[robocup-worldwide] Call for Papers: AAMAS 2019

[aamas2019org at gmail.com]

Call for Papers: AAMAS 2019

Eighteenth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems 
May 13-17, 2019, Montreal, Canada
http://aamas2019.encs.concordia.ca


Important Dates
Abstract Submission: 12th of November 2018 (23:59 UTC-12)
Full Paper Submission: 16th of November 2018 (23:59 UTC-12)
Rebuttal Phase: 8th-9th of January 2019 (23:59 UTC-12)
Author Notification: 23rd of January 2019 (23:59 UTC-12)
JAAMAS Submission: 27th of January 2019 (23:59 UTC-12)

Conference Schedule
Tutorials, Doctoral Consortium, Workshops: May 13-14, 2019
Main Conference: May 15-17, 2019


Main Track and Special Tracks
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. 

Information for Authors
AAMAS 2019 encourages the submission of analytical, empirical, methodological, technological, and perspective papers. Analytical and empirical papers should make clear the significance and relevance of their results to the AAMAS community. Similarly, methodological and technological papers should make clear their scientific and technical contributions, and are expected to demonstrate a thorough evaluation of their strengths and weaknesses in practice. It is strongly encouraged that papers focusing on specific agent capabilities evaluate their techniques in the context of autonomous agent architectures or multiagent systems. A thorough evaluation, conducted from a theoretical or applied basis, is considered an essential component of any submission. Authors are also requested to pay particular attention to discussing how their work relates to the state of the art in autonomous agents and multiagent systems research as evidenced in, for example, previous AAMAS and related confe!
 rences and journals. All submissions will be rigorously peer reviewed and evaluated on the basis of the overall quality of their technical contribution, including criteria such as originality, soundness, relevance, significance, quality of presentation, and understanding of the state of the art. 
AAMAS 2019, the eighteenth conference in the AAMAS series, seeks the submission of high-quality papers limited to 8 pages in length, with any additional pages containing only bibliographic references. Reviews will be double blind; authors must avoid including anything that can be used to identify them. Please note that submitting an abstract is required before submitting a full paper. However, the abstracts will not be reviewed, and full papers must be submitted for the review process to begin. All work must be original, i.e., it must not have appeared in a conference proceedings, book, or journal and may not be under review for another archival conference. In addition to submissions in the main track, AAMAS 2019 will be soliciting papers in special tracks. The review process for the special tracks will be similar to the main track, but with program committee members specially selected for each track. All accepted papers for the special tracks will be included in the proceed!
 ings. At least one of the authors of each paper is required to register (by the early registration deadline), attend, and present the paper at the conference. 
A significant number of papers will be invited to submit extended versions to the Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems (JAAMAS) for fast-track review. 

AUTHORS TAKE NOTE: The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of your conference. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work. (For those rare conferences whose proceedings are published in the ACM Digital Library after the conference is over, the official publication date remains the first day of the conference.) 

Topics of Interest
The conference solicits papers addressing original research on autonomous agents and their interaction. In addition to the main track, there will be six special tracks: Robotics, Socially Interactive Agents, Engineering Multiagent Systems, Blue-Sky Ideas, JAAMAS, and Industrial Applications. Specific details and topics of interest for each track appear below.
Topics of interest for the main track include (but are not limited to) the following:
 
Agent Theories and Models:
Logic and game theory
Logics for agents and multi-agent systems
Formal models of agency
Belief-Desire-Intention theories and models
Cognitive models
Models of emotions
Logics for norms and normative systems
Communication and Argumentation:
Commitments
Communication languages and protocols
Speech act theory
Deductive, rule-based and logic-based argumentation
Argumentation-based dialogue and protocols
Agent Cooperation:
Biologically-inspired approaches and methods
Collective intelligence
Distributed problem solving
Teamwork, team formation, teamwork analysis
Coalition formation (non-strategic)
Multi-user/multi-virtual-agent interaction
Multi-robot systems
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning:
Ontologies for agents
Reasoning in agent-based systems
Single and multi-agent planning and scheduling
Reasoning about action, plans and change in multi-agent systems
Reasoning about knowledge, beliefs, goals and norms in multiagent systems
Agent Societies and Societal issues:
Organizations and institutions
Social networks
Socio-technical systems
Normative systems
Values in MAS (privacy, safety, security, transparency,…)
Monitoring agent societies
Coordination and control models for multiagent systems
Architectures for social reasoning
Trust and reputation
Policy, regulation and legislation
Self-organization
Learning and Adaptation:
Reward structures for learning
Evolutionary algorithms
Co-evolutionary algorithms
Multiagent learning
Reinforcement learning
Deep learning
Adversarial machine learning
Learning agent capabilities (agent models, communication, observation)
Learning agent-to-agent interactions (negotiation, trust, coordination)
Agents & Mainstream Computing:
Service-oriented architectures
Mobile agents
Autonomic computing
P2P, web services, grid computing, IoT, HPC
Agent-based Simulation:
Social simulation
Simulation techniques, tools and platforms
Simulation of complex systems
Validation of simulation systems
Modelling for agent-based simulation
Interactive simulation
Emergent behaviour
Analysis of agent-based simulations
Verification and Validation of Agent-based Systems:
Testing of agent-based systems, including model-based testing
Verification techniques for multiagent systems, including model checking
Synthesis of agent-based systems
Fault tolerance and resilience of multi-agent systems
Testing and debugging multiagent programs
Economic Paradigms:
Auctions and mechanism design
Bargaining and negotiation
Behavioral game theory
Cooperative games: theory & analysis
Cooperative games: computation
Noncooperative games: theory & analysis
Noncooperative games: computation
Social choice theory
Game theory for practical applications

General Chairs:
Edith Elkind (University of Oxford, UK)
Manuela Veloso (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)

Program Chairs:
Noa Agmon (Bar-Ilan University, Israel)
Matthew E. Taylor (Borealis AI, Canada)

JAAMAS (Chair: Kagan Tumer) 
AAMAS 2019 will also accept papers for presentation that have appeared in the Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems (JAAMAS) in the 12 months period preceding the AAMAS notification date (January 2019). These articles also have the option to publish an extended abstract (maximum two pages, excluding bibliography) in the AAMAS proceedings. The articles must be original and not previously published as a full paper in an archival conference. The submission process for this track is separate from the main paper submission process, and is later (deadline in January). Authors of eligible JAAMAS papers will be contacted by email in the second half of November. 
For details on JAAMAS, visit http://www.springer.com/computer/ai/journal/10458 

Robotics (Chairs: Joydeep Biswas and Mohan Sridharan) 
We invite contributions that extend the state of the art at the intersection of artificial intelligence and robotics. We especially encourage contributions in integrated and interactive systems (e.g., systems that sense and reason), and contributions that include evaluations on physical robots (single or multiple). Papers are solicited in all areas, including, but not limited to, one or more of the following: 
Explainability, trust and ethics for robots
Human-robot interaction and collaboration
Knowledge representation and reasoning
Long-term (or lifelong) autonomy
Machine learning for robotics
Mapping and localization
Multirobot systems
Networked systems and distributed robotics
Robot control
Failure recovery for robots

Socially Interactive Agents (Chairs: Ana Paiva and David Sarne)
The Socially Interactive Agents track invites papers on research topics related to the design, implementation, evaluation and application of social agents including social robots. Such agents (and robots) are capable of interacting with people and each other using social communicative behaviors common to human-human interaction. Example applications include social assistants on mobile devices, pedagogical agents in tutoring systems, characters in interactive games, social robots collaborating with humans and multimodal interface agents for smart appliances and environments. The goal of the social agents track is to provide an opportunity for continued interaction and cross-fertilization between the AAMAS community and researchers working on social  interactive agents.
We welcome papers that present novel work and contributions on social agent systems, human(s)-agent(s) interaction, applications or evaluations of such systems. Submissions can address innovative, fundamental issues such as behavioral or cognitive models for autonomous social agents, as well as new application areas.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Humans and Agents/Robots:
Human-robot/agent interaction
Multi-user/multi-agent interaction
Agents competing and collaborating with humans
Agent-based analysis of human interactions
Agents for improving human cooperative activities
Groups  of humans and agents
Social agent models:
Reasoning, learning, adaptation and user modeling
Affect, personality and cultural differences
Multimodal interaction:
Verbal and nonverbal communication for social agents (perception, analysis and generation)
Gaze, gestures, emotions, facial expressions, etc. (recognition and generation)
Dialogue models for social agents
Adaptation and Learning in Interactive Social Agents:
Interactive and Active Learning for Social Agents
Transfer Learning for human-agent Interactions
Social agent architectures:
Tools for designing and building social agents
Ubiquitous architectures
Portability and reuse standards/measures to support interoperability
Evaluation methods and studies:
Empirical studies on social agents
Ethical considerations and social impact
New methods and new metrics for evaluating human-agent interaction
Social agents as a means to study and model human behavior
Applications:
Interactive storytelling, entertainment, education, health, art, chatbots, marketing and large scale deployments

Engineering Multiagent Systems (Chairs: Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni and Michael Winikoff)
The new Engineering Multiagent Systems track invites submissions that contribute to the theory and practice of multiagent system development. This includes methodologies, tools and technologies that support the development and engineering of multiagent systems. The aim of the Engineering Multiagent Systems track is to bring together researchers from software engineering and multiagent systems communities to discuss the engineering issues related to the development of multiagent systems. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:


Programming frameworks, languages, models and abstractions for all aspects of multiagent systems
Formal methods and declarative technologies for specification, verification and engineering of multiagent systems
Multiagent systems software engineering methodologies and techniques, and development concerns (e.g. deployment, scalability and complexity)
Interoperability and integration
Tools and testbeds for evaluation of multiagent systems
Empirical studies and industrial experience reports on engineering multiagent systems applications
Real-world and innovative applications of multiagent systems

