Area Topics of Interest

Area 1 – Coordination, Organizations, Institutions and Norms

Topics:

• Architectures for social reasoning
• Coordination and control models for multi-agent systems
• Monitoring agent societies
• Norm learning and emergence
• Normative systems
• Organisations and institutions
• Policy, regulation, sanctions, and legislation
• Representations and reasoning about norms and normative systems
• Self-organisation
• Social networks
• Socio-technical systems
• Trust and reputation
• Values in multi-agent systems, including privacy, safety, security and transparency

Description:

Robust and efficient operation of globally networked environments that facilitate interaction and transactions between diverse entities and stakeholders require the development, implementation, monitoring and enforcement of organizational, institutional, and social norms and coordination mechanisms. Research in agent and multiagent systems have a long history of developing techniques that balance agent autonomy, adaptation, and distributed social reasoning with system level with system level considerations such as organizational and institutional policy enforcement addressing safety, security and fairness considerations.  The increasing relevance of human-machine cooperation have further highlighted the need for ensuring transparency, fostering trust, and ensuring social reasoning conforms to societal norms and expectations.  We encourage submission of papers that highlight the design, development, evaluation, simulation, and analysis of novel, innovative, and impactful research on issues related to the above topics.

Sample AAMAS papers:

Davide Dell’Anna, Mehdi Dastani, and Fabiano Dalpiaz, “Runtime Revision of Norms and Sanctions based on Agent Preferences,” in the Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents & Multi Agent Systems, pages 1609-1617, Montreal, Canada, May 2019.
http://ifaamas.org/Proceedings/aamas2019/pdfs/p1609.pdf

Murat Sensoy, Achille Fokoue, Jeff Z. Pan, Timothy J. Norman, Yuqing Tang, Nir Oren, and Katia Sycara, ” Reasoning about Uncertain Information and Conflict Resolution through Trust Revision ,” in the Proceedings of the Twelfth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi Agent Systems (AAMAS), pages 837-844, Minneapolis, MN, May, 2013.
http://ifaamas.org/Proceedings/aamas2013/docs/p837.pdf

Partha Mukherjee, Sandip Sen, and Stephane Airiau, “Norm Emergence Under Constrained Interactions in Diverse Societies,” in the Proceedings of the Seventh International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents & Multi Agent Systems, pages 779-786, Estoril, Portugal May, 2008.
http://ifaamas.org/Proceedings/aamas08/proceedings/pdf/paper/AAMAS08_0863.pdf

Area Chairs:

• Sandip Sen, The University of Tulsa, USA
• Katia Sycara, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Area 2 – Engineering Multi-agent Systems

Topics:

• Development concerns, including deployment, scalability and complexity
• Empirical studies and industrial experience relating to the engineering of MAS applications
• Applications of formal methods and declarative technologies for specification, verification and validation of MAS
• Interoperability and integration
• Programming frameworks, languages, models and abstractions for all aspects of MAS
• Software engineering methodologies and techniques for agent-based systems
• Tools and testbeds for evaluation of MAS

Description:

The Engineering Multi-Agent Systems area aims to bring together researchers from the multi-agent systems and software engineering communities interested in the engineering of (multi)agent systems. The EMAS area invites submissions that contribute to the theory and/or practice of (multi)agent system development, including methodologies and technologies for the engineering of (multi)agent systems.

Sample AAMAS papers:

Yoosef Abushark, John Thangarajah, Tim Miller, James Harland and Michael Winikoff, “Early Detection of Design Faults Relative to Requirement Specifications in Agent-Based Models, ” In Proceedings of the 2015 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), pages 1071-1079,  Istanbul, Turkey, May 4-8, 2015.
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2773287

Alessandro Ricci, Andrei Ciortea, Simon Mayer, Olivier Boissier, Rafael H. Bordini and Jomi Fred, “Engineering Scalable Distributed Environments and Organizations for MAS, ” Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS), pages 790-798, Montreal, QC, Canada, May 13-17, 2019.
https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3331770

Mehdi Dastani, Birna van Riemsdijk and Michael Winikoff, “Rich goal types in agent programming, ” 10th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), pages 405-412, Taipei, Taiwan, May 2-6, 2011.
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2030530\&CFID=69153967\&CFTOKEN=38069692

