Aamas 2008

The International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) is the leading scientific conference for research in autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. The AAMAS conference series was initiated in 2002 as a merger of three highly respected individual conferences: the International Conference in Autonomous Agents, the International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages, and the International Conference on MultiAgent Systems. The seventh edition of AAMAS took place in Estoril, Portugal (12th-16th May). Lin Padgham and David Parkes were PC Chairs and thus responsible for the scientific program. General Chairs were Jörg Müller and Simon Parsons. In 2008, AAMAS featured two special tracks: one on Multi-Robots (Chair: Pedro Lima) and the other on Virtual Agents (Elisabeth Andre). The overall goal was to provide an opportunity for interaction and cross-fertilization between the AAMAS community and researchers working in these fields to strengthen links between the two communities. The review process at was extremely selective. AAMAS 2008 received a total of 721 submissions for the main conference, 65 of these were submitted to the Virtual Agents track and 41 to the Robotics track. The submissions came from 20 countries. 141 papers were accepted as full 8-page papers (an acceptance rate of 22 %). Of the papers submitted as short papers, 22 (an acceptance rate of 27 %) were accepted as short papers and an additional 97 papers (15 %) that were submitted as long papers were accepted as short 4-page papers. The proceedings of AAMAS’08 are available at http://www.ifaamas.org/Proceedings/aamas08/. The technical program was organized in four parallel sessions. Therefore, one had to be quite selective in choosing the tracks. This was remedied a little bit by poster sessions containing all accepted papers. For us, the tracks on “Agent Based System Development” and “Agent Cooperation” as well as the workshop on “Agent-oriented Software Engineering“ were of particular importance as approaches and ideas were presented that could be integrated in our current work on designing agent and multiagent systems. The talks in these sessions were of very high quality. However, the panel on the future of software engineering and multiagent systems demonstrated that there is still work ahead to make agents of real value for industry. Beside the main conference, AAMAS’08 consists of two days workshops and tutorials with a total of 10 tutorials and 23 workshops. The three days of main conference included a separate industry track with 13 papers, demonstration sessions with 34 demonstrations, a small exhibition, and a panel on the future of Software Engineering and Multi Agent Systems. A doctoral consortium preceded the workshop and tutorial days.