CALL FOR PAPERS

11th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2012)

Valencia, Spain
June 4–8, 2012
http://aamas2012.webs.upv.es

ABOUT AAMAS

AAMAS is the leading scientific conference for research in autonomous agents and multiagent systems. The AAMAS conference series was initiated in 2002 by merging three highly respected meetings: the International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS); the International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL); and the International Conference on Autonomous Agents (AA). The aim of the joint conference is to provide a single, high-profile, internationally respected archival forum for scientific research in the theory and practice of autonomous agents and multiagent systems.

AAMAS 2012 is the eleventh conference in the AAMAS series, following enormously successful previous conferences, and will be held at the Universitat Politècnica de València in Valencia, Spain, June 4-8, 2012.

See http://www.ifaamas.org for more information on the AAMAS conference series.

WHAT’S NEW?

We realise that many of you will not read the CFP in detail. Please at least read the following points, which highlight significant recent changes.

1. When submitting papers, if the paper has appeared anywhere before, even as a short paper or in a workshop, then you must provide information on this – see the Submission Instructions section below for details.
2. The “industry track” changed in 2011 to the “innovative applications” track.
3. In response to comments at the AAMAS 2011 community discussion session, AAMAS 2012 also invites “perspective” papers (see the end of topic list for more information)

TOPICS OF INTEREST

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Agent Communication:

1. Agent commitments
2. Communication languages
3. Communication protocols
4. Speech act theory

Agent Cooperation:

1. Biologically-inspired approaches and methods
2. Collective intelligence
3. Distributed problem solving
4. Human-robot/agent interaction
5. Multi-user/multi-virtual-agent interaction
6. Teamwork, coalition formation, coordination
7. Incentives for Cooperation
8. Implicit Cooperation

Agent Reasoning:

1. Planning (single and multiagent)
2. Reasoning (single and multiagent)
3. Cognitive models
4. Knowledge representation

Agent Societies and Societal issues:

1. Artificial social systems
2. Environments, organisations and institutions
3. Ethical and legal issues
4. Peer to peer coordination
5. Privacy, safety and security
6. Social and organizational structure
7. Trust, reliability and reputation

Agent Theories, Models and Architectures:

1. BDI
2. Belief revision
3. Bounded rationality
4. Formal models of agency
5. Logic-based approaches and methods
6. Mobile agents
7. Modeling other agents and self
8. Modeling the dynamics of MAS
9. Reactive vs. deliberative approaches
10. Service oriented architectures
11. Verification of MAS

Agent-based simulation:

1. Artificial societies
2. Emergent behavior
3. Simulation techniques, tools and environments
4. Social simulation

Agent-based system development:

1. Agent development techniques, tools and environments
2. Agent programming languages
3. Agent specification or validation languages
4. Design languages for agent systems
5. Development environments
6. Programming languages
7. P2P, web services, grid computing
8. Software engineering (agent- or multi agent-oriented)

Agreement Technologies:

1. Argumentation
2. Collective decision making
3. Judgment aggregation and belief merging
4. Negotiation
5. Norms

Economic paradigms:

1. Electronic markets
2. Economically-motivated agents
3. Game Theory (cooperative and non-cooperative)
4. Social choice theory
5. Voting protocols
6. Artificial economies/markets
7. Auction and mechanism design
8. Bargaining and negotiation

Learning and Adaptation:

1. Computational architectures for learning
2. Reward structures for learning
3. Evolution, adaptation
4. Co-evolution
5. Single agent Learning
6. Multiagent Learning

Systems and Organisation:

1. Autonomic computing
2. Complex systems
3. Self-organisation

Perspectives (see below)

Perspective Papers

These are papers that analyse in some way the agents research community, or part of it. These papers will be handled like any other AAMAS submission; they will be evaluated in terms of their originality, soundness, significance, presentation, understanding of the state of the art, and overall quality of their technical contribution.  Papers that merely present a numerical analysis of trends without insightful interpretation, or that fail to situate their analysis within the existing body of literature, are unlikely to be accepted.

