Accepted workskops

The 7th Workshop on Logical Aspects of Multi-Agent Systems

There is a growing interdisciplinary community of researchers and research groups working on logical aspects of MAS from the perspectives of logic, artificial intelligence, computer science, game theory, etc. The LAMAS workshop serves the community as a platform for presentation, exchange, and publication of ideas. The workshop is intended to cover the following subjects: logical systems for specification, analysis, and reasoning about MAS; modeling MAS with logic-based models; logic in game theory; logic in social choice theory; deductive systems and decision procedures for logics for MAS; development, complexity analysis, and implementation of algorithmic methods for formal verification of MAS; logic-based tools for MAS; and applications of logics in MAS.

Workshop Exploring Beyond the Worst Case in Computational Social Choice

Computational Social Choice (ComSoc) is a rapidly developing field at the intersection of computer science, economics, social choice, and political science. Research in this area has created dramatic benefits in the areas of market matchings, recommendation systems, and preference aggregation. However, much of the community remains focused on worst-case assumptions. This workshop will focus on practical and theoretical studies related to relaxing these worst-case assumptions and we encourage submissions in algorithms, empirical studies, average case analysis, identification of tractable sub-cases, fixed parameter complexity analysis, benchmarking analysis, approximation results and heuristics. We will additionally have two short mini-tutorials during the workshop detailing tools and techniques for empirical analysis in voting theory and fixed parameter tractability for social choice problems.

AMEC/TADA: Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce and Trading Agent Design and Analysis

The design and analysis of electronic commerce systems and automated trading agents is a prominent area of research in artificial intelligence and multi-agent systems. Research in this area includes methods for designing both agents and market institutions, and makes use of a wide variety of AI techniques including planning, decision theory, game theory, machine learning, and optimization. The scope of the workshop covers a wide range of topics, from game-theoretic analyses of market mechanisms and institutions, design of decision-making algorithms, to empirical studies of agent performance or e-commerce systems. In 2014, TADA/AMEC also aims to explore some new frontiers in electronic commerce research, such as mobile commerce and advertising, and advertising/trading through social networks.

Organisers: Onn Shehory, Esther David, Valentin Robu, Sofia Ceppi, Ioannis Vetsikas

Adaptative 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, This workshop is a continuation of the long running AAMAS series of workshops on adaptive agents. 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.

The Fifteenth International Workshop on Multi-Agent-Based Simulation

The MABS workshop series aims to bring together researchers interested in building and using MAS from a diverse range of fields. Its focus lies in the confluence of social sciences and multi-agent systems, with a strong empirical vein. This is the fifteenth workshop in the series, and this year we include an introductory tutorial on MABS, hosted by some of those who arranged the original workshop. This tutorial should provide a strong grounding for newcomers in the area to participate in the traditional sessions that follow. This year in addition to our usual interest in MABS tools, methodologies, and applications, we have an interest in promoting the use of Big Data with MABS, and strongly encourage contributions in this area.

The Seventh International Workshop on Agent-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. ACAN has been tightly cooperating with ANAC (Automated Negotiating Agents Competition). The tutorial session will focus on the game-theoretic foundations of electronic negotiations to give a broad overview of state of the art in agent-mediated negotiation.

The 6th International Workshop on Emergent Intelligence on Networked Agents

In this workshop we will discuss about the emergence of intelligence from large-scale complex networked agents, and the aim is to investigate the role of networked agents in the emergence of systemic properties, notably emergent intelligence. Focus is on topics such as network formation among agents, the feedback of network structures on agent's dynamics, network-based collective phenomena, and emergent problem solving of networked agents. Up to now, main interest of agent community is the dynamics of agent itself. But, in the current rapidly growing Internet like WWW and social media like twitter, facebook, etc., studies about the complex network are attracting international attention. And studies about complex network are deeply related to multi agent community. So, the ultimate target of this workshop is to bridge between multi agent community and complex network community.

Third International Workshop on Human-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., energy 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. In particular, we focus on the challenges of designing and modelling human-agent interaction. While the former 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 behaviour 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).

