MINI-SCHOOL
The PRIMA 2016 mini-school is intended to provide a broad perspective on some of the key technologies enabling multi-agent systems: computational logic, market design, game theory, decision making, business processes. Thanks to the generous support of IFAAMAS and AIJ and agreement with the PRICAI officials, a significant number of student scholarships is available to attend the PRIMA mini-school and related events, including the PRIMA student session and PRICAI student symposium.
This page will be updated soon. Please come back in a few days for complete and up-to-date information.
MINI-SCHOOL PROGRAM
Day 1: Wednesday August 24th, 2016
| 13.30-17.00: TUTORIAL I |
| An Introduction to the Logic Programming Paradigms with an Eye to Agents Design |
| Enrico Pontelli |
Day 2: Thursday August 25th, 2016
| 10.00-13.00: TUTORIAL II |
| Agent technology and business process management: A new synthesis |
| Aditya Ghose |
| 13.30-17.00: TUTORIAL III |
| Market Design: Designing Social System by Game Theory |
| Makoto Yokoo |
Day 3: Friday August 26th, 2016
| 10.00-13.00: TUTORIAL IV - CANCELED |
| Sequential Decision Making for Improving Efficiency in Urban Environments |
| Pradeep Varakantham |
PROGRAM DETAILS
Prof. Enrico PontelliComputer Science Department |
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TITLE:
An Introduction to the Logic Programming Paradigms with an Eye to Agents Design
ABSTRACT:
The tutorial will provide a brief tour-de-force through the three main “flavors” of logic programming paradigms - traditional Prolog, constraint logic programming, and answer set programming. We will review the foundations of the three paradigms, the typical execution models, and implementations. We will draw illustrative examples drawn from the use of these paradigms in implementing reasoning components of intelligent knowledge-based agents.
SHORT BIO:
Enrico Pontelli received a Laurea in Computer Science from the University of Udine (1991), a Master’s from the University of Houston (1992) and a Ph.D. from New Mexico State University (1997). He joined the faculty at NMSU in 1997, achieving the rank of Regents Professor. He is currently serving as Interim Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. His research interests are in the areas of logic programming, constraint programming, knowledge representation and reasoning, high performance computing, bioinformatics and assistive technologies. He has served as lead investigator for funded research projects for over $15M, including a NSF Career award. He was recognized as a Distinguished Achievement faculty by NMSU in 2012. He served in many national and international organization, including the Association of Logic Programming, the ACM Special Interest Group on Computers and Accessibility, and the Computing Research Association. He has published over 250 peer-reviewed publications.
Prof. Pradeep VarakanthamSchool of Information Systems |
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TITLE:
Sequential Decision Making for Improving Efficiency in Urban Environments
ABSTRACT:
Rapid “urbanization” (more than 50% of worlds’ population now resides in cities) coupled with the natural lack of coordination in usage of common resources (ex: bikes, ambulances, taxis, traffic personnel, attractions) has a detrimental effect on a wide variety of response (ex: waiting times, re- sponse time for emergency needs) and coverage metrics (ex: predictability of traffic/security patrols) in cities of today. Motivated by the need to improve response and coverage metrics in urban environments, my research group is focussed on building intelligent agent systems that make sequential decisions to continuously match available supply of resources to an uncertain demand for resources. Our broad approach to generating these se- quential decision strategies is through a combination of data analytics (to obtain a model) and multi- stage optimization (planning/scheduling) under uncertainty (to solve the model). While we perform data analytics, our contributions are focussed on multi-stage optimization under uncertainty. We exploit key properties of urban environments, namely homogeneity and anonymity, limited influence of individual entities, abstraction and near decomposability to solve ”multi-stage optimization under un- certainty” effectively and efficiently.
SHORT BIO:
Pradeep Varakantham is a Lee Kong Chian Fellow and an Assistant Professor in the School of Information Systems at Singapore Management University. Prior to his current position, Pradeep received his PhD from University of Southern California and was a post-doctoral fellow for two years at Carnegie Mellon University. His research is at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence, Operations Research and Machine Learning with specific focus on solving sequential matching problems in urban environments. Pradeep has published over 60 research papers in top tier conferences (AAAI, IJCAI, AAMAS, ICAPS, UAI, NIPS) and journals (JAIR, JAAMAS) in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. One of his papers was nominated for best student paper award at AAMAS 2009 and he currently serves on the board of directors for IFAAMAS (governing body of AAMAS). He was finalist for the best senior program committee member award at AAMAS 2013.
Prof. Makoto YokooDepartment of Informatics |
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TITLE:
Market Design: Designing Social System by Game Theory
ABSTRACT:
"Market Design" is a research field that examines how to design a new market or improve an existing market such that a certain design goal is satisfied. This research field is influenced by micro economics, in particular, game theory. Here, the meaning of a "market" is very broad; it includes a spectrum auction, in which a government allocates the licenses to use specific spectrum bandwidth to companies, or a market without monetary transfer, such as a kidney exchange program, or a school choice program, in which children/parents can choose public schools they want to attend. Now, market design has become a interdisciplinary research topic that is relevant to computer science and information systems. In this lecture, I will describe two representative application domains of market design: auction mechanisms (e.g., spectrum auctions, sponsored search) and two-side matching mechanisms (e.g., medical resident matching programs, school choice programs).
SHORT BIO:
Makoto Yokoo received the B.E., M.E., and Ph.D. degrees in 1984, 1986, and 1995, respectively, form the University of Tokyo, Japan. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Information Science and Electrical Engineering, Kyushu University, Japan. He served as a general co-chair of International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems in 2007 (AAMAS-2007), and as a program co-chair of AAMAS-2003. He served as the president of International Foundation for Autonomous Agent and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS) from 2011 to 2013. He is a fellow of the Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). He received the ACM SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award in 2004, and the IFAAMAS influential paper award in 2010.
Prof. Aditya GhoseSchool of Computing and Information Technology |
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TITLE:
Agent technology and business process management: A new synthesis
ABSTRACT:
The field of business process management is generally viewed as being distinct to the field of agent technology. However, a closer analysis reveals considerable similarity in their objectives and in the key units of analysis and representational constructs. Developments in both fields are also complementary in many ways, and each can leverage results from the other. This tutorial will lay out a new synthesis of both approaches. Attendees will take away an appreciation of how agent systems insights can add value in the (already substantial) industrial applications of business process management and how business process insights might make agent systems more amenable for deployment in business/industry settings. The tutorial will also highlight a number of research challenges where the cross-fertilization of ideas from both fields can lead to interesting results.
SHORT BIO:
Aditya Ghose is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Wollongong, where he heads the Decision Systems Lab and co-directs the Centre for Oncology Informatics. He holds a PhD and MSc in Computing Science from the University of Alberta (he spent parts of his candidature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Tokyo) and a Bachelor of Computer Science and Engineering from Jadavpur University. Prof. Ghose is President of the Service Science Society of Australia and a Fellow of the Institution of Engineers (Australia). Prof. Ghose works in business process management, service science, agent systems and formal knowledge representation and the application of these in clinical informatics. He works closely with IBM Research, Xerox Research, Infosys Labs, a number of radiation oncology centres and medical research institutes as well as a variety of Australian companies (including startups from his research group).