May 7 (Tue)
9:00am – 6:00pm: Organizing MSDM
11:10am – 11:40am: MASS-13 presentation
12:00pm – 12:30pm: ATES-13 poster presentation
4:00pm – 4:30pm: ATES-13 presentation

May 8 (Wed)
2:10pm – 2:30pm: Innovative Applications track (F2) presentation
3:30pm – 4:30pm: Main poster presentation

May 9 (Thr)
7:30am – 9:00am: Teamcore breakfast

In sequential decision making, an agent’s objective is to choose actions, based on its observations of the world, in such a way that it expects to optimize its performance measure over the course of a series of such decisions. In environments where action consequences are non-deterministic or observations incomplete, Markov decision processes (MDPs) and partially observable MDPs (POMDPs) serve as the basis for principled approaches to single-agent sequential decision making. Extending these models to systems of multiple agents has become the subject of an increasingly active area of research over the past decade and a variety of models have emerged (e.g., MMDP, Dec-POMDP, MTDP, I-POMDP, and POSG). The high computational complexity of these models has driven researchers to develop multiagent planning and learning methods that exploit the structure present in agents’ interactions, methods that provide efficient approximate solutions, and methods that distribute computation among the agents.

The MSDM workshop serves several purposes. The primary purpose is to bring together researchers in the field of MSDM to present and discuss new work and preliminary ideas. Moreover, we aim to identify recent trends, to establish important directions for future research, and to discuss some of the topics mentioned below such as challenging application areas (e.g., cooperative robotics, distributed sensor and/or communication networks, decision support systems) and suitable evaluation methodologies. Lastly, MSDM seeks to bring researchers from other AAMAS communities together in order to facilitate consensus among different models and methods, thus making the field more accessible to new researchers and practitioners.

Topics
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Multiagent sequential decision making comprises (1) problem representation, (2) planning, (3) coordination, and (4) learning. The MSDM workshop addresses this full range of aspects. Topics of particular interest include:

- Challenging conventional assumptions
… model specification: where do the models come from?
… what is an appropriate level of abstraction for decision making?
- Novel representations, algorithms and complexity results
- Comparisons of algorithms
- Relationships between models and their assumptions
- Decentralized vs. centralized planning approaches
- Online vs. offline planning
- Communication and coordination during execution
- Computational issues involving…
… large numbers of agents
… large numbers of states, observations and actions
… long decision horizons
- (Reinforcement) learning in partially observable multiagent systems
- Cooperative, competitive, and self-interested agents
- Application domains
- Benchmarks and evaluation methodologies
- Standardization of software
- High-level principles in MSDM: past trends and future directions

Important Dates
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February 8, 2013 – Abstract submission due
February 12, 2013 – Paper submission due
March 8, 2013 – Notification of Acceptance
March 12, 2013 – Camera-ready submission due
May 6 or 7, 2013 – Day of Workshop

Submission Instructions
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Authors are encouraged to submit papers up to 8 pages in length, as per the instructions on the workshop homepage: http://gaips.inesc-id.pt/~switwicki/msdm2013/
Each submission will be reviewed by at least three Program Committee members. The review process will be “single-blind”; thus authors do not have to remove their names when submitting papers.

Organizing Committee
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Prashant Doshi / University of Georgia
Jun-young Kwak / University of Southern California
Brenda Ng / Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Frans A. Oliehoek / Maastricht University
Stefan Witwicki / INESC-ID & Instituto Superior Técnico

Program Committee
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Martin Allen / University of Wisconsin – La Crosse
Christopher Amato / MIT
Bikramjit Banerjee / University of Southern Mississippi
Raphen Becker / Google
Daniel Bernstein / Fiksu, Inc.
Aurélie Beynier / University Pierre and Marie Curie (Paris 6)
Alan Carlin / University of Massachusetts
Georgios Chalkiadakis / Technical University of Crete
François Charpillet / INRIA-Loria
Prashant Doshi / University of Georgia
Ed Durfee / University of Michigan
Alberto Finzi / Università di Napoli
Piotr Gmytrasiewicz / University of Illinois Chicago
Claudia Goldman / GM Advanced Technical Center Israel
Akshat Kumar / IBM Research, India
Jun-young Kwak / University of Southern California
Michail Lagoudakis / Technical University of Crete
Francisco Melo / Instituto Superior Técnico & INESC-ID
Hala Mostafa / BBN Technologies
Abdel-Illah Mouaddib / Universit de Caen
Enrique Munoz de Cote / National Inst. of Astrophysics Optics and Electronics
Brenda Ng / Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Frans Oliehoek / Maastricht University
Simon Parsons / City University of New York
Praveen Paruchuri / Carnegie Mellon University
David Pynadath / Institute for Creative Technologies, USC
Zinovi Rabinovich / Mobileye
Paul Scerri / Carnegie Mellon University
Jiaying Shen / Nuance Communications
Matthijs Spaan / Delft University of Technology
Peter Stone / University of Texas at Austin
Stefan Witwicki / INESC-ID & Instituto Superior Técnico
Jianhui Wu / Amazon
Ping Xuan
Makoto Yokoo / Kyushu University
Chongjie Zhang / University of Massachusetts
Shlomo Zilberstein / University of Massachusetts

A quick summary…:
It was indeed tough… my committee members were very patient and kind, and they asked questions in a very friendly mood. However, it was quite hard to stay calm during the proposal presentation, and I felt it was not good enough to answer some of the questions correctly.

I am still learning from my experience, as well as from others.. I believe as long as I keep putting my efforts to go through, I will be getting stronger and stronger.

Now.. time to handle follow-up comments on my work in a relatively relaxed mood, and continue moving forward. Fight on!