News & Announcements

New Book "Argumentation in Artificial Intelligence"  Edited by I. Rahwan and G. R. Simari with a forward by Johan van Benthem You can now pre-order the book from Springer through this link (book due to appear 08/2009).

New Journal "Argument & Computation"  Editors: Chris Reed, Floriana Grasso, Iyad Rahwan and Guillermo R. Simari Published by Taylor & Francis. Submit here.

Overview

Argumentation can be abstractly defined as the interaction of different arguments for and against some conclusion. Over the last few years, argumentation has been gaining increasing importance in multi-agent systems, mainly as a vehicle for facilitating "rational interaction" (i.e., interaction which involves the giving and receiving of reasons). This is because argumentation provides tools for designing, implementing and analysing sophisticated forms of interaction among rational agents. Argumentation has made solid contributions to the practice of multi-agent dialogues. Application domains include: legal disputes, business negotiation, labor disputes, team formation, scientific inquiry, deliberative democracy, ontology reconciliation, risk analysis, scheduling, and logistics. A single agent may also use argumentation techniques to perform its individual reasoning because it needs to make decisions under complex preferences policies, in a highly dynamic environment.

The workshop series is concerned with the use of the concepts, theories, methodologies, and computational models of argumentation in building autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. The workshop will solicit papers looking at both theory and practice. In particular, the workshop aims at bridging the gap between the vast amount of work on argumentation theory and the practical needs of multi-agent systems research.

The following are the ArgMAS workshops held or planned so far in the series.

• ArgMAS 2010 to be held in conjunction with AAMAS 2010, in Toronto, Canada, May, 2010
• ArgMAS 2009 held in conjunction with AAMAS 2009, in Budapost, Hungary, May 11, 2009 (attracted 33 participants)
• ArgMAS 2008  held in conjunction with AAMAS 2008, in Estoril, Portugal, May 12, 2008 (attracted 21 participants)
• ArgMAS 2007 held in conjunction with AAMAS 2007, in Honolulu, Hawai'i, USA (attracted 22 participants)
• ArgMAS 2006 held in conjunction with AAMAS 2006, at Future University, Hakodate, Japan (attracted 21 participants)
• ArgMAS 2005 held in conjunction with AAMAS 2005, at Universiteit Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands (attracted 31 participants)
• ArgMAS 2004 held in conjunction with AAMAS 2004, at Columbia University, New York, USA (attracted 20 participants)

I. Rahwan and P. Moraitis (Eds.) (2009). Argumentation in Multi-Agent Systems: Fifth International Workshop, ArgMAS 2008, Estoril, Portugal, May 2008 Revised Selected and Invited Papers, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Volume 5384, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Germany. [Workshop Web site] [Get the Book]

I. Rahwan, S. Parsons, and C. Reed (Eds.) (2008). Argumentation in Multi-Agent Systems: Forth International Workshop, ArgMAS 2007, Honolulu, HI, USA, May 2007 Revised Selected and Invited Papers, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Volume 4946, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Germany. [Workshop Web site] [Get the Book]

N. Maudet, S. Parsons and I. Rahwan (Eds.) (2007). Argumentation in Multi-Agent Systems: Third International Workshop, ArgMAS 2006 Hakodate, Japan, May 8, 2006 Revised Selected and Invited Papers, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Volume 4766, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Germany. [Workshop Web site] [Get the Book]

S. Parsons, N. Maudet, P. Moraitis, and I. Rahwan (Eds.) (2006). Argumentation in Multi-Agent Systems: Second International Workshop, ArgMAS 2005, Utrecht, Netherlands, July 26, 2005, Revised Selected and Invited Papers, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Volume 4049, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Germany. [Workshop Web site] [Get the Book]

I. Rahwan, P. Moraitis and C. Reed (Eds.) (2005). Argumentation in Multi-Agent Systems: Proceedings of the First International Workshop (ArgMAS'04): Expanded and Invited Contributions, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Volume 3366, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Germany. [Workshop Web site] [Get the Book]

ArgMAS Steering Committee

In order to organise ArgMAS, a steering committee was established in 2003. Each year, members from the steering committee volunteer to form the organising committee for ArgMAS. The steering committee is currently made up of the following members:

• Antonis Kakas
  Department of Computer Science
  University of Cyprus
  75 Kallipoleos Str., P.O. Box 537
  CY-1678 Nicosia, Cyprus
  

• Nicolas Maudet
  LAMSADE
  Université Paris 9 Dauphine
  75775 Paris Cedex 16
  France
  

• Peter McBurney
  Department of Computer Science
  Ashton Building
  University of Liverpool
  Ashton Street
  Liverpool L69 3BX, UK
  

• Pavlos Moraitis
  Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
  Paris-Descartes University
  45 rue des Saints-Peres
  75270 Paris Cedex 06
  France
  

• Simon Parsons
  Department of Computer and Information Science
  Brooklyn College
  City University of New York
  2900 Bedford Avenue
  Brooklyn, 11210 NY
  

• Iyad Rahwan
  

  Institute of Informatics British University in Dubai P.O.Box 502216, Dubai United Arab Emirates

  (Fellow) School of Informatics University of Edinburgh Edinburgh, EH8 9LE UK

• Chris Reed
  Department of Applied Computing
  University of Dundee
  Dundee DD1 4HN
  Scotland, UK