Michael Winikoff
Location: Great Room 1&2
Title:
30 Years of Engineering Multi-Agent Systems: What and Why?
Abstract:
Research on Engineering Multi-Agent Systems (EMAS) aims to provide software engineers with what they need to be able to effectively develop multi-agent systems. The field is broad, covering foundational concepts, notations, processes, techniques, tools, and languages. Although it is difficult to pin down a precise year, it can be argued that the community is now 30 years old. This talk will review where the field is, and outline some challenges and future directions. In addition to answering the question “What is EMAS?” the talk aims to raise the profile of the field and the community, answering the question “Why should I care?”.
Bio:
Michael Winikoff is a Full Professor (and currently Head of School) at the School of Information Management at Victoria University of Wellington. He completed his PhD at Melbourne University in 1997, and has subsequently worked at institutions including RMIT University (Melbourne, Australia), and Otago University (Dunedin, New Zealand). He is known for his work on engineering aspects of autonomous systems, including the Prometheus methodology. More recently, he has been working on issues relating to trust in autonomous systems, including verification and explanation. Michael is on the IFAAMAS board of directors, has previously been IFAAMAS secretary and is currently IFAAMAS president. He was the Program Co-Chair and General Co-Chair for the conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems in 2012 and 2017, respectively, and is currently co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems.
Ann Nowé
Location: Great Room 1&2
Title:
Trustworthy Reinforcement Learning: Opportunities and Challenges
Abstract :
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has long outgrown the traditional representations that guaranteed policy convergence but severely limited its application to complex domains. Modern Deep RL enables far richer and complex behaviour, yet at the cost of transparency and explainability. While these latter issues have recently received much attention in Machine Learning, they are underexplored in RL. In this talk, I will discuss them from multiple angles, survey state-of-the-art approaches, including recent developments in policy distillation and formal guarantees, and touch upon the related question of fairness.
Bio:
Ann Nowé is professor of Computer Science and director of the AI Lab at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). Her main research interest is Reinforcement Learning (RL), including Multi-Agent and Multi-Objective RL. She strongly believes in the interplay between theory and applications. Her team has developed novel algorithms and tested them in domains such as smart grids, communication networks, mechatronics and scheduling problems. Ann Nowé is a former board member of EurAI and chairman of the BNVKI, and a current board member of IFAAMAS. She was co-PC chair of AAMAS’21 and general chair of ECAI’23 and EWRL’23. Recently she was elected as an EurAI fellow.
Liz Sonenberg
Location: Great Room 1&2
Title:
Agents and Humans: Trajectories and Perspectives
Abstract:
The AAMAS conference was established in 2002 as the merger of three highly successful conferences: AA (the International Conference on Autonomous Agents), ICMAS (the International Conference on Multiagent Systems) and ATAL (the International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages). In this talk I draw on my own experiences and that of others in investigating human-agent collectives. I reflect on aspects of the trajectory of research topics in the AAMAS community over the past 20+ years, and on selected challenges for human-centred AI.
Bio:
Liz Sonenberg has been part of the AAMAS community since before the first AAMAS conference. She served on the IFMAS Board and the IFAAMAS Board (2002-2008), was co-Chair of the Local Organising Committee for the second AAMAS conference (Melbourne, 2003), Program co-Chair for the third conference (New York, 2004), and General co-Chair for the tenth conference (Taiwan, 2011).
Her research focus is on human-centred AI, especially mechanisms to support human decision making, generally involving the study of characteristics associated with so-called cognitive agents. She has enjoyed many research engagements with colleagues in Psychology, Education and Medicine, and with international collaborators.
Liz is a member of the Advisory Board of AI Magazine and of the international Standing Committee of the One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100). She was the recipient of the Distinguished Research Contribution in the Australasian AI Awards in 2020.
Liz is a Professor of Information Systems at the University of Melbourne, Australia, has served in several senior leadership positions at the University, and at present holds the University-wide role of Pro Vice Chancellor (Systems Innovation). She has held Advisory Board roles in several Commonwealth funded national research infrastructure initiatives and is currently the inaugural Chair of Australia’s National Research Infrastructure Advisory Group.