Call for Papers

Call for Papers

Information Sharing in Large Scale Multi-Agent Systems (IS @ AAMAS 2013)

Workshop in conjunction to AAMAS 2013

Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA

May 6-10, 2013

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 distribution, diversity, volatility of data, and, in many emerging applications ubiquity of information sources, 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.

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 for which they do not share a common representation. Also, sometimes, information by multiple sources needs to be pre-processed, before being propagated to the right agents: The later may need specific information to be, for instance, extracted, implied, abstracted, or somehow aggregated, in different ways.

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 (i.e. one agent’s actions affect the observations and the state of an other), 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 that address any subset of the issues raised above, with a focus on information sharing, as opposed to mere information searching and retrieval through querying.
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 and completeness)
· Energy/cost-efficient and scalable information sharing methods
· Machine learning 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