This workshop aims to establish a forum for researchers to discuss common issues that arise in designing and modelling human-agent interaction in different domains.

Autonomous 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 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.

Trust in Agent Societies

Multi-agent systems operate across organizational and social boundaries, facilitating interaction among and between entities, both human and computational. For interaction within such complex socio-technical systems to be effective/reliable, however, decisions must be grounded upon identity and associated trustworthiness of potential partners. Trust is foundational for the notion of agency and for its defining relation of acting "on behalf of". It is also central in modeling and supporting groups, teams and organizations, human-agent interaction and in modeling the distribution of (mis)information in agent-based systems. The aim of this workshop is to bring together leading research on the use of computational models of trust in agent systems and societies. Submissions to this workshop should address key challenges in trust from theoretical, methodological, empirical or applied perspectives. Perspectives from interdisciplinary research are particularly welcome.

2nd International Workshop on Engineering Multi-Agent Systems

Although much progress has been made, the design, implementation and deployment of multi-agent systems still poses many challenges. It is increasingly apparent that there are benefits in considering design and implementation challenges together. Therefore, the workshop on Engineering Multi-Agent Systems (EMAS) was formed as a merger of three existing AAMAS workshops (AOSE, DALT, and ProMAS) and had its first edition with AAMAS'13. The EMAS community welcomes papers that address challenges in all aspects of engineering MAS, including application papers that describe lessons learned and engineering challenges identified in building and deploying multi-agent systems.

11th International Workshop on Argumentation in Multi-Agent Systems

The main goal of ArgMAS 2014 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, through interactions such as negotiation, persuasion, and joint deliberation.

Agent Environments for Multi-Agent Systems – 10 Years Later

Organizers: Danny Weyns, Van Parunak, Fabien Michel, Olivier Boissier, Michael Schumacher, Alessandro Ricci

In 2004, researchers in multi-agent systems became more and more aware that agent systems consist of more than only agents. The E4MAS workshop that was organized in conjunction with AAMAS 2004 emerged from this awareness. During three successful editions of E4MAS, a substantial group of researchers worked intensively on the subject of agent environments. One of the primary outcomes of this endeavor was a principled understanding that the agent environment should be considered as a primary design abstraction, equally important as the agents. The challenges have been the drivers for numerous follow up research efforts. The goal of this special edition of E4MAS is threefold: (1) To reflect on the past 10 years of research and engineering on agent environments for multi-agent systems; (2) To investigate to what extent the challenges identified a decade ago have been tackled; and (3) To outline challenges for future research on a short and longer term. The workshop will be organized in a highly interactive way, as the preceding editions. Proceedings will be published in a Lecture Notes in Computer Science volume.

Culture Aware Robotics

Culture is not the first aspect that comes to mind when discussing human robot interaction. But our cultural upbringing does to a large degree influence our patterns of behavior and interpretation. Thus, culture is present in the development of robotic systems as well as of embodied agent systems right from the start, unconsciously influencing how robots look, what we envision with them to do, and how they are programmed to interact with the user. Thus, culture significantly shapes how we interact with each other and with other social entities such as robots and agents, and a better understanding of cultural differences and commonalities will have significant scientific, design, and societal implications. This workshop aims at improving awareness on the topic and facilitates communication among researchers from different cultures and those interested in culture as a factor in interacting with robots and embodied agents. The scientific focus of the activity is directed to culturally-aware robotics, which refers to a brand-new area in social robotics and human robot interaction and is closely related to the emergence of the field of culture aware computing in computer science and related disciplines. The main focus is on understanding the influence of culture on many human processes that affect human-robot interactions be it directly or indirectly. Culture aware robots can thus be defined as robotic systems, where culture-related information has had some impact on its design, runtime or internal processes, structures, and/or objectives.

8th International Workshop on Agents in Traffic and Transportation

Building effective and user-friendly transportation systems is one of the big challenges for engineers in the 21st century. The rapid change of location, enabled by plane, high-speed rail, sea and road travel, has constantly become easier and more natural. 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 and Multiagent Systems in all areas related to transportation, traffic and logistics.

