AAAI 2007 SPRING SYMPOSIUM ON GAME THEORETIC AND DECISION THEORETIC AGENTS, GTDT'07. March 26-28, Stanford University, California, USA.

Schedule

MONDAY, March 26

9:00 am - 10:30 am Session

Effective Learning in Adaptive Dynamic Systems, Andriy Burkov and Brahim Chaib-draa.

Graphical Models for Online Solutions to Interactive POMDPs, Prashant Doshi and Yifeng Zeng.

10:30 am - 11:00 am Coffee Break

11:00 am - 12:30 pm Session

Towards Strategic Kriegspiel Chess Play with Opponent Modeling, Antonio Del Giudice and Piotr Gmytrasiewicz.

"Unrolling" Complex Task Models into MDPs, Robert P. Goldman, David J. Musliner, Mark S. Boddy, Edmund H. Durfee and Jianhui Wu.

12:30 pm - 2:00 pm Lunch

2:00 pm - 3:30 pm INVITED TALK

Hal Varian, Univeristy of California, Berkeley "Ad Position Auctions"

3:30 pm - 4:00 pm Coffee Break

4:00 pm - 5:30 pm Session

Q-value Heuristics for Approximate Solutions of DEC-POMDPs, Frans Olichoek and Nikos Vlassis.

An Afficient Heuristic for Security Against Multiple Adversaries in Stackelberg Games, Praveen Paruchuri, Jonathan P. Pearce, Milind Tambe and Fernando Ordonez.

6:00 pm - 7:00 pm Reception

TUESDAY, March 27

9:00 am -10:30 am Session

Natural Solutions for a Class of Symmetric Games, Stephen D. Patek, Peter A. Beling and Yijia Zhao.

Tight Bounds for a Stochastic Resource Allocation Algorithm Using Marginal Revenue, Pierrick Plamondon and Brahim Chaib-draa.

10:30 am - 11:00 am Coffee Break

11:00 am - 12:30 pm PANEL DISCUSSION

Present and Future of Game and Decision Theories in Agent Design

12:30 pm - 2:00 pm Lunch

2:00 pm - 3:30 pm Session

Fainess in Combinatorial Auctioning Systems, Megha Saini and Shrisha Rao.

SPIDER Attack on a Network of POMDPs: Towards Quality Bounded Solutions, Pradeep Varakantham, Janusz Marecki, Milind Tambe and Makoto Yokoo.

4:00 pm - 5:30 pm Session

Automated Mechanism Design: Framework and Applications, Yevgeniy Vorobeychik and Daniel Reeves.

Enabling Agents to Perform Prioritizes Multi-Criteria Aggragation, Ronald R. Yager.

6:00 pm - 7:30 pm Plenary Session

WEDNESDAY, March 28

Open *****************************************************************

Recently, game and decision 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 notions such as 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.

Applications of intelligent agent technologies are numerous. While prototypical agents are physical, like robots, widely useful are also agents that operate in virtual and electronic environments, like the Internet. They can fetch and filter information, trade, negotiate and participate in auctions on behalf of their human users, and propose solutions to transportation, manufacturing and financial allocation problems.

There is much to be gained from bringing together researchers interested in game theory and decision theory to present recent work on the application of these techniques to agent-based computing.

Submission information:

Submissions are due on October 6, 2006. Please submit the paper electronically (at most 15 pages standard LaTeX article style) electronically in postscript (preferred) or in pdf, to Piotr Gmytrasiewicz at piotr@cs.uic.edu

Topics of Interest:

We solicit papers dealing with, but not limited to, the following areas:
  • Descriptions of agent systems employing game theory or decision theory;
  • Empirical evaluations of agent systems employing game theory or decision theory;
  • Theoretical developments in game theory or decision theory applied to agent systems;
  • Position statements about the use of game theory or decision theory in agent systems.
  • Descriptions of deployed systems are welcome. We are also interested in the use of non-standard variants of decision theory (including qualitative and logical approaches), and in approaches that combine decision and game theories.

    Organizers:

    Co-chair: Piotr Gmytrasiewicz, CS Department
    University of Illinois at Chicago
    Chicago, IL 60607-7053
    Email: piotr@cs.uic.edu

    Co-Chair: Simon Parsons, Department of Computer Science,
    Chadwick Building, University of Liverpool,
    Liverpool L69 7ZF, United Kingdom.
    Email: S.D.Parsons@csc.liv.ac.uk

    PROGRAM COMMITTEE (tentative):

  • Cristina Biccheri (Carnegie Mellon University),
    cb36@andrew.cmu.edu
  • Craig Boutilier (University of Toronto),
    cebly@cs.toronto.edu
  • Prashant Doshi (University of Georgia),
    pdoshi@cs.uga.edu
  • Jon Doyle (Massachusetts Institute of Technology),
    doyle@mit.edu
  • Robert Goldman (SIFT, LLC),
    rpgoldman@sift.info
  • Amy Greenwald (Brown University),
    amygreen@cs.brown.edu
  • Jeff Kephart (IBM Institute for Advanced Research),
    kephart@watson.ibm.com
  • Kate Larson (University of Waterloo),
    klarson@cs.uwaterloo.ca
  • Sarit Kraus (Bar-Ilan University),
    sarit@macs.biu.ac.il
  • Rohit Parikh (City University of New York),
    rparikh@gc.cuny.edu
  • Martijn Schut (Vrije Universiteit University),
    schut@cs.vu.nl
  • Richard E. Stearns (University of Albany),
    res@cs.albany.edu
  • Wynn Stirling (Brigham Young University),
    wynn@ee.byu.edu
  • Gerald Tesauro (IBM Watson Research Center),
    tesauro@watson.ibm.com
  • Leon van der Torre (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam),
    torre@cs.vu.nl
  • Karl Tuyls (Universiteit Maastricht),
    k.tuyls@cs.unimaas.nl
  • Russell Vane (Litton PRC), russ@vaneteam.com
  • William Walsh (IBM Watson),
    wwalsh1@us.ibm.com
  • Michael Wooldridge (University of Liverpool),
    M.J.Wooldridge@csc.liv.ac.uk
  • Shlomo Zilberstein (University of Massachusetts),
    shlomo@cs.umass.edu