Workshops
Full-Day Workshops
ACAN
W2Agent-based Complex Automated Negotiations Complex Automated Negotiations have been widely studied and have become an emerging area in the field of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. These issues are being explored by researchers from different communities in Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent systems. The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers from these communities to learn about each others' approaches, form long-term collaborations, and cross-fertilize the different areas to accelerate progress towards scaling up to larger and more realistic applications.
ADMI
W3Agents and Data Mining Interaction The ADMI workshop provides a premier forum for sharing research and engineering results, as well as potential challenges and prospects encountered in the respective communities and the coupling between agents and data mining. The workshop welcomes theoretical work and applied dissemination aiming to: (1) exploit agent-enriched data mining and demonstrate how intelligent agent technology can contribute to critical data mining problems in theory and practice; (2) improve data mining-driven agents and show how data mining can strengthen agent intelligence in research and practical applications; (3) explore the integration of agents and data mining towards a super-intelligent system; (4) discuss existing results, new problems, challenges and impact of integration of agent and data mining technologies as applied to highly distributed heterogeneous, including mobile, systems operating in ubiquitous and P2P environments; and (5) identify challenges and directions for future research and development on the synergy between agents and data mining.
AOSE
W5Agent-Oriented Software Engineering Since the early 1990s, multi-agent system researchers have developed a large body of knowledge on the foundations and engineering principles for designing and developing agent-based systems. The 12 past editions of the agent-oriented software engineering workshop (AOSE) had a key role in this endeavor. For 2012, the workshop organizers and the steering committee propose to organize an edition of AOSE workshop aimed at exploring the new role emerging of agent-oriented software engineering as a bridge from the now consolidated agent oriented programming languages and platforms, to recent systems modelling paradigms like self-*, autonomic systems, and systems of systems (SoS). Thus, it is our hope to explore in this workshop, from an agent-based perspective, foundations, models, methods, architectures, and tools for engineering future software-intensive IT eco-systems.
ArgMAS
W6Argumentation in Multiagent Systems The main goal of ArgMAS 2012 is to bring together the community of researchers working on argumentation in multi-agent systems. The workshop will focus on the concepts, theories, methodologies, and applications of computational models of argument in creating autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. Argumentation can be abstractly defined as the formal interaction of different arguments for and against some conclusion (eg, a proposition, an action intention, a preference, etc). A single agent may use argumentation techniques to perform individual reasoning, to resolve conflicting evidence, or to decide between conflicting goals. Multiple agents may also use dialectical argumentation in order to identify and reconcile differences between themselves, through interactions such as negotiation, persuasion, and joint deliberation.
ARMS
W7Autonomous Robots and Multirobot Systems Robots are agents, too. Indeed, agent researchers are sometimes inspired by robots, sometimes use robots in motivating examples, and sometimes make contributions to robotics. Both practical and analytical techniques in agent research influence, and are being influenced by, research into autonomous robots and multi-robot systems. Despite the significant overlap between the multiagent and robotics research areas, roboticists and agents researchers have only a few opportunities to meet and interact. The recently established robotics track at AAMAS is one such opportunity. The goal of the proposed workshop is to extend and widen this opportunity, by offering a forum where researchers in this area of research can interact and present promising innovative research directions, and new results. The workshop is coordinated and associated with the AAMAS robotics track.
ATES
W8Agent Technologies for Energy Systems The Agent Technologies for Energy Systems workshop provides a forum for researchers and practitioners seeking to apply agent technologies within future energy systems such as the smart grid.
ATT
W9Agent in Traffic and Transportation Building effective and user-friendly transportation systems is one of the big challenges for engineers in the 21st century. The purpose of this workshop is to bring researchers and practitioners together in order to set up visions on how agent technology can be and is used for today's isolated IT-tools so as to model, simulate, and manage large-scale complex transportation systems. Therefore, we are interested in research papers, case studies and practitioners' reports on the implementation and use of Autonomous Agents in all areas related to transportation, traffic and logistics. Besides running real-world applications, we are also interested in papers concerning demonstrators or testbed that are still under development. Conceptual papers and those reporting on particular components of transportation systems are also welcome.
CAVE
W10Cognitive Agents in Virtual Environments The CAVE workshop is meant to connect people that are working on the use of agent technology in virtual environments. Within the agent community there is a lot of work done on multi-agent systems, both theoretical as well as practical. Such properties as communication, team work, coordination and cooperation of agents are important if agents are to interact effectively with each other and human participants in all sorts of virtual activity such as serious gaming. We want to explore how these results might be used to support these interactions and which extra requirements should be imposed for this context. Finally, the workshop would like to promote the testing and evaluation of practical agent frameworks to establish which framework is most appropriate for different types of games or other virtual applications.
