[UAI] ICMAS-00 Trading Agent Competition Deadline Extension

From: Peter Wurman (wurman@csc.ncsu.edu)
Date: Wed Apr 12 2000 - 07:44:28 PDT

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    The deadline for submitting the "intent to participate" form for the
    ICMAS-00 Trading Agent Competition has been extended to May 1st. If
    you are considering entering the competition, please go to
       http://tac.eecs.umich.edu/intent.html
    and complete the form.

    The original CFP is appended below. We encourage all interested
    parties to visit the competition web site
    (http://tac.eecs.umich.edu/) for a precise statement of the game
    rules and to see practice games in action.

    ---------------------------------------------------------------------
                    ICMAS-00 Trading Agent Competition
                              8 July 2000
                        Boston, Massachusetts, USA
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------

    Trading in electronic markets is increasingly becoming both a commonplace
    economic activity and a topic of special interest within the AI, Electronic
    Commerce, and Multiagent Systems (MAS) research communities. Inspired by
    the success of competitions in various other AI realms, we announce the
    ICMAS-00 Trading Agent Competition, to be held in conjunction with a
    special purpose workshop at the Fourth International Conference on
    Multiagent Systems (ICMAS-00), in Boston in July 2000. This event is
    designed to spur research on common problems, promote definitions of
    benchmarks and standard problem descriptions, and showcase current
    technologies.

    The competition will pit software agents--developed by research groups,
    students, and others from all over the world--against each other in a
    challenging market game. The software agents will represent travel
    coordinators whose goal is to arrange travel packages for clients. These
    travel packages consist of flights, hotel rooms, and tickets to
    entertainment events, all of which the agents buy (and, in the case of event
    tickets, sell) in electronic auctions. The market game has been specially
    designed to present agents with difficult decision problems and admit a
    wide variety of potential bidding strategies.

    The competition will be hosted on a version of the Michigan Internet
    AuctionBot that has been outfitted with features to facilitate and control
    distributed market games. Software agents communicate with the AuctionBot
    via a TCP-based agent programming interface. Simple example agents are
    available in a variety of platforms and programming languages.

    The final round of the competition will be held at the ICMAS-00 TAC workshop on
    8 July 2000. Preliminary rounds may be necessary. We anticipate the
    following schedule for contest related events:

         1 May 2000 Entrants registration (intent to participate) due.
        17 June 2000 Preliminary rounds begin, if necessary.
         7 July 2000 TAC contest and workshop, Boston MA.

    More information can be found at http://tac.eecs.umich.edu/

    We encourage you to circulate this announcement to anyone who may be
    interested in participating. Questions may be directed to
    TAC.support@umich.edu.

    -- 
    

    -- Pete

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Peter Wurman wurman@csc.ncsu.edu Assistant Professor, North Carolina State University http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/faculty/wurman/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-



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