Call for Blue Sky Ideas

The Blue Sky Ideas special track is intended to present and provoke visionary ideas, long-term challenges, new research opportunities, and controversial debate. It serves as an incubator for innovative, risky, and provocative research directions, and aims to provide a forum for publishing and presenting these without being constrained by the result-oriented standards followed in the review process of the main track of the conference. Research visions and ideas could cross disciplines, envisioning new directions relevant for Agents and Multi-Agent Systems research community fostered by inter-disciplinary and trans-disciplinary viewpoints.

We encourage papers to reflect on the future of the research area and its community within the broader AI and computing landscape. We invite submissions that focus on novel, overlooked, or under-represented application areas to which agent research may contribute; potential paths for agent research to contribute to the state of the art in other AI and computing areas and the other way around; unexplored theoretical grounds for agent research. Overall, we aim at papers that help guide the agent community to achieve in the coming years a leading position within AI and computing research.

Evaluation Criteria

Reviewers will assess papers based on the following criteria:

• Relevance and Advancement (level of future thinking)
  • Are the ideas presented of interest to members of the Agents and MAS research communities?
  • Do the ideas push forward the envelope of Agents/MAS application into the future?
• Novelty and Vision (level of “Blue Sky”-ness)
  • How much ideas are visionary (vs. state of the art), novel
• Background and Foundation (level of grounded-ness)
  • Are the ideas motivated and grounded to a solid understanding of existing state-of-the-art and older foundational research/theory?
  • Do the ideas consider elatively new research ideas (e.g. published in the last 5 years)?
• Impact and Practicality (level of real-world applicability)
  • How deep and wide is the envisioned impact of the ideas on the research in the Agents and MAS communities?
  • How deep and wide is the envisioned impact on the intended beneficiaries of the ideas presented, including practical considerations?
• Rigour and Clarity (level of strength of contribution)
  • Are the ideas presented in a clear and rigorous way?
  • How strong is the level of critical reflection applied in the exploration of these ideas?

Important Dates

• Abstract submission: December 5, 2022 (at 23:59 anywhere on earth)
• Papers submission: December 12, 2022 (at 23:59 anywhere on earth)
• Rebuttal period: January 18-25, 2023
• Author notification: February 19, 2023
• Camera-ready submission: March 19, 2023

Submission

Submissions are limited to 4 pages in length in the AAMAS-2023 format, with any additional pages containing only bibliographic references. The formatting instructions are the same as for the AAMAS-2023 main track. Accepted papers will appear in the conference proceedings and will be presented orally at the conference.

The Blue Sky Ideas track follows the same policies as the main track.  Submissions must be original, reviewing is double-blind, and at least one author of each accepted paper will be required to register for the conference by the early registration deadline with the intention of presenting the paper at the conference.  See the main track call for papers for details.

Papers must be submitted via EasyChair:

Note that this is a different EasyChair site from the one used by the main track.

Contact

Blue Sky Ideas Track Co-Chairs
Prof Elizabeth Sklar, esklar@lincoln.ac.uk
Prof Gal Kaminka, galk@cs.biu.ac.il