Area Chairs:

• Matteo Baldoni, Università degli Studi di Torino, Italy
• Brian Logan, University of Nottingham, UK

Area 3 – Humans and AI/Human-Agent Interaction

Topics:

• Agent-based analysis of human interactions
• Agents competing and collaborating with humans
• Agents for improving human cooperative activities
• Explainability in human-agent systems
• Groups of humans and agents
• Human-robot/agent interaction
• Multimodal interaction
• Multi-user/multi-agent interaction
• Social agent architectures
• Social agent models
• Socially interactive agents
• Trust in human-agent systems
• Virtual humans

Description:

As the boundaries of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems continue to expand, there is an increasing need for agents to interact with humans.  Significant challenges arises when transitioning from conceptual models to applications regarding how people will interact with these systems. Open design and implementation challenges in both real and simulated studies with humans include how to better address human–agent coordination mechanisms, trust issues in human–agent interaction, interaction techniques, human activity recognition and explainability.

Sample AAMAS papers:

Ramchurn, Sarvapali D., Trung Dong Huynh, Yuki Ikuno, Jack Flann, Feng Wu, Luc Moreau, Nicholas R. Jennings et al. “HAC-ER: A disaster response system based on human-agent collectives.” In Proceedings of the 2015 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, pp. 533-541. International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, 2015

DeVault, David, Ron Artstein, Grace Benn, Teresa Dey, Ed Fast, Alesia Gainer, Kallirroi Georgila et al. “SimSensei Kiosk: A virtual human interviewer for healthcare decision support.” In Proceedings of the 2014 international conference on Autonomous agents and multi-agent systems, pp. 1061-1068. International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, 2014.

Hindriks, Koen, Catholijn M. Jonker, Sarit Kraus, Raz Lin, and Dmytro Tykhonov. “Genius: negotiation environment for heterogeneous agents.” In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems-Volume 2, pp. 1397-1398. International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, 2009.

Area Chairs:

• Elisabeth André, University of Augsburg, Germany
• Avi Rosenfeld, Jerusalem College of Technology, Israel

Area 4 – Innovative Applications

Topics:

• Challenges in moving agent-based technology to the real world
• Deployed applications of agent-based systems
• Emerging applications of agent-based systems
• Integrated applications of agent-based and other technologies
• User studies of deployed agent-based systems

Description:

We invite industry practitioners and researchers to present emerging or deployed applications that use agents/multi-agent systems technology. We encourage the submission of papers that explore the challenges around deploying agent-based technology to the real world, how users experience the application, how agent/multi-agent systems technology is integrated into other technologies,  and which challenges are still remaining. In case of deployed applications, we expect that applications have been deployed over a reasonable duration, such that evidence of impact, and lessons for the agents/multi-agents community about what worked and what did not are included in the discussion. Note that for deployed applications (only) it is allowed to refer to a website providing additional material and as such possibly revealing the identity of the authors or organisation. For emerging applications, it is key that these are really novel applications, which have not been tackled with agent-based approaches before. Here the double blind requirement cannot be violated.

Sample AAMAS papers:

http://teamcore.usc.edu/pita/publications/2011/GUARDS_Ind.pdf
http://ifaamas.org/Proceedings/aamas2018/pdfs/p2094.pdf

Area Chairs:

• Ece Kamar, Microsoft Research, USA
• Ann Nowé, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium

Area 5 – Knowledge Representation, Reasoning and Planning

Topics:

• Agent theories and models
• Coalition formation (non-strategic)
• Communication and argumentation
• Distributed problem solving / constraint reasoning
• Logics for agent reasoning
• Ontologies for agents
• Single- and multi-agent planning and scheduling
• Reasoning about action, plans and change in multi-agent systems
• Reasoning about knowledge, beliefs, goals, norms and strategies in multi-agent systems
• Reasoning and problem solving in agent-based systems
• Teamwork, team formation, teamwork analysis
• Verification of multi-agent systems

Description:

Papers of relevance to Area 5 include theoretical or experimental contributions in the areas of knowledge representation, reasoning and planning with particular relevance to single or multi-agent systems. Knowledge representation is to be intended broadly, ranging from theoretical contributions (e.g., epistemic, strategic, or description logic) to ontologies and beyond. All forms of reasoning are in principle of relevance, including, for instance, theorem proving approaches for onboard agent reasoning to verification approaches for reasoning about multi-agent systems. Likewise, all forms of single- and multi-agent search and planning – from motion planning to symbolic planning – and their interplay with other agent components are relevant. 

