2nd CFP: Adaptive Learning Agents Workshop (ALA) @ AAMAS 2014

Second Call For Papers: Adaptive and Learning Agents Workshop 2014 (Paris, France)
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Paper deadline: JANUARY 22, 2014

ALA 2014: Adaptive and Learning Agents Workshop held at AAMAS 2014 (Paris, France). The ALA workshop has a long and successful history and is now in its sixth edition. The workshop is a merger of European ALAMAS and the American ALAg series which is usually held at AAMAS. Details may be found on the workshop web site:

http://swarmlab.unimaas.nl/ala2014/

Adaptive and Learning Agents, particularly those in a multi-agent setting are becoming more and more prominent as the sheer size and complexity of many real world systems grows How to adaptively control, coordinate and optimize such systems is an emerging multi-disciplinary research area at the intersection of Computer Science, Control theory, Economics, and Biology. The ALA workshop will focus on agent and multi-agent systems which employ learning or adaptation.

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 and multi-agent systems. It aims at bringing together not only scientists from different areas of computer science but also from different fields studying similar concepts (e.g., game theory, bio-inspired control, mechanism design).

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 (single and multi-agent)
* Planning (single and multi-agent)
* Reasoning (single and multi-agent)
* 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 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 behaviour 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-agent systems to real world complex systems

The workshop will also include a half day tutorial on multi-agent reinforcement learning. Previous versions of this tutorial were successfully run at EASSS 2004 (the European Agent Systems Summer School), ECML 2005, ICML 2006, EWRL 2008 and AAMAS 2009-2013, and ECML 2013 with different collaborators. The ALA 2014 edition will include revised and updated content with a new focus on reward shaping covering in particular depth - difference rewards and potential-based reward shaping.

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Submission Details

Papers can be submitted through Easychair: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ala20140
Submissions may be up to 8 pages in the ACM proceedings format (i.e., the same as AAMAS papers in the main conference track).
Accepted work will be allocated time for oral presentation during the one day workshop.
Papers accepted at the workshop will also be eligible for inclusion in a special issue published after the workshop.

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* Submission Deadline: January 22, 2014
* Notification of acceptance: February 19, 2014
* Camera-ready copies: March 10, 2014
* Workshop: May 5-6, 2014
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