student scholarships

The AAMAS-04 organizers are delighted to announce a student scholarship program. The purpose of this program is to provide partial financial support for students with accepted papers at AAMAS-04 to enable them to travel to the conference. As well, there will be a small number of scholarships for participants at the Trading Agent Competition (TAC) held in conjunction with AAMAS-04. Note that as part of the scholarship program, recipients may be expected to do a modest amount of work at the conference to help with running the workshops, tutorials and/or technical sessions.

Below, we describe who is eligible for support and how to apply.

who is eligible for support
To be eligible for the program you must:

• be registered as a full-time student at a higher education institution (e.g., a University) and
• be explicitly listed as a co-author of an accepted full paper at AAMAS-04 or be a registered participant at the Trading Agent Competition.

support for poster authors
Our first priority is students with accepted full papers. Because funds are limited, we do not currently envisage it will be possible to provide support for student authors of posters. However, if this situation changes (i.e., more funding becomes available), we will ensure that all AAMAS authors receive notification of this, and we will issue a second call.

there is no support for non-student authors
Unfortunately, there is no support for authors who are not full-time students. We have limited funds, and students are our highest funding priority.

how to apply
You need to do two things to apply:

• Send the scholarship chair (see below) an email with the following information:
  • your name,
  • the tracking number of the accepted full paper(s) for which you are a co-author,
  • whether you are a Trading Agent Competition participant,
  • your full contact details (email, postal address, fax, phone),
  • the degree for which you are registered (e.g. BS, MS, PhD),
  • the name of the department and institution at which you are registered,
  • a brief (one paragraph) statement of the work you are doing (e.g., your area of PhD research),
  • a brief (one paragraph) statement on what other funding you are getting to travel to AAMAS-04 (if any) and why you need a scholarship,
  • whether your accepted full paper(s) was (were) submitted as a student paper(s) (which are supposed to be identified in a footnote on the first page) and whether you are the primary author,
  • whether you are participating in the Doctoral Mentoring program,
  • the tracking number of accepted poster(s) for which you are a co-author.
  The subject title of the email should be "AAMAS SCHOLARSHIP APPLICATION". The request for support must be received by April 6, 2004.
• Ask your supervisor/thesis advisor to send a letter or a fax to the scholarship chair, certifying that you are indeed registered as a full time student. The letter should be signed by your supervisor/thesis advisor, and carry the stamp of your institution. This letter must also be received by April 6, 2004.

notification
We will contact all applicants to let them know the outcome as soon as possible. (It would be helpful if you did *not* send any emails asking about the state of your application, as this just clogs up email in trays and slows the process down!) Applicants will be notified via email by May 6, 2004.

decision process
We will first check eligibility. After that, we will prioritize eligible candidates on the basis of whether they are the primary author of an accepted full paper and their level of need: the more clearcut the need, the higher the priority. Points will be given for participation in the Trading Agent Competition, the doctoral mentoring program and poster co-authorship. Also as mentioned earlier, there will be a small number of scholarships for students who are only participants at the Trading Agent Competition. We will try to help as many students as we can to come to AAMAS, while ensuring that the awards are distributed widely on a geographic and institutional basis.

applications and inquiries
Please send proposals (in ASCII) and inquiries to:

Yves Lespérance
Dept. of Computer Science
York University
4700 Keele St.
Toronto, ON, CANADA, M3J 1P3
Fax:  +1-416-736-5872
lesperan@cs.yorku.ca