As more and more multi-agent systems are deployed in the real world, it becomes imperative to study these systems with real humans to avoid unexpected negative consequences during deployment. Yet, this can be challenging for researchers with more experience designing algorithms and less experience running human participant experiments. In this tutorial, we will discuss the…
The proposed tutorial aims to introduce audiences to algorithmic mechanism design without money and its applications, for strategic environments when the mechanism designers are required to elicit private information from the agents in order to generate desirable outcomes and implement desirable mechanisms’ properties when monetary transfers are not allowed. The audiences will be exposed to…
A latent state can enable vastly better planning, exploration, and credit assignment by keeping task-relevant information while discarding distractions and irrelevant details. For example, in video games, there is a game-engine state which has all relevant information for the underlying dynamics. This tutorial will discuss how we can discover such a latent state in the…
This tutorial will survey the recent work in economics and computer science focussing on mechanism design when agents have imperfect rationality. We will present known results as well as techniques that have been developed in the area, with an emphasis on obvious strategyproof mechanisms. We will conclude with a list of open problems in this…
The demand for multi-robot systems is increasing, due to their performance, flexibility, and fault tolerance. Successful multi-robot deployments have been completed in fulfilment centres, fruit fields, and on roads. In each of these environments, robot behaviour is affected by the stochastic dynamics of the environment and the other robots, and so we require planning solutions…
The tutorial will give an overview of the application of logics for strategic reasoning in Mechanism Design, a central problem in economics that consists of designing new games for aggregating preferences in MAS. The aim is to show how to use extensions of Strategy Logic (SL) for (i) the automated verification of mechanisms in relation…
In this tutorial we will discuss two fundamental approaches that have been proposed in the MAS literature to tackle coordination problems, one based on Distributed Constrained Optimization Problems (DCOPs) and another based on Coalition Formation (CF). We will invite the attendance to model some sample problems coming from real applications, and discuss the relevant solutions…
We present the “map of elections” framework for designing and analyzing numerical experiments on elections in computational social choice, as well as for analyzing the space of elections. The idea is to take a set of elections, computeĀ distances between them, and present them as points on a plane, whose distances resemble those between the…
Interaction protocols, commitments, and more generally, norms have been a major theme of multiagent systems (MAS) research for the past two decades. This tutorial will cover the latest advances on these topics, especially from theĀ perspective of information modeling (think databases) and decentralized enactments (think messaging and asynchrony). Understanding these perspectives is crucial to designing…
In the context of multi-agent systems, the Rational Verification problem is concerned with checking which properties will hold in a system when its constituent agents are assumed to behave rationally and strategically in pursuit of individual objectives. In many ways, Rational Verification is a natural game-theoretic counterpart of the conventional model checking problem in the…