IAM agent repeats trust success in ART competition

For the second year running an ECS team has won the Agent Reputation and Trust (ART) competition at the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, held this month in Hawaii.

The competition provides a testbed for agent reputation- and trust-related technologies. Teams of agent researchers from universities around the world pit their agents against each other, enabling them to test whether their ideas about trust can feed into a generic problem. This year’s competition increased the number of player-agents from around 5 to 25-50. This tested the agents’ assessment of trust in larger populations, where they may not be able to interact with all their peers on a regular basis.

The game involved clients requesting appraisals for paintings from different eras; and the success of the appraising agents was judged on the highest number of clients and profit received for producing the most accurate appraisals. The winning appraiser agent (the Southampton agent, IAM), was the one with the highest bank account balance. The winning margin of the Southampton IAM team was 50 per cent, a significant increase from last year’s margin of 30 per cent. Team member Dr Luke Teacy said that this may be explained by the larger number of agents in each game: ‘With more agents there is more opportunity for our agent to discover reliable peers to interact with, and so increase its own revenue’, he said.

The winning team was led by Professor Nick Jennings, Head of the IAM group.