMAS 2011 Program Co-Chairs

Peter Stone and Liz Sonenberg,
AAMAS 2011 General Co-Chairs