COIN
W11Coordination, Organization, Institutions and Norms Coordination, Organizations, Institutions and Norms are four key governance elements for the regulation of open multi-agent systems. The COIN workshop aims to bring together researchers in autonomous agents and multi-agent systems working on the scientific and technological aspects of organizational theory, electronic institutions and computational economies from an organizational and institutional perspective. Besides the regular topics, the 14th version of COIN focusses on research from the field of cloud computing; with a special interest in topics such as the organization of cloud computing, and using cloud computing for large scale multi-agent organizations.
DALT
W13Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies The workshop on Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies (DALT), in its tenth edition this year, is a well-established forum for researchers interested in sharing their experiences in combining declarative and formal approaches with the engineering and technological aspects of agents and multiagent systems. DALT aims at providing a discussion forum to both (i) support the transfer of declarative paradigms and techniques to the broader community of agent researchers and practitioners, and (ii) to bring the issue of designing complex agent systems to the attention of researchers working on declarative languages and technologies.
HAIDM
W15Human-Agent Interaction Design and Models As the boundaries of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems continue to expand, there is an increasing need for agents to interact with humans. In fact, the field of multi-agent systems has matured from conceptual models to applications within the real-world (e.g., Engergy and sustainability, disaster management, or health care). One significant challenge that arises when transitioning these conceptual models to applications is addressing the inevitable human interaction. To this end, this workshop examines major challenges at the intersection of human-agent systems. The workshop will be divided into two key tracks in order to reflect the main research directions taken in the community, namely Human-Agent Interaction (HAI) and Modelling Agent Systems with Humans (MASH). While the former is takes a human-centric view of human-agent systems and focuses on the design of human-agent coordination mechanisms, trust issues in human-agent interaction, interaction techniques, and human activity recognition, the latter is concerned with finding better models of human behavior in a variety of settings so that autonomous and multi-agent systems can appropriately interact with human agents (e.g., agent-human negotiation strategies or health care agents encouraging physical therapy for a variety of recovering patients). Hence, this workshop aims to establish a forum for researchers to discuss common issues that arise in designing and modeling human-agent interaction in different domains.
MSDM
W18Multiagent Sequential Decision Making Under Uncertainty In sequential decision making, an agent's objective is to choose actions, based on its observations of the world, that will maximize its performance over the course of a series of such decisions. The MSDM workshop focuses on extensions of principled single-agent models (e.g., MDPs and POMDPs) and methods (e.g., planning and learning) to systems of multiple agents. Over the past decade, a variety of different multiagent models have emerged for cooperative agents (e.g., the MMDP, Dec-POMDP, and MTDP) as well as for self-interested agents (e.g., the I-POMDP and POSG). The purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers in the field of multiagent sequential decision making to present and discuss promising new work, to identify recent trends in model and algorithmic development, and to establish important directions and goals for further research and collaboration. In the long term, the active discussions that the MSDM workshop promotes will help us to overcome the challenges of applying multiagent sequential decision making methods to large-scale real-world problems in, for instance, security, sustainability, public safety and health.
OptMAS
W19Optimisation in Multi-Agent Systems The number of novel applications of multi-agent systems has followed an exponential trend over the last few years, ranging from online auction design, through multi-sensor networks, to scheduling of tasks in multi-actor systems. Multi-agent systems designed for all these applications generally involve some form of very hard optimization problems that are substantially different from problems traditionally dealt with in other areas (e.g., industrial processes or scheduling applications). This workshop invites works from different strands of the multi-agent systems community that pertain to the design of algorithms, models, and techniques to deal with multi-agent optimisation problems. In so doing, this workshop aims to provide a forum for researchers to discuss common issues that arise in solving optimisation problems in different areas and elaborate common benchmarks to test their solutions.
ProMAS
W20Programming in Multiagent Systems Now in its 10th edition, ProMAS has proved to be an invaluable venue for bringing together leading researchers from both academia and industry to discuss key issues in the design of programming languages and tools for multi-agent systems. In particular, the workshop promotes the discussion and exchange of techniques, concepts, requirements and principles central to multi-agent programming technology. These include the theory and application of agent programming languages, how to effectively implement a multi-agent system specification or design, the verification and analysis of agent systems, as well as the implementation of social structures in agent-based systems (e.g., organisations, coordination, and communication in multi-agent systems).