Sample AAMAS papers:

Dynamic epistemic logic with assignment, H. P. van Ditmarsch, W. van der Hoek, B. P. Kooi, AAMAS05.

Towards Partial Order Reductions for Strategic Ability, W. Jamroga, W. Penczek, P. Dembiński, A. Mazurkiewicz, AAMAS18 Liu, H. Ma, J. Li and S. Koenig: Task and Path Planning for Multi-Agent Pickup and Delivery. In Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), 2019.
http://idm-lab.org/bib/abstracts/papers/aamas19a.pdf

Aleck M. MacNally, Nir Lipovetzky, Miquel Ramírez, Adrian R. Pearce: Action Selection for Transparent Planning. 1327-1335
AAMAS 2018.
http://ifaamas.org/Proceedings/aamas2018/pdfs/p1327.pdf

Xin Tian, Hankz Hankui Zhuo, Subbarao Kambhampati: Discovering Underlying Plans Based on Distributed Representations of Actions. 1135-1143 AAMAS 2016.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.05662

Area Chairs:

• Sven Koenig, University of Southern California, USA
• Alessio Lomuscio, Imperial College London, UK

Area 6 – Learning and Adaptation

Topics:

• Adversarial multi-agent systems
• Co-evolutionary algorithms
• Deep learning
• Deep reinforcement learning
• Evolutionary algorithms
• Learning agent capabilities
• Learning agent-to-agent interactions
• Machine learning
• Multi-agent learning
• Multi-reward learning
• Multi-task learning
• Reinforcement learning
• Reward structures for learning

Description:

Autonomous Agents must sense, deliberate, decide, and act in potentially complex and uncertain environments. In addition, in many cases, they must interact with other agents and/or humans. Anticipating each situation and hardcoding the appropriate agent behavior becomes impossible as the complexity of the environment and interactions increase. As such, adaptivity and learning are key properties that imbue autonomy to agents operating in the real world. Papers in this area focus on all aspects of single agent and multiagent learning.

Sample AAMAS papers:

Noa Agmon, Samuel Barrett, and Peter Stone. Modeling Uncertainty in Leading Ad Hoc Teams. AAMAS  2014: 397-404.

Shayegan Omidshafiei, Dong-Ki Kim, Jason Pazis, Jonathan P. How. Crossmodal Attentive Skill Learner. AAMAS 2018: 139-146.

Joel Z. Leibo, Vinícius Flores Zambaldi, Marc Lanctot, Janusz Marecki, Thore Graepel. Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning in Sequential Social Dilemmas. AAMAS 2017: 464-473.

Area Chairs:

• Kagan Tumer, Oregon State University, USA
• Karl Tuyls, Google DeepMind, UK

Area 7 – Markets, Auctions, and Non Cooperative Game Theory

Topics:

• Auctions and mechanism design
• Bargaining and negotiation
• Behavioural game theory
• Game theory for practical applications
• Non-cooperative games: computation
• Non-cooperative games: theory & analysis

Description:

This area is relevant to works on non-cooperative games, which deal with computational aspects (e.g., algorithms/complexity analysis on finding an equilibrium), as well as theory and analysis.  Furthermore, this area is relevant to various application areas of non-cooperative game theory, e.g., market/mechanism design (including auctions and two-sided matching), bargaining and negotiation, and behavioural game theory.  This area also encourages submissions related to practical applications of game theory.

