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Call for papers
Decision Support Systems Journal
Special Issue on Decision Theory and Game Theory in Agent Design
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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).
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| 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 |
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