Workshop Descriptions

ACAN
Complex Automated Negotiations have been widely studied and are becoming an important, emerging area in the field of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers from these communities to learn about each other's approaches, form long-term collaborations, and cross-fertilize the different areas to accelerate progress towards scaling up to larger and more realistic applications. From 2010, ACAN is tightly cooperating with ANAC (Automated Negotiating Agents Competition). Based on the great success of ANAC2010, the ANAC2011 will be held at AAMAS2011 at Taiwan. This year, we, ACAN, have the ANAC special session, in which the finalists of ANAC will describe their negotiating agents.

ADAPT
In ADAPT, we hope to bridge the gap between theory and practice.  We hope to do this by fostering an exchange where the lessons learned from taking theory to practice and are used to understand the limitations of the theoretical models and the lessons learned directly from practice and used to discover the issues that theoretical models need to address. Over the last several years, members of the agents community have been involved with real-world systems in robotics, decision-support agents, personal-assistant agents in military, space and commercial domains. Many of the lessons learned from these endeavors involve the surprises, difficulties and flaws. These lessons are often not shared because they bring about questions for which an answer is not apparent. Nevertheless, it is important for our community to know and discuss these challenges if we are to produce the ideas and technology that are transformative and ultimately, utilized by practitioners.

ADMI
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.

AEGS
Training for complex situations in human societies such as in education, business transactions, military operations, medical care and crisis management can be provided effectively using serious games and simulations. In these types of games and simulations the role of agents to model and simulate naturally behaving characters becomes more and more important. A major aim of this workshop is to discuss how to model rational (or non-rational, but natural) behaving agents who are embedded in a social context with other characters and humans. An important issue is that the technologies used in game engines and multi-agent platforms are not readily compatible due to some inherent differences of concerns. Where game engines focus on real-time aspects and thus propagate efficiency and central control, multi-agent platforms assume autonomy of the agents. And while the multi agent platforms offer communication facilities these can or should not be used when the agents are coupled to a game. Approaches to solve this issue are especially relevant for this workshop.

ALA
The Adaptive and Learning Agents workshop serves 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.The workshop concerns all aspects these agent 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.

AMEC
The design and analysis of electronic commerce systems in which agents are deployed involves finding solutions to a large and diverse array of problems, concerning individual agent behaviors, interaction, and collective behavior. A wide variety of electronic commerce scenarios and systems, and agent approaches to these, have been studied in recent years. These studies suggest models that support the design and the analysis at both the level of the single agent and the level of the multi-agent system.
This workshop will address both the agent level and the system level, combining design and analysis aspects of electronic commerce. The primary goal of this workshop is to continue to bring together novel work from diverse fields as Computer Science, Game Theory, Economics, Artificial Intelligence and Distributed Systems that focus on modeling, implementation and evaluation of computational trading agents and institutions.

AMPLE
Socio-technical systems are complex adaptive entities that require the engagement of social and technical elements in an environment to reach certain goals. One of the major tools for understanding socio-technical systems is agent-based modeling. AMPLE aims at bringing together the topics of  agent and artificial society research on the one hand, with policy making, institutional analysis and the tools being used on the other, in order to discuss mutual effect of models on societies and vice versa. 

AOSE
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 11 past editions of the agent-oriented software engineering workshop (AOSE) had a key role in this endeavor. For 2011, the workshop organizers and the steering committee plan to organize a special edition of AOSE. In particular, we aim to wrap up the previous editions of the workshop with a discussion of the the state of the art in the key areas of AOSE and based on that outline the future of the field. This way, we aim to find a way out of the increasing fragmentation and fuzziness on software engineering in AOSE.

ArgMAS
ArgMAS 2011 will focus on the concepts, theories, methodologies, and applications of computational models of argumentation in building autonomous agents and multi-agent systems.  Argumentation can be defined as the formal interaction of different arguments for and against some conclusion (eg, a proposition, an action intention, a preference, etc). An agent may use argumentation techniques to perform individual reasoning, in order 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
The Autonomous Robots and Multi-Robot workshop aims to bring together researchers in agent technology and robotics. Many canonical robotics problems, such as robotic soccer, coverage, foraging, and patrolling, can also serve as the basis for research into multi-agent technology. Similarly, problems that have traditionally been studied in the agent field, such as task allocation and coalition formation, planning and coordination, and machine learning, are relevant for robotics researchers too. Of special interest in this year's ARMS workshop is the connection between robotics and agency on the subject of planning for, and coordination of mobile robots.

ATES
Addressing the challenges of mitigating climate change and ensuring energy security in the face of dwindling oil and gas reserves, requires a radical change in the way in which energy use is managed. The distributed nature of many of these energy systems, and the autonomous behaviour expected of them, naturally lend themselves to a multi-agent methodology, and this workshop provides a forum for agent researchers to present novel results in this exciting and increasingly important application domain.

CARE
Do you care?  For the lifetime value of customers, patients, products, information, and plan execution? If yes,  then how do you work together with those that care for the same entity? Collaborative care is today’s primary means to achieve complex outcomes and to increase the lifetime value of the cared entities. Collaboration enables agents to achieve complex goals that are difficult or impossible to attain for an individual agent. This collaboration takes place under conditions of incomplete information, uncertainty, and bounded rationality, much of which has been previously studied in economics and artificial intelligence. However, many real world domains are characterised by even greater complexity, including the possibility of unreliable and non-complying collaborators, complex market and incentive frameworks, and complex transaction costs and organisational structures. How can we create computational models, representations, algorithms and protocols to enable the next generation of intelligent collaborative care technologies? How can we build technologies that support collaboration under this complexity and uncertainty?
This workshop aims to foster discussions on computational models of collaboration support in distributed systems, addressing a range of theoretical and practical issues.

COIN
The 12th International Workshop on Coordination, Organization, Institutions and Norms in Multi-Agent Systems (COIN@AAMAS2011) aims to bring together researchers in autonomous agents and multi-agent systems working on the scientific and technological aspects of social coordination, organizational theory, artificial or electronic institutions and normative systems for the exchange of ideas and discussion about future developments in the field.

CoopMAS
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.

DALT
The workshop  on Declarative Agent Languages  and Technologies (DALT), in  its ninth  edition this  year,  is a  well-established forum  for researchers  interested  in  sharing  their experiences  in  combining declarative  and  formal approaches  with  engineering and  technology aspects  of agents  and  multiagent systems.   Building complex  agent systems calls for models  and technologies that ensure predictability, allow for  the verification of properties,  and guarantee flexibility. Developing  technologies  that can  satisfy  these requirements  still
poses  an  important   and  difficult  challenge.   Here,  declarative approaches  have the  potential of  offering solutions  satisfying the needs   for  both  specifying   and  developing   multiagent  systems.

DOCM3AS
To understand mega-scale complex systems, such as human society, technologies for simulation, knowledge discovery, and computational modeling are required. Although researchers on multi-agent simulation (MASim) and massively multi-agent systems (MMAS) are good at working on the implementation of tools for multi-agent simulations and the design of computational model, they are not necessarily experts who can extract essentials of complex systems. On the other hand, data mining (DM) researchers are technicians for knowledge discovery though, it is usually hard for them to actively analyze obtained knowledge through simulations. There is the complementary relationship among MASim/MMAS and DM researches. Therefore, the primary aim of this workshop is to facilitate the collaboration among researchers on MASim, DM, and MMAS for creating new multi-agent research area by synthesizing diverse and different technologies/methodologies.

ITMAS
ITMAS aims at discussing issues on the design and implementation of infrastructures and tools for Multiagent Systems. When developing applications based on Multiagent Systems, developers and users demand infrastructures and tools which support essential features in Multiagent Systems (such as agent organizations, mobility, etc.) and facilitate the system design, management, execution and evaluation. Agent infrastructures are usually built using other technologies such as grid systems, service-oriented architectures, P2P networks, etc. In this sense, the integration and interoperability of such technologies in Multiagent Systems is also a challenging issue in the area of both tools and infrastructures for Multiagent Systems.

MABS
Multi-Agent Based Simulation (MABS) is a vibrant inter-disciplinary area which brings together researchers from within the agent-based social simulation (ABSS) and the Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) communities. The focus of ABSS is on simulating and synthesising social behaviour in order to understand real social systems via the development and testing of new concepts. The focus of MAS is on the solution of difficult engineering problems related to the construction, deployment and efficient operation of Multi-Agent Systems. The MABS workshop series continues to pursue its goal to bring together researchers interested in MAS engineering, with ABSS researchers focused on finding effective solutions to modelling complex social systems, in such areas as economics, management, and organizational and social sciences in general.

MSDM
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 to present new work, to identify recent trends in model and algorithmic development, and to discuss interesting and challenging application areas (e.g., cooperative robotics, distributed sensor and/or communication networks, decision support systems) and suitable evaluation methodologies.

OPTMAS
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 in multi-sensor networks, to scheduling of tasks in multi-actor systems. Multi-agent systems designed for all these applications generally require some form of optimization in order to achieve their goal. Given this, a number of advancements have been made in the design of winner determination, coalition formation, and distributed constraints optimization algorithms among others. However, there are no general principles guiding the design of such algorithms that would enable researchers to either exploit solutions designed in other areas or to ensure that their algorithms conform to some level of applicability to real problems. This workshop aims to address the above issues by bringing together researchers from different parts of the Multi-Agent Systems research area to present their work and discuss acceptable solutions, benchmarks, and evaluation methods for generally researched optimization problems.

ProMAS
It is imperative to support the ever more complex task of professional programmers of multi-agent systems. Importantly, such languages and tools must be developed in a principled but practical way. ProMAS aims to address both theoretical and practical issues related to developing and deploying multi-agent systems. ProMAS promotes the discussion and exchange of ideas concerning the techniques, concepts, requirements, and principles that are important for multi-agent programming technology. These include the theory and applications of agent programming languages, how to effectively implement a multi-agent system design or specification, the verification and analysis of agent systems, as well as the implementation of social structures in agent-based systems

Trust
Trust and Trustworthiness (along with related concepts such as privacy, reputation, security, control) have become major research topics in computer science. Although there is increasing interest in this area within the AAMAS community, this area will need continued support as an affiliated workshop in which are explored new directions and inter-disciplinary interactions so that the AAMAS community maintains a venue for research into trust, reputation, and related topics. In the workshop of this edition we will give a special attention about the theme of "TRUST IN SOCIAL COMPUTING". In fact the relationships between social behavior and computational systems are becoming increasingly interwined with interesting bilateral influences. The role of Trust and Reputation has to be deeply analyzed and understood in this new interactional paradigm. 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.