Participation in ICAART 2019

The 11th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (ICAART 2019) took place from February 19th to February 21st, 2019 in Prague, Czech Republic. It was organized by Ana Paula Rocha, Auxiliary Professor at the Department of Computing Engineering, University of Porto and Luc Steels, an ICREA research fellow at the Institute for Evolutionary Biology (UPF-CSIC) in Barcelona.

The conference was sponsored by the Institute for Systems and Technologies of Information, Control and Communication (INSTICC) and technically co-sponsored by the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society.

The purpose of the International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence is to bring together researchers, engineers, and practitioners interested in the theory and applications in the areas of Agents and Artificial Intelligence. Two simultaneous related tracks will be held, covering both applications and current research work. One track focuses on Agents, Multi-Agent Systems and Software Platforms, Distributed Problem Solving and Distributed AI in general. The other track focuses mainly on Artificial Intelligence, Knowledge Representation, Planning, Learning, Scheduling, Perception, Reactive AI Systems, and Evolutionary Computing.

The meeting was complemented with the Special Session on Human-centric Applications of Multi-agent Technologies (HAMT) and the Special Session on Natural Language Processing in Artificial Intelligence (NLPinAI).

ICAART received 202 paper submissions, including special sessions, from 43 countries only 22.7% of which have been accepted as full papers, showing the intention of preserving a high quality forum for the next editions of this conference.

The conference program includes a panel and four invited talks delivered by internationally distinguished speakers, namely: Penousal Machado (University of Coimbra, Portugal), Carla Gomes (Cornell University, United States), Michal Pechoucek (Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic) and Lambert Schomaker (University of Groningen, the Netherlands).

The conference was attended by participants from many countries — Czech Republic, Russia, Poland, Bulgaria, Sweden, Estonia, Finland, the USA, Austria, Portugal, Germany, Denmark, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, Japan, China, Tunisia, India, Iraq.

The Conference covered a wide range of topics in the following general fields:

Graduate student Anastasiya Galitskaya took part in the Poster Session. The title of her paper was «Multi-agent planning system for target application of earth remote sensing space systems for solving precision farming tasks». The paper considers the task of constructing a schedule for target application of space remote sensing systems for solving problems of precision farming. It also proposes a method of their solution using multi-agent technology. Presented models and algorithms allow for solving the urgent problem of network interaction between heterogeneous spacecraft group devices for implementation of enlarged and detailed territory surveys, as well as adaptive planning of user requests for shooting. Results of experiments demonstrate higher efficiency of the developed algorithms on large-scale problems in comparison with methods of traditional centralized planning.

Anastasiya Galitskaya: “I took part in a conference of this level for the first time. Sure, I was very worried about how my presentation would go, and if my knowledge of English was good enough. Now, after having visited the plenary and breakout sessions, I can say that at some moments, it was a little hard to understand fluent speech, but the presentation slides helped a lot. In the intervals between presentations, I spoke with other conference participants. Everyone was very friendly, interested in where I was from, what were my scientific interests and when was my presentation. Since several related conferences were held simultaneously, their participants did not know anything about multi-agent technologies, so they asked a lot of questions and it was nice to open up a new world for them”.

Reports that are closest to the works of “Smart Solutions”:

1.     Davide Guastella, Valérie Camps and Marie-Pierre Gleizes. Multi-agent Systems for Estimating Missing Information in Smart Cities.

2.     Michal Štolba, Michaela Urbanovská, Daniel Fišer and Antonín Komenda. Cost Partitioning for Multi-agent Planning.

3.     Falko Koetter, Matthias Blohm, Monika Kochanowski, etc. Motivations, Classification and Model Trial of Conversational Agents for Insurance Companies.

4.     Pavel Surynek. Conflict Handling Framework in Generalized Multi-agent Path Finding: Advantages and Shortcomings of Satisfiability Modulo Approach.

5.     Shohei Taga, Tomofumi Matsuzawa, Tomofumi Matsuzawa, etc. Multi-Agent Base Evacuation Support System Considering Altitude.

6.     Masashi Omiya, Munehiro Takimoto and Yasushi Kambayashi. Development of Agent System for Multi-robot Search.

7.     Antonio De Nicola, Anna Formica, Michele Missikoff, etc. A Comparative Assessment of Ontology Weighting Methods in Semantic Similarity Search.

8.     Joerg Bremer and Sebastian Lehnhoff. Lazy Agents for Large Scale Global Optimization.

9.     Peter Hofmann. Multi-agent Systems in Remote Sensing Image Analysis.

10. Jiˇrí Švancara and Roman Barták. Combining Strengths of Optimal Multi-Agent Path Finding Algorithms.

11. Youssef Inedjaren, Besma Zeddini, Mohamed Maachaoui and Jean-Pierre Barbot. A Hybrid Multi-agent Architecture for Modeling in MATSim with an Alternative Scoring Strategy.

12. Takaki Matsune and Katsuhide Fujita. Designing a Flexible Supply Chain Network with Autonomous Agents.

13. Suresh Chavhan and Pallapa Venkataram. Emergent Intelligence: A Novel Computational Intelligence Technique to Solve Problems.

14. Tabajara Krausburg and Rafael Bordini. Constrained Coalition Formation among Heterogeneous Agents for the Multi-Agent Programming Contest.

15. Michal Pechoucek. Understanding Future Technologies through Agent-Based Simulation.