Call for Papers
We invite you to submit your best work in the area of agents and multiagent systems to AAMAS-2021, the 20th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, to be held in London in May 2021.
While we are looking forward to the community coming together once again in person in London in 2021, we are also planning for the eventuality that the global public health situation might require us to run the conference as a partly or fully virtual event. Under any scenario, authors of accepted papers who are unable to travel to London will be given the opportunity to present virtually, while still being actively involved in the conference.
All submissions will be rigorously peer-reviewed and evaluated on the basis of the overall quality of their technical contribution, taking into account criteria such as originality, significance, soundness, reproducibility, clarity, relevance to the conference, quality of presentation, as well as understanding and appropriate referencing of the state of the art.
Areas of Interest
We welcome the submission of technical papers describing significant and original research on all aspects of the theory and practice of autonomous agents and multiagent systems. If you are new to this community, then we encourage you to consult the proceedings of previous editions of the conference to fully appreciate the scope of AAMAS. At the time of submission, you will be asked to associate your paper with one of the following 10 areas of interest:
- Coordination, Organisations, Institutions, and Norms
- Markets, Auctions, and Non-Cooperative Game Theory
- Social Choice and Cooperative Game Theory
- Knowledge Representation, Reasoning, and Planning
- Learning and Adaptation
- Modelling and Simulation of Societies
- Humans and AI / Human-Agent Interaction
- Engineering Multiagent Systems
- Robotics
- Innovative Applications
The reviewing process for each of these areas will be coordinated by dedicated area chairs familiar with the particularities of the area they are responsible for. We reserve the right to transfer a paper to a different area in case we believe that doing so will improve the quality of the reviewing process. You will have the opportunity to react to preliminary versions of the reviews of your paper (so-called ‘rebuttal’) before we take a final decision regarding the acceptance of your paper.
Special Tracks
In addition to the main track, AAMAS-2021 will feature three special tracks, the Blue Sky Ideas Track, the JAAMAS Track, and the Demo Track, each with a separate Call for Papers.
The focus of the Blue Sky Ideas Track is on visionary ideas, long-term challenges, new research opportunities, and controversial debate. The JAAMAS Track offers authors of papers recently published in the Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (JAAMAS) that have not previously appeared as full papers in an archival conference the opportunity to present their work at AAMAS-2021. The Demo Track, finally, allows participants from both academia and industry to showcase their latest developments in agent-based and robotic systems.
Submission Instructions
Papers should be written in English, be prepared for double-blind reviewing, get submitted as a PDF document, and conform to our formatting guidelines:
AAMAS-2021 LaTeX Template and Formatting Guidelines
Papers submitted to the main track must be at most 8 pages long, with any number of additional pages containing bibliographic references only. Excessive use of typesetting tricks to make everything fit into 8 pages is not admissible. Please do not modify the style files or any of the layout parameters.
The use of LaTeX is highly recommended. If you choose to prepare your paper using Word instead, then it is your responsibility to adapt the Word template available at the ACM website so as to conform to the AAMAS-2021 formatting guidelines.
Please note that registering an abstract of your paper (of around 100-300 words in plain text) is required one week before the paper submission deadline and you will be asked to provide some additional information (such as keywords characterising your paper) at this time. We recommend to not wait with submission until the very last moment. Note that you can resubmit your paper any number of times until the submission deadline. Please register your abstract and submit your paper here:
If the principal author of your paper is a (doctoral or other kind of) student, then please register your paper as a student paper. This information will not be shared with reviewers and is used only to determine eligibility for the Pragnesh Jay Modi Best Student Paper Award.
Supplementary Material
You have the option to accompany your submission with supplementary material. This might be a separate document with further information regarding your experiments or more comprehensive versions of some of your proofs. This might also be code or a dataset (up to 25MB). Contact the programme chairs if you need more than 25MB and we will try to help.
Reviewers will consult supplementary material at their own discretion, and you should not assume that they necessarily will. Please make sure that any supplementary material you submit really is supplementary in nature: any information that is essential for understanding or evaluating your paper must be included in the paper itself. For example, it is not acceptable to relegate most of the proofs of your theoretical results to the supplementary material. You of course must ensure that your supplementary material does not compromise the anonymity of your submission.
