Member of the Program Committee of SAC 2020-IRMAS Track

I’m very pleased to serve as a member of the Program Committee of the IRMAS – Intelligent Robotics and Multi-Agent Systems technical track on the 35th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium On Applied Computing in 2020.  The list of current PC members is posted on the track website: https://sac2020-irmas.isr.uc.pt/index.php/program-committee.

Below you can find the calls for papers.

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* Accepted papers will be included in the ACM SAC 2020 proceedings and published in the ACM digital library, being indexed by Thomson ISI Web of Knowledge and Scopus. Top-quality papers will be invited after the conference for submission, in extended form, to a special issue of an ISI indexed journal *.

:: Important Dates

Paper submission:          Sep. 15, 2019
Paper submission: Sep. 29, 2019 (DEADLINE EXTENDED)
Acceptance notification:   Nov. 10, 2019
Final paper submission:    Nov. 25, 2019

:: Objectives and Scope 

The ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC) has been a primary gathering forum for applied computer scientists, computer engineers, software engineers, and application developers from around the world. SAC 2020 (https://www.sigapp.org/sac/sac2020/) is sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Applied Computing (SIGAPP), and will be held in Brno, Czech Republic. The technical track on Intelligent Robotics and Multi-Agent Systems (IRMAS) will be organized for the sixth time in SAC 2019, exploiting the inherent synergy between Robotics and Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), thus aiming to bring together these highly related and exciting research fields.
Robotics is a multidisciplinary research area that presents an enormous potential. It concerns about developing intelligent robotic systems that are capable of making decisions and acting autonomously in real and unpredictable environments to accomplish tasks and assist humans in relevant application domains for society. Several complex problems require the use of teams of robots that share some of the same challenges studied in MAS.
MAS are groups of intelligent agents that can perceive and act in a given environment to achieve their individual and collective goals. MAS enable solving problems that are beyond the individual capabilities and knowledge of single agents, not suffering from resource limitations, performance bottlenecks, or critical failures usually found in centralized problem solvers. Multi-robot systems are often used to evaluate and validate MAS with physical robot platforms.
For many years, Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers have worked separately in these fields, both fields have matured enormously, and today there is a growing interest in getting the two fields together. Many in Robotics believe that the focus in the near future should be adding capabilities to robots that lie at the core of AI research. Reciprocally, AI researchers aim at embedding their techniques in physical robots that can perceive, reason and act in real, dynamic physical environments. Despite this mutual interest, although there are many conferences focusing either on Robotics or AI separately, there is a lack of scientific venues where both communities can meet.
The purpose of the IRMAS track is therefore to provide a venue to exploit synergies between Intelligent Robotics and MAS, bringing together researchers from both fields to share experiences, expose issues, and discuss about these exciting fields. Papers that make fundamental contributions in either of these two areas are welcome, and research that spans both areas is especially encouraged.

:: Topics 

– Autonomous robots
– Multi-agent systems (MAS) theory
– Cooperative robotics and cooperative MAS
– Multi-robot systems
– Coordination and cooperation
– Distributed control architectures
– Human-robot interaction
– Human-robot collaboration
– Real-world applications of MAS
– Self-adaptation and learning
– MAS in mobile ad-hoc sensor networks
– Robot localization, mapping, exploration, and navigation
– Artificial perception and computer vision
– Field robotics
– Deployment, coverage and patrolling
– Evolutionary robotics and swarm robotics
– Humanoid robots
– Social and service robotics
– Entertainment and educational robots
– Micro and nano robotics
– Robotic dexterous grasping
– Simulation and programming tools for MAS

:: Submission Procedure 

To submit a paper, please follow the URL:
https://sac2020-irmas.isr.uc.pt/index.php/submissions

Original papers addressing any of the listed topics of interest (or related topics) will be considered. Each submitted paper will be fully refereed and undergo a double-blind review process by at least three referees.
* Accepted papers will be included in the ACM SAC 2020 proceedings and published in the ACM digital library, being indexed by Thomson ISI Web of Knowledge and Scopus. Top-quality papers will be invited after the conference for submission, in extended form, to a special issue of a ISI indexed journal *.
Paper size is limited to 8 pages. A maximum of 2 additional pages may be included for an additional fee. The review process will be double-blind. This means that authors’ names and affiliations must not appear in the paper, self-citations should be in the third person, and authors must avoid disclosing their identity by any means. Submitted papers must be formatted using the ACM SIG format (http://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template).
Paper registration is required allowing the inclusion of the paper in the conference proceedings. An author or a proxy attending SAC must present the paper. This is a requirement for the paper to be included in the ACM digital library. No-show of scheduled papers will result in excluding them from the ACM digital library.
Graduate students are invited to submit research abstracts (maximum 4 pages) to the Student Research Competition (SRC), following the instructions published at SAC 2020 website. Authors of selected abstracts will have the opportunity to give poster presentations of their work and compete for three top-winning places. The winners will receive cash awards and SIGAPP recognition certificates during the conference banquet. Authors of selected abstracts are eligible to apply to the SIGAPP Student Travel Award program for support.

:: Track Chairs 

Rui P. Rocha     (University of Coimbra, Portugal)
Daniel Kudenko   (University of York, UK)
Denis Wolf       (University of São Paulo, Brazil)

For further information on SAC 2020 IRMAS track, please contact one of the track chairs:
rprocha [at] isr.uc.pt, or daniel.kudenko [at] york.ac.uk, or denis [at] icmc.usp.br