Subject: Spring Symposium on Adaptation, Co-evolution, and Learning in Multiagent Systems
From: [email-masked] (Sandip Sen)
Date: 24 Aug 1995 23:12:21 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.ai

AAAI-96 Spring Symposium Series
     			March 25-27, 1996
		Stanford University, California

Adaptation, Co-evolution and Learning in Multiagent Systems
===========================================================

Coordination of multiple agents is essential for the viability of systems
in which these agents share resources.  Most of the research in Distributed
Artificial Intelligence have concentrated on developing coordination
strategies off-line. These pre-fabricated strategies can quickly become
inadequate if the system designer's world model is incomplete/incorrect or
if the environment can change dynamically.  Learning and adaptation are
invaluable mechanisms by which agents can evolve coordination strategies
that meet the demands of the environments and the requirements of
individual agents.

The goal of this symposium is to focus on research that will address unique
requirements for agents learning and adapting to work with other agents.
Recognizing the applicability and limitations of current machine learning
research as applied to multiagent problems as well as developing new
learning and adaptation mechanisms particularly targeted to these class of
problems will be of particular relevance to this symposium.  We would
particularly welcome new insights into this class of problems from other
related disciplines, and thus would like to emphasize the
inter-disciplinary nature of the symposium.  Among others, papers of the
following kind are welcome:

-- Benefits of adaptive/learning agents over agents with fixed behavior
   in multiagent problems.

-- Characterization of methods in terms of modeling power, communication 
   abilities, and knowledge requirement of individual agents.

-- Developing learning and adaptation strategies for environments with
   cooperative agents, selfish agents, partially cooperative agents.

-- Analyzing and constructing algorithms that guarantee convergence and
   stability of group behavior.

-- Co-evolving multiple agents with similar/opposing interests.

-- Inter-disciplinary research from fields like organizational theory, 
   game theory, psychology, sociology, economics, etc.

Submission information
######################

The symposium will consist of individual presentations, invited talks,
break-out group discussions, panels, and video sessions.  Participants
interested in presenting their work should send an extended abstract (12
point font, 5 pages or less) describing work in progress or completed work.
Other interested participants should send a one-page description of their
research interests with a short list of relevant publications.  We would
like to encourage submissions for video presentations and for working
systems that can be used for hands-on demonstration during the symposium.
We will accept only e-mail submissions of postscript files.  Submissions
should be sent to [email-masked].  Further information on
this symposium can be found on the WWW at
http://euler.mcs.utulsa.edu/~sandip/ss.html.

Submissions for the symposia are due on October 31, 1995.  Notification
of acceptance will be given by November 30, 1995.  Material to be included
in the working notes of the symposium must be received by January 19, 1996.

Organizing Committee
####################

Sandip Sen (Chair), University of Tulsa, [email-masked]
Devika Subramanian, Cornell University, [email-masked]
Jeff Rosenschein, The Hebrew University, [email-masked]
John J. Grefenstette, Naval Research Laboratory, [email-masked]
Michael N. Huhns, University of South Carolina, [email-masked]
Tad Hogg, Xerox PARC, [email-masked]