Intelligent agents are computer programs that act as surrogates for users. Instead of a human having to carry out time-consuming activities, an agent can do it in their place. The agents can typically be aware of more resources than the user would be aware of, and can exploit this knowledge to carry out (repetitive, lengthy) activities that might be difficult for a person to perform. The more sophisticated we can make these agents, the more they can do automatically for people.

The Multiagent Systems Research Group (a.k.a. Critical MAS) explores how to build intelligent agents that can work together. These agents might be cooperative, and looking for ways to help one another, or they might be competitive, and need to consider how they can resolve conflicts that arise. The MAS Research Group made its mark in early work on game theory and mechanism design as applied to multiagent negotiation and planning. More recent work has branched out into a variety of additional MAS research areas.

Here are some topics that the Critical MAS group is investigating; they include issues in Computational Social Choice, Computational Economics, and other Artificial Intelligence areas:

• Incentive Compatible Regression Learning and Classification
• Complexity of Manipulation, Control, and Winner-Determination in Single Winner and Multiwinner Elections
• Average-case Complexity of Voting Manipulation
• Coalitional Manipulation of Voting
• Power Indices and their Efficient Computation and Approximation
• Information Elicitation
• Automated Design of Voting Rules via Learning
• Robustness of Preference Aggregation
• Adding Incentives to Trade in Peer-To-Peer Systems
• Dynamics Based Control and Extended Markov Tracking applied to Robotics
• Focal Point Learning to Improve Tactic Coordination
• Adversarial Environment Models
• Multiagent Graph Coloring
• Distributed and Peer-to-Peer Resource Allocation
• Adaptive Reconsideration, Cooperation, and Exploration

At this site, you'll find out more about the Group's members, our current and past research projects, our publications, and our Critical MAS group meetings. You will also find pointers to related sites and resources in the area of Multiagent Systems.