IFAAMAS will not publish your supplementary material. Nevertheless, if your paper gets accepted, then the readers of your published paper should have access to the same information as the reviewers of your submission. This entails that you should make your (suitably revised) supplementary material openly available in archival form at the time of publication of your paper, and that you should include a reference to the supplementary material in the camera-ready version of your paper. For code or data you may wish to use a service such as Zenodo. For a technical appendix with additional proof details or similar, you may wish to use an archival preprint server such as arXiv.
Important Dates
- Abstract submission: 2 October 2020
- Paper submission: 9 October 2020
- Rebuttal period: 23-25 November 2020
- Author notification: 18 December 2020
Camera-ready paper submission: 29 January 2021- Camera-ready paper submission (full papers): 8 February 2021
- Camera-ready paper submission (extended abstracts): 15 February 2021
All deadlines are at the end of the day specified, anywhere on Earth (UTC-12).
Publication
All papers accepted at AAMAS-2021 will be published by the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS) and be openly available to everyone from the IFAAMAS website. To maximise the reach of AAMAS-2021 papers, they will also be included in the ACM Digital Library.
Papers submitted to the main track will be accepted either as full papers (8 pages plus references) or as extended abstracts (2 pages plus references). You will be able to indicate at the time of submission whether you would accept the offer to publish your work as an extended abstract. This information will be visible to the programme chairs only.
A significant number of authors of papers accepted to AAMAS with excellent reviews will be invited to submit extended versions of those papers to the Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (JAAMAS) for fast-track review.
Policies
IFAAMAS publishes original research. Therefore, you may not submit papers (to the main track) that have substantial overlap in contribution or text with work previously accepted for publication as a full paper in another archival forum. This includes full papers at workshops with archival proceedings, but not, for instance, two-page extended abstracts published at previous editions of AAMAS.
Reviewing for AAMAS is double-blind. This means that reviewers should not be aware of the identity of the authors of the papers they review. As an author you must make a reasonable effort to ensure that this is possible. Specifically, please replace your name and affiliation on the first page with the paper tracking number and do not include any acknowledgements in your submission. Cite your own prior work where appropriate, but do so in the third rather than the first person (that is, write, for instance, “X et al. [42] showed …” rather than “We showed … [42]”).
We recognise that for certain papers describing deployed applications it may be impossible to guarantee the anonymity of the submission while also providing reviewers with sufficient information to evaluate your contribution. In such cases we ask you to maintain anonymity as much as is feasible and to use the submission form to (a) confirm that the main contribution of your work concerns a deployed application (rather than, say, an idea for a possible future application) and to (b) explain why full anonymity was not an option.
Submitting a paper that has previously been presented at an informal workshop or that is available from a public preprint server (such as arXiv) is admissible. In that case, please do not cite that earlier version of your work in the paper itself but instead enter this information in the relevant text box in the submission system. This information will be visible to the programme chairs only. Finally, we ask you to not actively promote your paper to a global audience during the reviewing period or the four weeks preceding the abstract submission deadline (e.g., by uploading it to a public preprint server or by presenting it at an international event).
Papers must not include pointers to supplementary material on the web, not even when that supplementary material has been fully anonymised. The reason for this policy is that we would be unable to ensure that this material will remain unaltered throughout the reviewing period.
We recognise the significant strain on the scientific community caused by the needs of peer review. Therefore, the work you submit to AAMAS must not be under review elsewhere at any time between submission and notification.
The abstracts submitted ahead of the main paper submission deadline are central for the assignment of reviewers to papers. For this reason, abstracts should not be altered in any significant way after the abstract submission deadline. Please note that this entails that submitting “placeholder abstracts” is not admissible.
All individuals—and only those—who have made significant contributions to a paper submitted to AAMAS should be listed as authors in the submission system. We will not permit adding or removing authors to a paper after the submission deadline. Only mistakes regarding the ordering of authors can still be corrected after the notification date.
Submissions that are in violation of any of the above policies are subject to rejection without peer review at the discretion of the programme chairs.
Submissions to AAMAS are confidential. However, submissions, author information, and reviews may be shared with the organisers of other AI conferences to identify duplicate submissions and to limit duplicate reviewing efforts. By submitting to AAMAS-2021, you agree for relevant data regarding your submission to be shared in this manner.
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. This is a prerequisite for your paper being included in the conference proceedings.
Frequently Asked Questions
If you have any questions regarding this Call for Papers, please contact the programme chairs, Ulle Endriss (University of Amsterdam) and Ann Nowé (VUB, Brussels), at aamas2021.pc.chairs@gmail.com. Or maybe your question is answered here already: