AAMAS 2007 IntroductionThe ubiquity, distribution, and connectedness of contemporary computer systems enable them to provide the services that are required by our information-rich society, but this has come at the expense of a dramatic increase in their size, complexity, and diversity. To provide timely services with required quality, the computer systems must interact with one another and with humans; and characterizing the participants as agents provides a convenient and powerful abstraction for designing and understanding the interactions. Agent technologies thus play essential roles in the design of complex, distributed, and service-oriented systems. The technologies govern the nature and character of the interactions, as well as the means by which the participants comprehend, coordinate, enable, implement, and cause the interactions. The AAMAS 2007 program addresses and advances the theory and practice of all these technologies. Agents and multiagent systems also introduce a paradigm shift in the way systems are analyzed, designed, and implemented by conceptualizing the system components as autonomous entities. The paradigm shift in turn addresses complexity, distribution, and interaction. Concepts of agents and multiagent systems are shaping landscapes of basic and applied research, including social simulation, games, pervasive and ubiquitous computing, robotics, user interfaces, computer-mediated collaboration, electronic commerce, information retrieval, education and training, and autonomic computing. All of these research areas are represented in the AAMAS 2007 program. The Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) conference series brings together researchers from around the world to share the latest advances in the field. It was initiated in 2002 as a merger of three highly successful related events: the International Conference on Autonomous Agents (AGENTS), the International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS), and the International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL). The AAMAS conference series provides a single, high-profile forum for research in the theory and practice of autonomous agents and multiagent systems. AAMAS 2002, the first of the series, was held in Bologna, followed by AAMAS 2003 in Melbourne, AAMAS 2004 in New York, AAMAS 2005 in Utrecht, AAMAS 2006 in Hakodate, and AAMAS 2007 in Honolulu, Hawai'i. AAMAS 2007 received 531 submissions for the main conference. Each paper was reviewed by at least three program committee members (guided by a senior program committee member). 122 papers were accepted as full 8-page papers, and an additional 131 were accepted as short 3-page papers (acceptance rates of 23% for full papers and 48% overall). Among the most exemplary papers appearing at the conference are the papers nominated for the Best Paper and Best Student Paper awards, and these are listed below. The AAMAS 2007 program is organized so that all accepted papers, both full length and short, will be presented at poster sessions. Full papers will additionally be presented in oral sessions. We consider poster presentations as an important form of detailed technical exchange. We however believe that oral presentations provide an additional means of exchange, which is of particular importance for younger researchers. Besides the main conference program, the five-day AAMAS event consists of 8 tutorials, 19 workshops, a main conference track, a separate industry paper track with 10 papers, demonstration sessions with 11 demonstrations, an exhibition, and a doctoral mentoring program with 17 students. These and other conference elements are the result of great efforts on the part of many dedicated volunteers. We are grateful to all the AAMAS 2007 conference officials and those who worked with them to put together such a successful research meeting. The chairs would like to thank all of the Program Committee and Senior Program Committee members for their hard work putting together this year’s program. Overall, the reviews were quite detailed and the reviewers were very responsive during the discussion phase. Edmund Durfee and Makoto Yokoo, Conference co-Chairs Best Paper and Best Student Paper Nominees
From among this year's complete program, the following papers were selected as nominees for the best paper: "A Bounded Q-decomposition RDTP Approach to Resource Allocation," "Multiagent Reinforcement Learning and Self-organization in a Network of Agents," "Bidding Optimally in Concurrent Second-Price Auctions of Perfectly Substitutable Goods," "Outperforming the Competition in Multi-Unit Sealed Bid Auctions," "Better automated abstraction techniques for imperfect information games, with application to Texas Hold’Em Poker," "Distributed Agent-Based Air Traffic Flow Management," "Theoretical Advantages of Lenient Q-learners: An Evolutionary Game Theory Perspective," "Distributed Management of Flexible Times Schedules," The following papers were selected as nominees for the best student paper award: "A Computational Characterization of Multiagent Games with Fallacious Rewards," "Computing the Banzhaf Power Index in Network Flow Games," "A Generative Inquiry Dialogue System," "Exploiting Factored Representations for Decentralized Execution in Multi-agent Teams," "Robust coordination to sustain throughput of an unstable agent network," "Batch Reinforcement Learning in a Complex Domain," "Organizational Self-Design in Semi-dynamic Environments," "IFSA: Incremental Feature-Set Augmentation," |
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ISBN: 978-81-904262-7-5 (RPS) © 2007 IFAAMAS |