SCW
W21Spatial Computing Workshop In the field of distributed systems, space plays various important roles, ranging from computational resource (e.g., parallelism) to the result of the computation itself (e.g., formation control or self-assembly). For example, in multiagent-based systems, spatial relationships are often used to organize the interactions between agents, at least in applications in which the problem and the space are intertwined. Furthermore, multiagent-based systems and their behaviors can be specified and analyzed relying on spatial notions like: location, neighborhood, diffusion, propagation, etc. The goal of the 5th Spatial Computing Workshop is to serve as an inclusive forum for the discussion of ongoing or completed work focusing on the theoretical and practical issues of explicitly using space in the design process of multiagent or multiactor systems. We invite researchers to explore spatial computing in the context of multiagent-based systems at different abstraction levels, ranging from relevant concepts and theories for the top-down specification of spatial applications, to suitable methodologies and tools, and novel spatial applications.
TADA/AMEC
W22Joint Workshop on Trading Agent Design and Analysis and Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce The design and analysis of electronic commerce systems and automated trading agents is a prominent area of research in artificial intelligent and multi-agent systems. Research in this area includes methods for designing both agents and market institutions, and makes of of a wide variety of AI techniques including planning, decision theory, game theory, machine learning, and optimization. The scope of the workshop includes descriptions of agent architectures, decision-making algorithms, theoretical analysis of market institutions and agents, empirical studies of agent performance or e-commerce systems, negotiation and contracting strategies, game theoretic analysis, mechanism design and other related topics.
TRUST
W23Trust in Agent Societies Trust and Trustworthiness (along with related concepts such as privacy, reputation, security, control) have become major research topics in computer science. The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers (even from different disciplines) who can contribute to a better understanding of trust and reputation in agent societies. We seek papers that address trust as it arises in any kind of interaction among social agents (human-human, human-computer, human-human through computers, computer-computer). Applications are of interest, especially in e-commerce, e-health, and e-governement. We welcome computational and theoretical models and approaches to trust as well as applications and empirical studies on trust. This edition of the workshop will emphasize the theme of "Trust and Agreement".
Half-Day Workshops
AAHC
W1Agents Applied in Health Care This seventh edition of the Workshop on Agents Applied in Health Care will address the main issues related to the design and application of agent technology to health care problems. Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to, remote care delivery, agent-based decision support systems in health care, distributed patient scheduling, and agent-based health care simulation and modelling. Papers that describe deployed applications of health care systems based on cooperative agents are particularly welcome.
CoopMAS
W12Cooperative Games in Multiagent Systems The use of cooperative game theory to study how agents should cooperate and collaborate, along with the related topic of coalition formation, has received growing attention from the multiagent systems, game theory, and electronic commerce communities. The focus of much of the current work in this area has been on exploring methods by which agents can form coalitions so as to solve problems of joint interest, make group decisions, and distribute gains arising from such cooperation.
EEA
W14Emotional and Empathic Agents The main goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers from different disciplines to discuss the creation of what we call "empathic agents". Empathy has been associated with the processes that make a person to have "feelings that are more congruent with another's situation than with his own situation". Humans, when interacting with virtual agents or robots can be led to feel empathy, and experience a diverse set of emotional reactions. On the other hand, agents and robots can in a certain, perhaps limited way, also show certain emotions in reaction to human emotions, thus seemingly expressing empathy towards other agents and towards humans. Further, agents interacting in social simulation scenarios may react to the other agents in a way that is more congruent with the other's. Thus, by seeking inspiration in empathic relations established between humans and between humans and animals, in this workshop we expect to explore these dimensions of empathic agents.
LAMAS
W16Logical Aspects of Multi-Agent Systems The workshop will provide an annual meeting forum for the research community working on various logical aspects of MAS from the perspectives of logic, artificial intelligence, computer science, and game theory. It will address the whole range of issues that arise in the context of using logic in MAS, from theoretical foundations to algorithmic methods and implemented tools. LAMAS'2012 will be the main annual event of the LAMAS research network and will continue the series of annual LAMAS workshops.
Full-Day and a Half Workshops
ALA
W4Adaptive and Learning Agents Adaptive Learning Agents encompasses diverse fields such as Computer Science, Software Engineering, Biology, as well as Cognitive and Social Sciences. The ALA workshop will focus on agents and multiagent systems which employ learning or adaptation. The workshop will serve as an inclusive forum for the discussion of ongoing or completed work in both theoretical and practical issues of adaptive and learning agents and multiagent systems. This workshop will focus on all aspects of adaptive and learning agents and multiagent systems with a particular emphasis on how to modify established learning techniques and/or create new learning paradigms to address the many challenges presented by complex real-world problems.
MABS
W17Multi-Agent Based Simulation The Multi-Agent-Based Simulation (MABS) workshop is the thirteenth of a series that began in 1998.The workshop will provide a forum for social scientists, agent researchers and developers, and simulation researchers, to assess the current state of the art in the modeling and simulation of social systems and MAS, to identify where existing approaches can be successfully applied, to learn about new approaches and explore future research challenges, and to promote exchanges in an inter-disciplinary environment.