ALA 2009 - Workshop at AAMAS 2009

Adaptive Learning Agents encompasses diverse fields such as Computer Science, Software Engineering, Biology, as well as Cognitive and Social Sciences.

This workshop is a continuation of last year's ALAMAS+ALAg workshop, now in its ninth year. Previous version of this workshop may be found at the following urls:



The goal of this workshop is to increase awareness and interest in adaptive agent research, encourage collaboration and give a representative overview of current research in the area of adaptive and learning agents. It aims at bringing together not only scientists from different areas of computer science (e.g., agent architectures, reinforcement learning, and evolutionary algorithms) but also from different fields studying similar concepts (e.g., game theory, bio-inspired control, mechanism design).

The workshop will serve as an inclusive forum for the discussion on ongoing or completed work in both theoretical and practical issues of adaptive and learning agents and multi-agent systems.



This workshop will focus on all aspects of adaptive and learning agents and multi-agent systems with a particular emphasis on how to modify established learning techniques and/or create new learning paradigms to address the many challenges presented by complex real-world problems. The topics of interest include but are not limited to:

  • Novel combinations of reinforcement and supervised learning approaches
  • Integrated learning approaches that work with other agent reasoning modules like negotiation, trust models, coordination, etc.
  • Supervised multi-agent learning
  • Reinforcement learning in multi-agent systems
  • Distributed Learning
  • Adaptation and learning in dynamic environments
  • Evolution of agents in complex environments
  • Co-evolution of agents in a multi-agent setting
  • Cooperative exploration and learning to cooperate and collaborate
  • Learning trust and reputation
  • Communication restrictions and their impact on multi-agent coordination
  • Design of reward structure and fitness measures for coordination
  • Scaling learning techniques to large systems of learning and adaptive agents
  • Emergent behavior in adaptive multi agent systems
  • Game theoretical analysis of adaptive multi agent systems
  • Neuro control in multi agent systems
  • Bio-inspired multi agent systems
  • Applications of adaptive and learning agents and multi agents systems to real world complex systems Learning of Co-ordination

Update: We are excited to announce that Springer has agreed to publish a book containing revised versions of the best papers from the workshop (after an additional review process).


Page limit: 16 pages in LNCS format.


  • Submission: June 26th
  • Notification: August 28th Delayed
  • Camera Ready: September 18th

Submission

Paper submissions may be emailed in pdf format to taylorm@usc.edu with the subject Submission ALA. Submissions may be up to 8 pages in the ACM proceedings format (i.e., the same as AAMAS papers in the main conference track) and will be reviewed for relevance, originality, significance, and clarity. Accepted work will be allocated time for oral presentation during the one day workshop.

Important Dates

  • Submission Deadline
February 8th, 2009 (Note new date)
  • Notification of acceptance:
March 1st, 2009
  • Camera-ready copies:
March 15th, 2009
  • Workshop:
Tuesday, May 12th, 2009

Venue

The ALA workshop will be held at AAMAS 2009, the eighth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent System which will take place in Budapest, Hungary.

Registration

Registration is handled directly by AAMAS.

Program

Tentative Schedule:

Morning Session 1
10:30-11:00: coffee
Morning Session 2
12:30-2:00pm: lunch
Afternoon Session 1
3:30-4:00pm: coffee
Afternoon Session 2

Program Committee

  • Eduardo Alonso, City University, UK
  • Bikramjit Banerjee, The University of Southern Mississippi, USA
  • Ana L.C. Bazzan, UFRGS, Porto Alegre, BR
  • Marek Grzes, University of York, UK
  • Zahia Ghuessoum, University of Paris 6, FR
  • Franziska Klügl, University of Orebro, Sweden
  • Daniel Kudenko, University of York, UK
  • Ann Nowé, Vrije Universiteit Brussels, BE
  • Liviu Panait, Google Inc Santa Monica, USA
  • Lynne Parker, University of Tennessee, USA
  • Jeffrey Rosenschein, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
  • Michael Rovatsos, Centre for Intelligent Systems and their Applications, UK
  • Sandip Sen, University of Tulsa, USA
  • Kagan Tumer, Oregon State University, USA
  • Katja Verbreek, KaHo Sint-Lieven, Belgium

Organization

This year's workshop is organized by:
  • Matthew Taylor (University of Southern California, USA)
  • Karl Tuyls (Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands)

Questions about the ALA workshop should be directed to the chairs by email: taylorm@usc.edu.



Senior Steering Committee Members:
  • Franziska Klügl (University of Orebro, Sweden)
  • Daniel Kudenko (University of York, UK)
  • Ann Nowé (Vrije Universiteit Brussels, Belgium)
  • Lynne E. Parker (University of Tennessee, USA)
  • Sandip Sen (University of Tulsa, USA)
  • Peter Stone (University of Texas at Austin, USA)
  • Kagen Tumer (Oregon State University, USA)
  • Karl Tuyls (Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands)