AAMAS 2010 Workshops and Industry Track

Meanwhile, in the background, the Workshop Chair, Kagan Tumer, set about issuing a call for workshops, and the list of accepted workshops is now available from the website, with many of these workshops already having issued their first calls. The deadline for workshop papers is 2 February 2010, so there's a good month to get papers ready after the New Year.

At the same time, the Industry and Applications Track Chairs, Jeff Kephart of IBM and Dominic Greenwood of Whitestein Technologies, have now received their paper submissions, and decisions are due out in early to mid January.

It's all shaping up very nicely.

AAMAS 2010 Papers

I had intended to write this earlier, but the last couple of months have been hectic with lots of activity on various aspects of the conference. Still, it's a good time to take stock now that there's a little breathing space during the holiday period.

First, AAMAS 2010 received 570 papers submitted in the main track, 57 in the robotics track and 58 in the virtual agents track, giving 685 papers in total. This is a very significant increase on the number of submissions from 2009, and the Publicity Chair, Jordi Sabater did his job brilliantly.

Because I am late in writing this, the decisions are already out, with a huge amount of effort from the Program Committee and Senior Program Committee, and especially the Program Chairs, Wiebe van der Hoek and Gal Kaminka, who spent a very long week together finalising the decisions in Liverpool shortly before Xmas.

The results give 163 full papers (23.9%) and 136 short papers giving another (19.9%), broadly in line with the 2009 acceptance rates.

AAMAS 2010 Tutorials

Progress continues on AAMAS 2010: last week the first call for tutorial proposals was published. Thanks to Kate Larson for producing it, and to Jordi for distributing it.

It will be added to the website shortly

EPSRC on Twitter

I was going to write something a week or so back, when there was uproar in the cricket world as a result of Phillip Hughes (the Australian batsman) announcing on Twitter that he had been dropped by the Australian selectors before the team had been announced officially. And then the newspapers were full of countless other instances of cricket commentators, ex-coaches, current players, etc., using Twitter. It seemed to me to be a sudden explosion in use of Twitter.

Then, Darren Bent, the Tottenham football player, decided to have a rant on Twitter about delays in his transfer to Sunderland, abusing his employer in the process, and receiving a fine of £80,000 for his pains. Where would it all end?

The answer is that it ends with me finally biting the bullet as a result of an email received 10 minutes ago, stating that the UK's EPSRC is now on Twitter. Sigh!

AAMAS 2010 Website Goes Live

Thanks to excellent work by a whole bunch of people, but Hojjat Ghaderi in particular, the website for AAMAS 2010 is now live. Previously, we just had the key dates and the initial Call for Papers there, but it's now looking might fine, consistent with what we're aim for in the premier international agents conference.

Meanwhile work is proceeding on several fronts, despite the summer months, and all is looking good as we move forward.

More on developments as they happen.