Autonomous intelligent agents are entities that are capable of fulfilling their goals in complex environments by choosing to execute actions based on their, possibly imperfect, sensory data. Agents can live in environments that are either physical (robots) or virtual (for example internet softbots), and should be able to operate alone or effectively interact and communicate with other agents. Over the last few years decision and game theories have proved to be powerful tools with which to design autonomous agents and to understand interactions in systems composed of many such agents.
Decision theory provides a general paradigm for designing agents that can operate in complex uncertain environments, and can act rationally to maximize their preferences. Decision-theoretic models use precise mathematical formalism to define the properties of the agent's environment, the agent's sensory capabilities, the ways the agent's actions change the state of the environment, and the agent's goals and preferences. The agent's rationality is defined as behavior that maximizes the expectation of the degree to which the preferences are achieved over time, and the planning problem is identified as a search for the rational, or optimal, plan. Game theory adds to the decision-theoretic framework the idea of multiple agents interacting within a common environment. It provides ways to specify how agents, separately or jointly, can change the environment, and how the resulting changes impact their individual preferences. Building on the assumption that agents are rational and self-interested, game theory uses the notion of Nash equilibrium to design mechanisms and protocols for various forms of interaction and communication that result in the overall system behaving in a stable, efficient, and fair manner. We invite papers devoted to designing computational agents based on insights from decision and game theories. Of particular interest are papers that address any of the issues of efficient representation of information about the environment, robust methods for updating this information given imperfect sensing and non-deterministic results of actions, existence of optimal solutions, complexity of computing solutions, and approximation methods with known error bounds. Further, we invite papers that address the theoretical developments in game theory or decision theory applied to agent systems. These include the applicability of game-theoretic solution concepts to computationally bounded agents, and combining decision and game-theoretic methods. Finally, we welcome papers that are devoted to applications of agent techniques in industry, defense, business, e-commerce, resource management and other related areas, papers that address any of the problems of automated negotiation, coalition formation, market-based systems, voting techniques, and industrial-scale information economies, and papers devoted to non-standard variants of decision theory (including qualitative and logical approaches). Guest Editors: Piotr Gmytrasiewicz, CS Department, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL 60607-7053. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Simon Parsons, Department of Computer and Information Science, Brooklyn College, City University of New York, Brooklyn, New York 11210. Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Submission details: The submission deadline is January 30, 2003. Please submit in postscript or pdf format to Piotr Gmytrasiewicz at [EMAIL PROTECTED] The papers will undergo a round of review, and authors will be notified about the acceptance decisions by May 1. The final versions of papers will be due May 20. The expected publication date is August (electronic) and October (hard copy). - -- +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Piotr Gmytrasiewicz | | Associate Professor | | Department of Computer Science email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | University of Illinois at Chicago phone: (312) 355-1320 | | 851 South Morgan Street fax: (312) 413-0024 | | Chicago, IL 60607-7053 http://www.cs.uic.edu/~piotr | +--------------------------------------------------------------------+