Spatial 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). In multiagent-based systems, spatial relationships are often used to organize the interactions between agents and often their behaviors can be specified and analyzed relying on spatial notions like: location, neighborhood, diffusion, propagation, etc. The goal of the 7th 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 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.

The Fifth Workshop on Cooperative Games in Multiagent Systems

This is the fifth instantiation of this international workshop on cooperative games and multiagent systems, traditionally held as part of the AAMAS conference. The workshop will focus on topics in cooperation in multi­agent systems, cooperative game theory, cooperative solution concepts, coalition formation, and applications. It should be of interest to researchers in cooperative game theory and coalition formation, as well as to those who examine collaboration between agents, cooperation in multiagent systems and design and implementation of collaborating agents. We also welcome participants who are interested in applications of cooperative game theory, which include trading agents, sponsored search and recommender systems. The workshop will incorporate a tutorial on computational aspects of cooperative games, based on a recent textbook by Chalkiadakis, Elkind, and Woodridge.

The First International Workshop on Agents and CyberSecurity

Research in cyber security is nowadays one of the hottest topics in computer science. This is because security is of capital importance to the development of a sustainable, resilient and prosperous cyber world. This includes protecting crucial assets, ranging from Critical Infrastructures to individual's Personal Information, and it spans domains like Cloud Computing, Smart Grid, Virtual Organisations, Virtual Communities, Social Media, Electronic Commerce and many more. Approaches that are intelligent and self-adaptable are required to deal with the complexities of effectively protecting these crucial assets in all these domains. This is where research from the agent community can make a difference in cyber security. Indeed, cyber security is increasingly receiving more and more attention from the agent community. The focus of this workshop is to provide a forum to discuss and advance cyber security by means of agent-based approaches.

First International Workshop on the Multiagent Foundations of Social Computing

Social computing broadly refers to computing-supported approaches that facilitate interactions among people and organizations. Social computing has emerged as an exciting multidisciplinary area of research, driven by the wealth of easily available information and the success of online social networks and social media. Social computing applications are characterized by high interactivity among users, user-generated content, and in cases such as Wikipedia, more open governance structures.

Much of the recent excitement in social computing is driven by data analytics and business models. What is still lacking, however, is a deeper conceptual understanding of social computing -- e.g., relating to its conceptual bases, information and abstractions, design principles, and platforms. We invite papers that take an explicitly multiagent perspective in addressing these gaps and do so in thought-provoking ways.

Munindar Singh will give a tutorial on social computing in this workshop.

The Second Collaborative Online Organizations Workshop (COOS'14)

This workshop aims to bring together experts interested in the theory and practice of computational models of network organizations. The objective is to advance understanding and crafting of network organizations. Substantial amount of research work is ongoing in distributed knowledge management. This workshop intends to emphasize the operational elements of various networks that facilitate elements of network organization. Papers describing advanced prototypes, systems, tools and techniques indicating future directions are also encouraged. Social as well as cognitive foundations surrounding network organizations are of special interest. We invite theoretical and pragmatic contributions from specialists with capacities for explaining or predicting changes in the life cycle of online organizations. Explorations of social capital embedded in collaboration networks that play central role for their continued functioning and maintenance are within our scope.

International Joint Workshop on Optimisation in Multi-Agent Systems and Distributed Constraint Reasoning

This joint OptMAS-DCR 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 optimization problems. We will also place a particular emphasis on DCR approaches, which include the modeling, formulation and solution of DCR problems, including both Distributed Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization Problems.

The 17th International Workshop on Coordination, Organisations, 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.

Agents, Virtual Societies and Analytics

Agent based models (ABMs) are a useful tool for modeling complex social systems with interacting, dynamic factors. However, calibration and validation of complex ABMs can be difficult, due to the need for temporally extended, high resolution data. Research in this area has been constrained because of limitations in the types of data which are available to researchers. In this workshop, we will explore how data from games and virtual worlds (e.g., Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs)), can be used as a means of constructing, calibrating and validating agent based models.

