The 7th MSDM workshop will be held in conjunction with AAMAS 2012 in Valencia, Spain. The CFP is below and we would appreciate it if you could consider submitting to MSDM or distribute it to anyone who might be interested.

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CALL FOR PAPERS
AAMAS 2012 Workshop
Multiagent Sequential Decision Making Under Uncertainty (MSDM)
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The Seventh Workshop in the MSDM series
June 4 or 5, 2012
Valencia, Spain
http://gaips.inesc-id.pt/~switwicki/msdm2012/

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., the 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 primary purposes of this workshop are to bring together researchers in the field of MSDM to present and discuss new work and preliminary ideas, to identify recent trends in model and algorithmic development, and to establish important directions and goals for further research and collaboration. A secondary goal is to help address an important challenge; in order to make the field more accessible to newcomers, and to facilitate multidisciplinary collaboration, we seek to bring order in the large number of models and methods that have been introduced over the last decade. The workshop also aims to discuss interesting and challenging application areas (e.g., cooperative robotics, distributed sensor and/or communication networks, decision support systems) and suitable evaluation methodologies. In the long term, the active discussions that the MSDM workshop promotes will help us to overcome the challenges of applying multiagent sequential decision making methods to large-scale real-world problems, for instance, in security, sustainability, public safety and health.

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
- Dealing with…
…large numbers of agents
…large numbers of / continuous 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 High-level principles in MSDM: past trends and future directions

Important Dates
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February 28, 2012 – Paper submission due (strict)
March 27, 2012 – Notification of Acceptance
April 10, 2012 – Camera-ready copy submission due
June 4 or 5, 2012 – 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/msdm2012/. Each submission will be reviewed by at least two 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
Stefan Witwicki INESC-ID, Instituto Superior Técnico / GAIPS
Jun-young Kwak University of Southern California
Frans A. Oliehoek MIT
Akshat Kumar University of Massachusetts Amherst

Program Committee
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Christopher Amato Aptima, Inc.
Raphen Becker Google
Daniel Bernstein University of Massachusetts Amherst
Aurélie Beynier University Pierre and Marie Curie (Paris 6)
Alan Carlin University of Massachusetts Amherst
Brahim Chaib-Draa Laval University
Georgios Chalkiadakis Technical University of Crete
François Charpillet INRIA
Ed Durfee University of Michigan
Alessandro Farinelli University of Verona
Alberto Finzi Università di Napoli
Claudia Goldman GM Advanced Technical Center Israel
Michail Lagoudakis Technical University of Crete
Janusz Marecki IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Francisco S. Melo INESC-ID Lisboa
Hala Mostafa BBN Technologies
Abdel-Illah Mouaddib Universit de Caen
Enrique Munoz De Cote INAOE, Mexico
Brenda Ng Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Praveen Paruchuri Carnegie Mellon University
David Pynadath University of Southern California
Xia Qu University of Georgia
Zinovi Rabinovich Bar-Ilan University
Anita Raja University of North Carolina at Charlott
Paul Scerri Carnegie Mellon University
Jiaying Shen SRI International, Inc.
Matthijs Spaan Delft University of Technology
Katia Sycara Carnegie Mellon University
Karl Tuyls Maastricht University
Pradeep Varakantham Singapore Management University
Jianhui Wu Amazon
Makoto Yokoo Kyushu University
Shlomo Zilberstein University of Massachusetts Amherst