=================================================================================
Call for participation: The Automated Negotiating Agents Competition 2022

Submission deadline: June 2022

Event: IJCAI 2022, July 23-29 2022, in Vienna, Austria

Website: http://web.tuat.ac.jp/~katfuji/ANAC2022
=================================================================================




==========
Motivation, impact, and expected outcomes
==========

We invite researchers to participate in The Automated Negotiating Agent Competition (ANAC) 2022, which brings together researchers from the negotiation community and provides a unique benchmark for evaluating practical negotiation strategies in multi-issue domains. ANAC has the following aims:

* to provide an incentive for the development of effective negotiation strategies and protocols for bidding, accepting and opponent modeling for different negotiation scenarios;
* to collect and develop a benchmark of negotiation scenarios, protocols and strategies;
* to develop a common set of tools and criteria for the evaluation and exploration of new protocols and new strategies against benchmark scenarios, protocols and strategies;
* to set the research agenda for automated negotiation.

The previous competitions have spawned novel research in AI in the field of autonomous agent design which are available to the wider research community. This year, we introduce a variety of negotiation research challenges:

* Agent Negotiation and Transfer Learning (GeniusWeb framework): http://web.tuat.ac.jp/~katfuji/ANAC2022/genius.html
* Human-Agent Negotiation (IAGO framework): https://myiago.com/
* Supply Chain Management (NegMas framework): https://scml.cs.brown.edu/

We expect innovative and novel agent strategies will be developed, and the submitted ANAC 2022 agents will serve as a negotiating agent repository to the negotiation community.

Since 2010, ANAC has been cooperating with ACAN (The International Workshop on Agent-based Complex Automated Negotiations). This year, ACAN will have a special ANAC session, in which we plan to explain and discuss the research challenges addressed in ANAC 2020-2022. The participants with winning negotiation strategies, especially in ANAC 2020 and ANAC 2021, are invited to submit their paper. See: https://sites.google.com/view/ijcai-acan2022

==========
Competition Schedule
==========

* Deadline for submissions: June 2022
* Announcement of finalists: July 2022 (tentative)
* ANAC 2022: July 23-29, 2022; jointly held with IJCAI 2022

Please check the website of individual leagues for their specific timeline: http://web.tuat.ac.jp/~katfuji/ANAC2022/#leagues

==========
Website URL
==========

For more details, please visit the competition webpage: http://web.tuat.ac.jp/~katfuji/ANAC2022/

ANAC Board Members

* Dr. Reyhan Aydoğan, Ozyegin University & Delft University of Technology
* Dr. Tim Baarslag, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) & Utrecht University
* Dr. Katsuhide Fujita, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology
* Prof. Dr. Catholijn Jonker, Delft University of Technology

League Organizers

* Automated Agents League: Bram Renting (Leiden University)
* Human-Agent League: Dr. Johnathan Mell (The University of Central Florida)
* Supply Chain Management League: Dr. Yasser Mohammad, Shinji Nakadai; Dr. Satoshi Morinaga (NEC, AIST); Prof. Dr. Amy Greenwald, Dr. Enrique Areyan Viqueir (Brown University); Dr. Mark Klein (MIT)

Sponsorship Chair

* Prof. Dr. Takayuki Ito, Nagoya Institute of Technology

Scientific Advisory Board

* Prof. Dr. Catholijn Jonker, Delft University of Technology (Chair)
* Prof. Dr. Takayuki Ito, Nagoya Institute of Technology
* Prof. Dr. Carles Sierra, IIIA/CSIC
* Prof. Dr. Jonathan Gratch, USC