Automated negotiation in open environments: (by ACM/SIGART autonomous agents research award winner)

Agents in open environments lack a central mechanism for controlling their behavior, and they may encounter human decision-makers whose behavior is affected by social and psychological factors. Examples include online markets, patient care-delivery systems; virtual reality and simulation systems used for training and IT systems administration. As open environments increase in number and complexity, they pose significant challenges for agent designers. In this talk, I will discuss several research thrusts that address some of the challenges of automated agent design and evaluation in open environments. These agents are self-interested in the sense that they aim to fulfill their own goals as efficiently as possible. However, they may still cooperate if such behavior can serve either their short-or long-term interests or goals. I will present algorithms for representing and learning agents' goals and capabilities that have been evaluated under diverse settings varying in the extent to which agents are cooperative or competitive. Lastly, I will describe Color Trails, a game infrastructure for investigating negotiation strategies in open environments. Color Trails provides a realistic but modeling-tractable setting that facilitates the design and evaluation of automated decision making by agents.