Blue Sky Ideas Track

Following some requests, we are extending the paper submission deadline for the AAMAS 2021 Blue Sky Ideas Track to December 8, 2020 (at 23:59 anywhere on earth).  Note however that the paper must be registered and the abstract submitted by December 3, 2020 on the Track’s EasyChair site.

Chairs

Yves Lespérance, York University, Toronto, Canada (lesperan@eecs.yorku.ca)
Katia Sycara, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA (katia@cs.cmu.edu)

Rationale

The emphasis of this special track is on visionary ideas, long-term challenges, new research opportunities, and controversial debate. It serves as an incubator for innovative, risky, and provocative ideas, 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 ideas and 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. Therefore, we invite submissions to 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
  • How much ideas concern Agents and MAS, relevant for the research community
• “Level of Blue Sky” | Novelty
  • How much ideas are visionary (vs. state of the art), novel
• Background
  • How much the ideas are motivated, ground to a solid understanding of existing state of the art
• Impact
  • How deep and wide could be the impact of the ideas on the research on Agents and MAS
• Rigour
  • How much ideas are presented in a clear and rigorous way, how good is the level of critical reflection applied in the exploration of these ideas

Important Dates

• Papers submission: December 1, 2020
• Abstract submission: December 3, 2020 (at 23:59 anywhere on earth)
• Papers submission: December 8, 2020 (at 23:59 anywhere on earth)
• Rebuttal period: January 7-10, 2021
• Author notification: January 25, 2021
• Camera-ready submission: February 15, 2021

Submission

Submissions are limited to 4 pages in length in the AAMAS-2021 format, with any additional pages containing only bibliographic references. The formatting instructions are the same as for the AAMAS-2021 main track; see the AAMAS-2021 main track call for papers for details. Accepted papers will appear in the conference proceedings and will be presented orally at the conference.

Papers must be submitted at:

AAMAS-2021 Blue Sky Ideas Track EasyChair Site

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

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 AAMAS-2021 main track call for papers for details.

Awards

The CCC mission is to catalyze the computing research community, enabling the pursuit of innovative, high-impact research.