Examples of appropriate topics for perspective papers include (but are not necessarily limited to):

1. An analysis of data concerning trends in a given sub-area of agents, along with a discussion of these trends.
2. An overview of the state of adoption in practice of agents, along with an analysis of reasons and future trends
3. Any other papers that take a “step back” and consider the research and/or adoption of some aspect (or all of) the agents community

KEY DATES

For Authors:

Electronic Abstract Submission: October 7, 2011 (11:59 PM HST)
Full Paper Submission: October 12, 2011 (11:59 PM HST)
Rebuttal Phase:  November 29 – December 1, 2011 (11:59 PM HST)
Author Notification: December 21, 2011 (11:59 PM HST)
Conference: June 4–8, 2012

For Reviewers:

Bidding deadline: October 14, 2011 (11:59pm HST)
Paper assignments announced: October 24, 2011
Reviewing Period: October 24 – November 21, 2011
Discussion Period: December 2–9, 2011

SUBMISSION

AAMAS 2012 seeks submissions of high-quality full papers, limited to 8 pages in length. Submissions will be rigorously peer reviewed and evaluated on the basis of originality, soundness, significance, presentation, understanding of the state of the art, and overall quality of their technical contribution.  Reviews will be double blind; authors must avoid including anything that can be used to identify them.  Please note that prior submission of an abstract is required to submit a full paper.  However, the abstracts will not be reviewed and full (8 page) papers must be submitted for the review process to start.  All work must be original (must not have appeared in a conference proceedings, book, or journal).

Submission Instructions

To register and submit your paper (in PDF format), please go to the submission website: http://aamas2012.confmaster.net and follow the instructions.

Please keep in mind that you must submit an abstract by October 7, 2011 to be able to upload your paper (abstract submission is required to submit a paper, but abstracts will NOT be reviewed). The abstract and paper submissions close at 11:59 PM Hawaii Standard Time (HST = GMT – 10:00) on Oct 7 and Oct 12 respectively.

If any substantial part of your work appeared previously, please provide the citation and a one sentence description of the differences in the box provided. It is OK to submit work that has previously appeared in a workshop (without an associated archival publication). For such papers simply fill in the paper and workshop info. For papers that build on earlier work that appeared in an archival publication, please provide the citation and a one sentence description of the key advances/differences. This information will be kept from the reviewers to ensure a double-blind review and will only be used by the program chairs.

Formatting Instructions

The page limit for AAMAS 2012 submissions is 8 pages.  The format follows the ACM proceedings guidelines and consists of balanced double columns, 9 pt text, 1″ (2.54cm) margins top and bottom, and 0.75″ (1.9cm) margins left and right. Each column is 3.33″ (8.45cm) wide with a separation of 0.33″ (0.83cm). A LaTeX style file and a Microsoft Word template will be available soon on the conference Web site (http://aamas2012.webs.upv.es). Please do not modify the style files, or any layout parameters.

To ensure the effectiveness of the double-blind review process, make sure to put paper numbers (provided upon paper registration) instead of author names.  In addition, please ensure that any references to your own previous work is made in a way that does not disclose author identity (for example, instead of “in previous work, we have shown X [ref]” use “X was shown in [ref]“). In some cases where the work is clearly a continuation of your earlier work, you may consider removing citations to your own work until the final version (for example, “we have shown X [ref]” where [ref]= “Anonymous, 200X”). Please also check that the PDF file submitted does not contain embedded identifying information.

Mandatory Sections

The mandatory sections of the ACM styles are also mandatory for AAMAS 2012 submissions. Not only will these sections help select the reviewers, but according to ACM: “these index terms effect the ease and accuracy of retrieval within the Digital Library which ultimately benefits authors by allowing for greater distribution of their work”. Thus, although it may not be trivial to find the appropriate classification information, you should make an effort filling these sections:

1. Categories and Subject Descriptors:

Details of the ACM Computing Classification Scheme are available at http://www.acm.org/about/class/1998/

2. General Terms:

This section is limited to the following 16 terms: Algorithms, Management, Measurement, Documentation, Performance, Design, Economics, Reliability, Experimentation, Security, Human Factors, Standardization, Languages, Theory, Legal Aspects, Verification.

