CALL FOR PAPERS AAMAS-2002 Workshop on Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce IV: Designing Mechanisms and Systems http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/amec4 Colocated with the First International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems http://www.cs.umn.edu/aamas2002/ Bologna, Italy, July 15 or 16, 2002 OVERVIEW The design of economic agents, mechanisms, and systems has received growing attention in the agents and multiagent systems communities. Electronic commerce is rich with focused yet challenging problems, ripe for technical advances and practical application of agent technologies. As the domain is characterized by individual agent self-interest and private information, agent mediated trade requires principled design, often incorporating novel combinations of theories from different disciplines. Thus, techniques from fields such as computer science, operations research, artificial intelligence and distributed systems are integrated with principles from economics and game theory. Furthermore, there are challenges to eliciting human preferences and requirements and ensuring that they are represented in automated agent behavior. IMPORTANT DATES Submission deadline: 22 April 2002 Notification of acceptance: 20 May 2002 Final versions due: 27 May 2002 Workshop dates: 15 or 16 July, 2002 PUBLICATION It is planned for the proceedings of this workshop to be published in the LNAI series, in a format similar to previous workshops in the AMEC series; see http://dblp.uni-trier.de/db/conf/amec/index.html. WORKSHOP FORMAT Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce IV (AMEC IV) is colocated with the First International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systens. AMEC IV will build on the success of previous workshops, namely AMEC III (http://www.lsi.upc.es/~webia/amec3.html) which was colocated with Agents'00, and AMEC II which was colocated with IJCAI'99. This year the workshop will have three components: 1. PAPERS: We wish to explore research in the principled design of economic agents, mechanisms, and systems. To promote a forward-looking discussion, we encourage the submission of extended abstracts, work-in-progress reports, and position papers, as well as more developed technical papers, expressing innovative and principled ideas and approaches. Areas of particular interest include: * mechanisms, negotiation protocols, and auctions (esp. advanced designs such as multiattribute auctions) * bidding and negotiation strategies * integration of negotiation with broader decision making * economic-based theory and design methodologies * market-based problem solving * trading and pricing * eliciting human preferences and requirements and ensuring that they are represented in automated agent behavior * significant new problem domains There will be oral presentation of a selected subset of the accepted papers. One of the selection criteria to be applied by the program committee will be the likelihood of the paper to encourage fruitful discussions. Presentations will be grouped around one topic. The presentations will be around 20-25 minutes. Other selected papers will be presented in a poster session. 2. PANEL: Mobile Commerce Challenges and Opportunities The theme of the panel will be mobile commerce. In the context of agents, mobile commerce refers to agents on mobile devices such as mobile phones, palm computers, handhelds, laptops. Design and performance issues for such agents commonly depart from classical agent design, as agent protocols and strategies in the face of mobility must address scarce computation resources, limited bandwidth, prohibitive user-interface and unstable communication. 3. DEMONSTRATIONS: We invite demonstrations of electronic markets and/or agents that operate on electronic markets. There will be concurrent presentation of relevant prototypes, software developments and products. SUBMISSION DETAILS * Paper Submissions Authors should submit full papers electronically in PS or PDF format to William Walsh, wwalsh1@us.ibm.com. In addition, authors should submit an ASCII abstract, with the following information: title of paper; names and affiliations of authors; name, email, snail mail, phone number, and fax number of primary contact; abstract. The same information should be included on the first page of submitted papers. Papers must be written in English, with a maximum length of 8 pages. Please format papers according to the LNCS/LNAI style; a LaTex style is available at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html. Submitted papers will be reviewed by the program committee. All correspondence will be with the specified primary contact. * Demonstration Submissions Authors should submit a one page description of the demo provided in plain text (ASCII) format to Norman Sadeh, sadeh@cs.cmu.edu. All submissions will be reviewed by the Program Committee. When available, a URL should be provided on which the software can be tried out or downloaded. PROGRAM COMMITTEE Boi Faltings, EPFL, CH , faltings@lia.di.epfl.ch Peyman Faratin, MIT Sloan, peyman@mit.edu Fausto Giunchiglia IRST, Italy, fausto@itc.it Amy Greenwald, Brown, amygreen@cs.brown.edu Martin Griss, HP Palo Alto, Martin_Griss@hp.com Robert Guttman Frictionless Commerce Inc., USA, guttman@media.mit.edu Nick R. Jennings, Southampton University, UK, nrj@ecs.soton.ac.uk Sarit Kraus Bar-Ilan U., Israel, sarit@macs.biu.ac.il Yannis Labrou, CS and EE Dept.,Univ Maryland, jklabrou@cs.umbc.edu Pattie Maes MIT, USA, pattie@media.mit.edu Joerg Muller, Siemens, GE, joerg.mueller@mchp.siemens.de David Pennock, NEC Research Institute, dpennock@research.nj.nec.com Jeremy Pitt, Imperial College, j.pitt@ic.ac.uk Chris Preist, Hewlett-Packard, UK, Chris_Preist@hplb.hpl.hp.com Jeff Rosenschein, Hebrew University, Israel, jeff@cs.huji.ac.il Tuomas Sandholm, CMU, sandholm@cs.cmu.edu Katia Sycara, Carnegie Mellon U., USA, katia@cs.cmu.edu Michael Wellman, University of Michigan, wellman@umich.edu Mike Wooldridge, University of Liverpool, UK, M.J.Wooldridge@csc.liv.ac.uk Peter Wurman, NCSU, wurman@csc.ncsu.edu Frederik Ygge, Enersearch AB, Sweden, ygge@enersearch.se WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS Julian Padget Department of Computer Science University of Bath, UK tel: +44-1225-826971 email: jap@cs.bath.ac.uk David Parkes Department of Computer Science, Harvard University Tel: 617-384-8130 email: parkes@eecs.harvard.edu Norman Sadeh eCommerce Institute ISRI - School of Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University Tel: +1 (412) 268-8144 Email: sadeh@cs.cmu.edu Onn Shehory IBM - Haifa Research Lab ISRAEL Tel: 972-9-952-7682 email: ONN@il.ibm.com William E. Walsh IBM T.J. Watson Research Center Tel: 1-914-784-7334 email: wwalsh1@us.ibm.com