Research areas

Autonomous agents and multi-agent systems

Autonomous agents and multi-agent systems

Autonomous agents and multi-agent systems cover a wide range of techniques from games to voting theory. Various algorithms and mathematical theories are used in these domains. There are links to machine learning and reinforcement learning as is obvious in games. There are also links to other fields than computer science as for example with computational social choice.

Autonomous agents and multi-agent systems concern automated agents, or groups of automated agents, that have to make decisions in various types of environments (cooperative or adversarial, possibly with uncertainty and/or partial observability).

It covers a wide range of classes of problems such as planning, problem solving, collective decision making, game playing, or the analysis of strategic interactions in distributed decision making. It makes use of various techniques, from artificial intelligence (reinforcement learning, online learning, search algorithms) to computational economics (computational social choice, algorithmic game theory).

Applications range from electronic democracy to computer games and de novo molecule discovery.