Multiagent Systems Textbook

I am teaching Multiagent Systems this semester and thus updating the textbook as my students find bugs in it. The latest "live" version is below, or you can just download the pdf. I also hope to update the netlogo models to Netlogo 4.1.

Market and Social Systems Engineering Program

The University of Pennsylvania will be starting a new program in market and social systems engineering. It seems to be geared towards a subset of multiagent researchers, those more interested in incentives and in building human-computer systems:

“Traditional programs don’t prepare students to design systems that take into account the goals and incentives of the people who use them,” said Michael Kearns, professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science in Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science and the program’s founding faculty director. “We haven’t asked engineering students to take a course in game theory to understand how incentives work or in sociology to understand human behavior. There is now enough science out there on the intersection of these topics to design undergraduate courses.”

Find out more by reading their press release and browsing the MKSE website.

Networks, Crowds, and Markets Book

The book titled Networks, Crowds, and Markets by David Easley and Jon Kleinberg is now available to download freely from the link above. The current version is a pre-publication draft.

As is evident from reading the outline, there is a lot of overlap between the research present in this book and multiagent research. They both deal with game theory, auctions, markets, bargaining and, most importantly, search in networks, albeit from different perspectives.

AAMAS facebook group

There is now a AAMAS facebook group. Go and try to post something funny about multiagent systems, I challenge you.

Algorithmic Game Theory Classes

Via the AGT blog, here is a list of classes about algorithmic game theory and multiagent systems.

Aroxo

Looks like Nick Jennings used his expertise in automated negotiation to help build Aroxo, a web application that lets agents negotiate a deal for you. More info at this BBC news article.

E-Commerce Conference Papers

The Games and Economic Behavior journal has a special issue on the 8th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce, edited by David C. Parkes and Moshe Tennenholtz.

IJCAI Proceedings

The IJCAI 09 proceedings are online. A report from Ariel Proccacia highlights the 7 sessions they had on Algorithmic Game Theory.

I like Ariel's definition of AI as: "everything that might get published in AAAI/IJCAI", its a bit more specific that the old "once we understand it, it stops being AI" while still allowing the field to move around randomly.

AAMAS proceedings

AAMAS proceedings are freely available here.

Opera Unite

The new opera unite implements a web server into every web browsers, thus allowing real peer-to-peer communications, that is, we can build multiagent systems that run solely on the browser without the need for a server to route all messages. I hope the big three (IE, firefox, chrome) also implement this.

Algorithmic Game Theory Blog

Demonstrating how out of the loop I've been lately, I've just discovered a new blog by Noam Nissan on algorithmic game theory. Apparently, its been around for a couple of months. In any case, the book (Algorithmic Game Theory) is an excellent introduction to many of the problems that we face when building multiagent systems, from a formal perspective: meaning that the book focuses on theorems and algorithms. I'm hoping to soon been able to teach a class using both my textbook and AGT, to see how we can implement these algorithms.

Anyway, go check it out.

Fundamentals of Multiagent Systems with NetLogo Examples: March 2009

I have updated the textbook. You will find the new version below. The changes are all bugfixes. I am extremely thankful to the many people, from across the world, who have taken time to email me about the errors they have found it the book. I am also very happy that so many are reading it. Unfortunately, since I have not had the chance to teach our multiagent systems class lately, I have not had the time to add new material to the textbook. Hopefully, I will be teaching the class again in the next couple of years and then I will add new material. Still, I do fill confident that the material in the textbook is mostly timeless (for example, the Nash bargaining solution goes back to 1950) so it should hold up fine as a good introduction to the field.

I would be amiss if I didn't mention that Shohan and Leyton-Brown published Multiagent Systems: Algorithmic, Game-Theoretic, and Logical Foundations which covers much of the same material my book is trying to cover. Still, their coverage is not identical. Their book also focuses more on proofs. My goal, on the other hand, is to develop a book for practitioners: people who want to engineer multiagent systems. Thus, I try to focus on algorithms and provide the hands-on NetLogo examples. Anyway, you be the judge.

Fundamentals of Multiagent Systems

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Technology-Computer- multiagent

Fundamentals of Multiagent Systems with Netlogo Examples

Below is my textbook on multiagent systems which I have been writing and using since 2004 or so. I constantly update it every time I teach the class again and as new algorithms appear. I use NetLogo examples to bring to life the various algorithms. You can visit my MAS netlogo page to see these and other example programs.

Fundamentals of Multiagent Systems - Upload a Document to Scribd

Download PDF

Journal CFP: Social Choice

Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (Springer) Special Issue on Computational Social Choice

Computational social choice is a new interdisciplinary research area at the intersection of social choice theory and computer science that studies computational aspects of social choice mechanisms as well as applications of social choice ideas in the design and analysis of computing systems.

The aim of this special issue is to build on the spectacular success of two workshops in computational social choice (COMSOC'06, Amsterdam and COMSOC'08, Liverpool), and provide a forum for reseachers in the area to present their ideas on a variety of topics, including, but not limited to:

• Algorithmic aspects of voting rules
• Computational barriers to strategic behaviour
• Collective decision-making in multi-agent systems
• Preference elicitation and communication issues in voting
• Fair division
• Computational aspects of weighted voting games
• Collective decision-making in combinatorial domains
• Logic-based formalisms for social choice problems
• Belief and judgement aggregation
• Social software

We encourage submissions of high quality, original papers which are not simultaneously submitted for publication elsewhere. Papers should be formatted according to the journal style, and not exceed 20 pages including figures, references, etc. The papers must be submitted via the journal webpage: http://jaamas.edmgr.com/. When submitting your manuscript, please choose article type: 'SpIss:Social Choice; Elkind'.

IMPORTANT DATES:

• Manuscript submission deadline: February 15, 2009
• Notification due date: June 15, 2009
• Camera-ready manuscript due date: July 15, 2009
• Publication: December 2009

Guest editors:
Edith Elkind (University of Southampton, United Kingdom), ee@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Jerome Lang (LAMSADE, Universite Paris-Dauphine, France), lang@irit.fr

A PDF version of this announcement is available at http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ee/jaamas-flyer.pdf

Semantic Web Podcast

The always fun Software Engineering Radio podcast has a new episode where they interview James Hendler on the Semantic Web. It is a good introduction and goes into some of the technical details on how the various standards work together.