ECS double success at AAMAS 06
Teams from ECS carried off two major awards at AAMAS 06, the Fifth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, held this month in Hakodate, Japan.
In a major coup, the IAM team won the first Agent Reputation and Trust (ART) competition, which was launched with the goal of establishing a testbed for agent reputation- and trust-related technologies. In the competition, 17 teams of agent researchers from universities around the world pitted their agents against each other, enabling them also to test whether their ideas about trust can feed into a generic problem.
The game involved clients requesting appraisals for paintings from different eras; and the success of the appraising agents was judged on the highest number of clients and profit received for producing the most accurate appraisals. The winning appraiser agent (the Southampton agent, IAM), was the one with the highest bank account balance.
Previous trust models developed in the School, such as TRAVOS (Luke Teacy and Jigar Patel) and FIRE (Trung Dong Huynh) helped contribute to the Southampton success: ‘We tried to keep our strategy as simple as possible, while making maximum use of the aspects of the game we knew most about,’ said Luke Teacy.
The members of the Southampton team were: Professor Nick Jennings,Professor Michael Luck, Trung Dong Huynh, Jigar Patel, Luke Teacy, and Rajdeep Dash.
The second Southampton success at the conference was the Darpa Award for Best Applied and Industrial Paper at the conference, which went to the AgentLink team, made up largely of Southampton researchers, for work on industrial case studies of deployed agent systems. The EU-funded AgentLink programme has been led from Southampton for the last five years, promoting agent technologies and their use in business, industry, and public life. Summaries of different applications of agent-based computing, and the lessons that can be learned from them, were described in the winning paper. By providing persuasive examples of deployed systems, the authors aimed to stimulate further industrial applications and to encourage industrially-relevant research. The members of the AgentLink team were: Dr Roxana Belecheanu, Dr Steve Munroe, Professor Michael Luck, Terry Payne (Southampton), Tim Miller, Peter McBurney (Liverpool University), Dr Michal Pechoucek (Czech Technical University).
Posted by Joyce K Lewis on 21 May 2006.
