We would like to invite you to participate in the Automated Negotiating
Agents Competition (ANAC). The purpose of the competition is to steer
the research in the area bilateral multi-issue closed negotiation.
Closed negotiation, when opponents do not reveal their preferences to
each other, is an important class of real-life negotiations. Negotiating
agents designed using heuristic approach need extensive evaluation,
typically through simulations and empirical analysis, since it is
usually impossible to predict precisely how the system and the
constituent agents will behave in a wide variety of circumstances.
Furthermore, there is a need for the development of a best practice
repository for negotiation techniques. That is, a coherent resource that
describes which negotiation techniques are best suited to a given type
of problem or domain. To facilitate research in the area of bilateral
multi-issue negotiation the GENIUS system is developed. It allows easy
development and integration of existing negotiating agents. GENIUS can
be used to simulate individual negotiation sessions as well as
tournaments between negotiating agents in various negotiation scenarios.
It allows the specification of negotiation domains and preference
profiles by means of a graphical user interface. GENIUS can be used to
train human negotiators by means of negotiations against automated
agents or other humans. Furthermore, it can be used to teach the design
of generic automated negotiating agents.

The ANAC competition will be held in spring 2010, with the finals being
run during the AAMAS 2010 conference. The reward for the winner of the
competition is US$2000 (The prize will be paid only if the number of
participants is sufficient, that is at least 4 participants. In case if
the number of participants is less than 8 the prize will be downgraded
to US$1000).

ORGANIZATION TEAM

* Prof. Dr. Catholijn Jonker (organization chair)
* Prof. Dr. Sarit Kraus (organization chair)
* Dr. Koen Hindriks
* Dr. Raz Lin
* Dmytro Tykhonov

TIMELINE

* Design and test your agent in GENIUS yourself.
* Upload your agent on the GENIUS server and try it in tournaments
against
agents uploaded by the other teams
* Registration deadline: 31 March 2010 at 12.00 CET
* Test phase of submissions: 1 - 11 April 2010
* Qualifying Rounds: 12-16 April 2010
* Quarter Finals: Monday 26 April 2010, 4 x 4 agents
* Semi-Finals: Thursday 29 April 2010, 2 x 4 agents
* Finals: during AAMAS 2010 (10-14 May 2010), 4 agents

It is expected that teams that make it through to the finals will attend
the AAMAS 2010 conference.

To learn more about GENIUS see:
http://mmi.tudelft.nl/negotiation/index.php/Genius