Blue Sky Ideas (Chair: Catholijn Jonker) 
The emphasis of this track is on visionary ideas, long-term challenges, new research opportunities, and controversial debate. It serves as an incubator for innovative, risky, and provocative ideas, and aims to provide a forum for publishing and presenting these without being constrained by the result-oriented standards followed in the review process of other tracks of the conference. We encourage papers to reflect on: the use of agents and multiagent systems in emergent computing technologies; novel, overlooked, or underrepresented methodologies and application areas; their potential promises and risks; and on the future of the research area and its community within the broader AI and computing landscape. Importantly, this track is not the right place for preliminary work, or for papers reporting on existing approaches. Reviewers will assess papers based on the novelty of the ideas presented, the rigor with which they are developed, and the level of critical reflection appli!
 ed in the exploration of these ideas. 

Industrial Applications (Chairs: Bo An and Yoram Bachrach) 
We invite industry practitioners and researchers to present application work that is deployed or has the potential to be deployed and uses agents/multi-agent systems technology in practice. Research from, and relevant to, the AAMAS community has permeated a variety of domains and applications, both as central to the application and in key supportive roles. For example, the community pursues research in topics including optimization, machine learning agents (supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning), resource allocation, cognitive intelligence, agent-based simulation, and game theory, and applies them in domains such as automotive systems, traffic routing, physical and cyber security, auctions, energy markets, biomedicine, robotics, financial management, and internet market design. Ideas and technologies from this research are responsible for significant revenue-generation and cost-saving, as well as for supporting important public policy and business strategy deci!
 sion-making. We are interested in hearing about how agent and multi-agent approaches transition into practice and what the current problems of interest are. 
This special track provides the ideal forum to present, discuss, and demonstrate compelling applications, agent system deployment experiences, and new business ideas. The goal is to promote the fostering of mutually-beneficial relationships between those doing foundational scientific research and those using autonomous agents and multi-agent systems in real-world commercial, non-profit, or government applications. 
Submitted material will be evaluated based on the use of agent/multi-agent systems technology for real problems over a reasonable duration, evidence of impact, and lessons for the agents/multi-agents community about what worked and what did not. Contributors will be given the opportunity to present their application at the conference. We welcome both deployed application case study papers and emerging applications.
In addition to this, the track will offer the following features: 
There will be a special award for the best industrial application contribution.
Attendees will be offered the opportunity to participate in special events (e.g. "company academia speed dating” and a demo session) bringing industrial partners, students and academics in contact.
There will be joint panel session with practitioners and academics to discuss current trends in academia and industry and how to establish beneficial collaborations between industry and academia.

Submission Instructions for Industrial Applications: 
Authors can submit an extended abstract (2 pages) or a full paper (8 pages), following the standard AAMAS submission instructions, describing the application at a more scientific level. Such papers will undergo a regular reviewing process and if accepted will be included in the AAMAS proceedings. The submission deadline of such papers is the same as the submission deadline of the main track.
We will also welcome talk-only submissions. Authors should submit a presentation of their work in whatever electronic medium best shows the AAMAS relevant features of the application, whether a video, PPT, deployment, webpage or software. Acceptance to the track will be determined based on both the degree to which interesting agent technologies feature in and improve the deployed system, as well as the benefit to the community to understanding the challenges and solutions in the application. Authors must submit a one page document accompanying the primary submission, briefly summarizing what interesting agent technologies are featured in the deployed system and the impacts those technologies have had. We also consider submissions presenting real-world problems which can be potentially solved by agent technologies. 
The  talk-only submission deadline is February 1, 2019.




General Information
All full papers accepted to the main track and the special tracks will be presented in parallel technical sessions. All the papers will be published in the conference proceedings and will be permanently available after the conference at www.ifaamas.org/proceedings.html. In addition, AAMAS 2019 will include:
Workshops
Tutorials
Doctoral consortium
System demonstrations
Poster presentations for full papers and extended abstracts
Invited talks and panel discussions
The submission processes for the workshops and system demonstrations are separate from the main paper submission process. Information will be posted on the relevant pages. 

Policies
Policy on multiple and previous submissions 
Authors may not submit any paper to AAMAS 2019 that has already appeared in an archival forum. Authors must ensure that no submission to AAMAS 2019 is under review for another archival forum between the AAMAS 2019 submission and decision dates. 

Policy on harassment at the conference environment 
IFAAMAS is committed to organising the AAMAS conference and its affiliated events in an environment that is free of harassment for everyone involved: delegates, organisers, conference workers, and reviewers. All participants in IFAAMAS events are asked to embrace our intention to foster a harassment-free scientific community, and to understand that IFAAMAS will respond appropriately to incidents of harassment if they occur. The complete IFAAMAS harassment policy is available at www.ifaamas.org/harassment.html 

For further details about AAMAS 2019, please visit the website at http://aamas2019.encs.concordia.ca