3. Keywords:

This section is your choice of terms you would like to be indexed by.  Please refer to the Call for Paper page for a list of keywords.

SPECIAL TRACKS

In addition to submissions in the main track, AAMAS-2012 will be soliciting papers in three special tracks.  The review process for the special tracks will be similar to the main track, but with program committee members specially selected for that track.

Special Track on Robotics (Chair: Daniele Nardi)

Papers that advance theory and applications of single and multiple robots are welcome, specifically those focusing on real robots that interact with their environment. Papers should clearly explain how the work addresses challenges in robotics, opportunities for novel applications, and fundamental research issues in autonomous robotic systems. The goal is to demonstrate the synergy achieved from integration of research in agents and robotics.

Keywords for Robotics Track:

1. Cognitive robotics
2. Formal methods
3. Integrated perception, cognition, and action
4. Intelligence for human-robot interaction
5. Machine learning for robotics
6. Mapping (including exploration, coverage, and SLAM)
7. Networked robot/sensor systems
8. Robot planning (including action and motion planning)
9. Robot teams, multi-robot systems
10. Robot coordination
11. Robotic agent languages and middleware for robot systems

Special Track on Virtual Agents (Chair: Stefan Kopp)

Virtual agents are embodied agents in interactive virtual or physical environments that emulate human-like behavior. We encourage papers on the design, implementation, and evaluation of virtual agents as well as challenging applications featuring them. The goal is to provide an opportunity for interaction and cross-fertilization between the AAMAS community and researchers working on virtual agents and to strengthen links between the two communities.

Keywords for Virtual Agents Track:

1. Modeling cognition and socio-cultural behavior
2. Conversational agents
3. Verbal and non-verbal expression
4. Affect and personality
5. Multimodal agent interaction
6. Computational models of narrative
7. Pedagogical, companion, and coaching agents
8. Culturally-aware agents
9. Virtual character modeling and animation in games, education, training, and virtual environments
10. Empirical studies

Special Track on Innovative Applications (Chairs: Klaus Fischer & Alex Rogers)

The Innovative Applications Track is a continuation of the tradition started by the Industry Track in past years. Due to the growing maturity of the field there are now agent-based applications in widespread use across many domains, responsible for the generation of significant revenues, or the saving of major costs, or for supporting important public policy and business strategy decision-making. This special track provides the ideal forum to present and discuss your work: to inform and inspire the largest international gathering of agent technology researchers and practitioners with presentations and demonstrations of your compelling applications, agent system deployment experiences, and new business ideas. The goal is to promote the fostering of mutually beneficial relationships between members of the AAMAS community who are engaged in foundational scientific research and those who are working to make autonomous agents and multi-agent systems a commercial or public policy reality. Due to the special review process for the Innovative Applications track, papers accepted in this track may be designated in the proceedings as belonging to this track.

For submissions to the special track on innovative applications, authors are particularly encouraged to address the following questions: What is the rationale for using agent-based technology in this application domain, as opposed to other approaches? If you have deployed your technology, what insights have you gained from the experience?  For instance, what lessons do you have for anyone pitching, designing, implementing, deploying, using, or evaluating similar agent systems or working in similar domains? What improvements or external factors (such as technology standards) might facilitate wider-spread adoption of your technology? What improvements in fundamental agent technology might improve your application, or enable it to be adopted more broadly, or support its better use?

Keywords for Innovative Applications Track:

1. Telecommunications and media
2. Energy and emissions
3. Bio-technology and health care
4. Financial markets
5. Manufacturing and logistics
6. Transportation and telematics
7. Ambient intelligence
8. Surveillance and security
9. Aerospace and defense
10. Business strategy and marketing
11. e-Government and e-Democracy
12. Public policy and Economics
13. Simulation
14. Implementation lessons
15. Business cases for MAS

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