Multiagent Sequential Decision Making Under Uncertainty

The MSDM workshop focuses on principled sequential decision-making methods, and applications, to systems of multiple agents. Several multiagent models have emerged for cooperative agents (e.g., MMDP, Dec-POMDP) as well as for self-interested agents (e.g., I-POMDP, POSG), under various assumptions about agents' capabilities to communicate, observe, and influence other agents. The high complexity associated with such models has prompted development of planning and learning techniques that (1) exploit structure in agents' interactions and the problem, (2) find exact and more efficient approximate solutions, and (3) decentralize and distribute computation. Through a tutorial, presentations by authors and distinguished invitees, and discussions, we aim to facilitate collaboration among researchers and practitioners toward advancing MSDM theory and application.

International Workshop on Agent & 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)explore the integration of agents and data mining towards a super-intelligent system; (2) discuss existing results, new problems, challenges and impact of integration of agent and data mining technologies (3) identify challenges and directions for future research and development on the synergy between agents and data mining.

Particularly, ADMI’ 14 will focus on the theme, namely Agent Mining, and concentrate on the integration of emerging techniques like social computing, agent behaviorally modeling, big data and cloud computing.

Multi-Agent Systems for Healthcare

The MASH’14 (Multi-Agent Systems for Healthcare 2014) Workshop intends to provide a discussion forum on the most recent and innovative work regarding the study and application of multi-agent systems and related concepts to healthcare.
A healthcare facility faces diverse and complex everyday challenges, ranging from equipment and drug inventory management to patient clinical record and follow-up management, or even patient monitoring in either a hospital or home environment, and patient transportation scheduling. Covering a wide spectrum of research areas, MASH'14 intends to bring together communities from Agents/Multi-Agent Systems and clinicians working on Healthcare, providing a presentation and discussion forum for researchers in the area, highlighting innovative approaches, multidisciplinary works, and defining future research directions.

Fifth International Workshop on Collaborative Agents -- Research & Development, CARE for Intelligent Mobile Services

Organizers: Fernando Koch and Felipe Meneguzzi

"CARE for Intelligent Mobile Services" aims to discuss computational models of collaboration that contribute to increasing the quality of mobile and collaborative services, including teamwork, coordination, distributed planning, context awareness, and social analytics. These solutions will address challenging problems in e.g. team coordination, health, education, and security. In "CARE for Collaborative Intelligent Mobile Services" the application domains include (not an exhaustive list): Collaborative Intelligent Mobile Services, Context Inference, and Social Connectedness. How can we create computational models, representations, algorithms and protocols to enable the next generation of intelligent mobile services? What are the new challenges when Service Computing becomes mobile? What new functionalities and effectiveness can make use of collaborative models in mobile services? In these scenarios, caring requires the coordination of team members in different circumstances to work collaborative to attain a common goal: provide the best orientation for each individual preserving the family interest for the sake of the households wellbeing and preserving the social norms. Related examples include continuous healthcare, (patient care), support of students in their studies (student care), and security and wellbeing for individuals (citizen care). The CARE workshop series intends to address a gap in the existing agent and AI landscape and, moreover, aims to push the boundaries of existing work by addressing a problem that is relatively new to the agent community and that presents the community with exciting applications.

Towards Better and more Affordable Healthcare: Incentives, Game Theory, and Artificial Intelligence (Workshop on System of Systems Approach)

Organizers: Amir Ronen, Michal Rosen-Zvi, Ofer Lavi

Healthcare systems are known to be among the most costly and inefficient ecosystems. It is widely accepted that better and more affordable healthcare is feasible. Interestingly, many of the reasons for this inefficiency are game theoretic: conflicting objectives, asymmetric information, lack of proper incentives, externalities, and more. The workshop will bring together senior decision makers in the EU health system, scientists in algorithmic game theory and multi-agent systems, industry representatives, and healthcare economists in order to identify research gaps, concrete use cases, long term research strategies, and potential projects.