1st CfP: Information Sharing in Large Scale Multi-Agent Systems @ AAMAS 2013 (IS @ AAMAS 2013)

Fr Dez 14 12:26:52 CET 2012

Apologies for cross-postings

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Call for Papers

Information Sharing in Large Scale Multi-Agent Systems

Workshop in conjunction to AAMAS 2013
Saint Paul, Minessota
USA
May 6-10, 2013

URL: http://ai-group.ds.unipi.gr/islsmas/

Scope & Objectives

Agents, devices and information sources connected in large scale  
networks have to share information in effective ways, so as the right  
information to reach the right agents at the appropriate time, for  
agents to integrate and interpret data to perform the necessary tasks.

The diversity of data, the volatility and, in many emerging  
applications, ubiquity, make the information sharing task a  
challenging task. This is important in many real-world settings, where  
voluminous information from different sources need to reach distant  
agents. Sometimes, information by multiple sources needs to be fused,  
before being propagated to the right agents: The later may need  
information to be, for instance, extracted, implied, abstracted, or  
somehow aggregated, by the different pieces of information available.

The problem becomes even more challenging when agents have different  
"views" for the meaning of the information they share, when they  
have to manipulate heterogeneous data from different sources, or when  
they have to jointly control actuators.

In all the above cases, semantics play an important role.

Considering to be a decentralized control problem, information  
searching and sharing in large-scale systems of cooperative agents is  
a hard problem in the general case: The computation of an optimal  
policy, when each agent possesses an approximate partial view of the  
state of the environment and when agents' observations and  
activities are interdependent, is hard.

The above considerations, has resulted to efforts that either require  
agents to have a global view of the systems, to heuristics, to the pre- 
computation of agents' information needs and information provision  
capabilities for proactive communication, to localized reasoning  
processes built on incoming information, to analytical frameworks for  
coordination whose optimal policies can be approximated for small  
(sub-) networks of associated agents, and to reinforcement learning  
algorithms for hierarchical peer-to-peer information retrieval  
systems. On the other hand, there is a lot of research on semantic  
peer-to-peer search networks and social networks many of which deal  
with tuning a network of peers for effective information searching.

Topics of Interest

With the advent of new opportunities in mobile computing, in the  
social web and in the context of the internet of smart things, or in  
other settings where information is inherently distributed among  
several agents who have to share information (e.g. in rescue and large- 
scale emergency scenarios), in this workshop we welcome high-quality  
contributions with a focus on information sharing, as opposed to mere  
information retrieval that happens through locating information  
sources and querying.

Specific topics of interest therefore include, but are not limited to:

·      Algorithms for information sharing among self-interested agents.

·      Formal models of information sharing and formal properties  
(e.g. convergence, completeness, optimality)

·      Energy/cost-efficient and scalable information sharing methods

·      Machine learning methods for "tuning" information sharing  
in large scale settings

·      Adaptive multi-agent organizations for information sharing

·      Distributed semantic coordination for information sharing in  
heterogeneous and large scale settings.

·      Practical engineering issues for information sharing in large  
scale settings

·      Information provenance, trust and reputation for information  
sharing.

·      Environment abstractions and facilitators for effective  
information sharing.

·      Real-world applications of information sharing.

·     Agent architectures for energy-efficient and scalable  
information sharing.

We aim to foster discussion among researchers from the fields of agent- 
based peer-to-peer systems, adapting and self-organized multi-agent  
systems, large scale semantic coordination, decentralized control and  
game theory interested to information sharing in open, dynamic large  
scale settings of heterogeneous and/or mobile agents.

Submissions

We seek high-quality submissions of full papers, limited to 8 pages in  
length, and extended abstracts, limited to 4 pages in length.

All 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.

The purpose of an extended abstract is to either (a) give the authors  
the chance to present promising work, which is not fully matured as a  
full paper, so that it can be polished through the discussion at the  
workshop, or (b) present a short version of already published work.

To submit your paper (in PDF format), please go to the submission  
website
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=isaamas2013

The submission closes at 11:59 PM Hawaii Standard Time (HST = GMT -  
10:00) on Feb 9.

Authors must follow the AAMAS 2013 proceedings guidelines.

Important dates:

Feb 9, 2013: Submission of contributions

March 1, 2013: Paper acceptance notifications

March 8, 2013: Submission of camera-ready versions

May, 6-10, 2013: Workshop and AAMAS 2013

Workshop Organizers:

George Vouros,  University of Piraeus, Greece
email: georgev at unipi.gr

Paul Scerry, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
email: pscerri at cs.cmu.edu

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