Sample AAMAS papers:

Buyer Signaling Game in Auctions Weiran Shen, Pingzhong Tang, Yulong Zeng, AAMAS-2019

From Matching with Diversity Constraints to Matching with Regional Quotas Haris Aziz, Serge Gaspers, Zhaohong Sun, Toby Walsh, AAMAS-2019

Automated mechanism design via neural networks Weiran Shen, Pingzhong Tang, Song Zuo, AAMAS-2019

Computing Optimal Ex Ante Correlated Equilibria in Two-Player Sequential Games Andrea Celli, Nicola Gatti, Stefano Coniglio, AAMAS-2019

Area Chairs:

• Craig Boutilier, Google AI, USA
• Makoto Yokoo, Kyushu University, Japan

Area 8 – Modelling and Simulation of Societies

Topics:

• Analysis of agent-based simulations
• Applications of agent-based simulations 
• Emergent behaviour
• Engineering agent-based simulations 
• Interactive simulation
• Modelling for agent-based simulation
• Simulation of complex systems
• Simulation techniques, tools and platforms
• Social simulation
• Validation of simulation systems

Description:

The area aims to find efficient solutions to model and simulate complex social systems using agents. Important application areas include ecology, biology, economics, transportation, management, organizational, and social sciences in general. In these areas, agent theories, metaphors, models, analysis, experimental designs, empirical studies, and methodological principles, all converge into simulation as a way of achieving explanations and predictions, exploration and testing of hypotheses, and better system designs.

Sample AAMAS papers:

An Evolutionary Approach to Find Optimal Policies with an Agent-Based Simulation – Nicolas De Bufala, Jean-Daniel Kant (AAMAS 2019)

Modelling Multiple Influences Diffusion in On-line Social Networks  – Weihua Li, Quan Bai, Minjie Zhang, Tung Doan Nguyen (AAMAS 2018)

Cognition-enabled Task Interpretation for Human-Robot Teams in a Simulation-based Search and Rescue Mission – Fereshta Yazdani, Matthias Scheutz, Michael Beetz (AAMAS2017)

Area Chairs:

• Paul Davidsson, Malmö University, Sweden
• Harko Verhagen, Stockholm University, Sweden

Area 9 – Robotics

Topics:

• Explainability, trust and ethics for robots
• Failure recovery for robots
• Human-robot interaction and collaboration
• Knowledge representation and reasoning in robotic systems
• Long-term (or lifelong) autonomy for robotic systems
• Machine learning for robotics
• Mapping, localisation and exploration
• Multi-robot systems
• Networked systems and distributed robotics
• Robot control
• Swarm and collective behaviour
• Robots in adversarial settings

Description:

Robotics is one of the exciting fields in agent research. Both practical and analytical techniques in agent research influence, and are being influenced by, research in autonomous robots and multi-robot systems. We invite papers that advance theory and application of single and multiple robots. Papers on the interaction between robots and agents (broadly defined) are particularly welcome, but all papers at the intersection of robotics and artificial intelligence (and agent research, specifically) are in the scope of the robotics area at AAMAS.

Sample AAMAS papers:

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~pstone/Papers/bib2html-links/AAMAS18-yunl.pdf
http://idm-lab.org/bib/abstracts/papers/aamas17.pdf
http://www.ifaamas.org/Proceedings/aamas2016/pdfs/p1087.pdf

Area Chairs:

• Noa Agmon, Bar-Ilan University, Israel
• Yevgeniy Vorobeychik , Washington University in St. Louis , USA

Area 10 – Social Choice and Cooperative Game Theory

Topics:

• Coalition formation (strategic)
• Cooperative games: computation
• Cooperative games: theory & analysis
• Fair allocation
• Social choice theory

Description:

We are looking forward to receive submissions on topics in strategic group formation and group decision-making. This includes voting (including strategic analysis of voters’ behavior), coalition formation (including, in particular, matching algorithms, hedonic games, and computation of various solution concepts to cooperative games), and various forms of fair division and fair allocation.

Sample AAMAS papers:

Shreyas Sekar, Sujoy Sikdar, Lirong Xia: Condorcet Consistent Bundling with Social Choice. AAMAS-2017

Julien Lesca, Patrice Perny, Makoto Yokoo: Coalition Structure Generation and CS-core: Results on the Tractability Frontier for games represented by MC-nets. AAMAS-2017

Aurélie Beynier, Yann Chevaleyre, Laurent Gourvès, Julien Lesca, Nicolas Maudet, Anaëlle Wilczynski: Local Envy-Freeness in House Allocation Problems. AAMAS-2018

Area Chairs:

• Edith Elkind, University of Oxford , UK
• Piotr Faliszewski , AGH University of Science and Technology , Poland