#IJCAI2019 mini-interviews – Claus Aranha from University of Tsukuba

Meet Claus Aranha, Assistant Professor at the University of Tsukuba, Center of Artificial Intelligence Research (C-AIR).

What are you presenting at IJCAI?
I am organizing the werewolf track ANAC Competition.

Can you tell me more about ANAC?
ANAC stands for Automated Agent Negotiation Competition¹. It is a competition where AI Agents negotiate with each other and/or humans. We have 6 leagues this year – Supply Chain Management, Werewolf (a social party game), Diplomacy (a board game), Human-Agent League, Agent-Agent League: Agent Negotiation with Partial Preferences and the GENIUS league.

What is the real world impact of agents negotiating with each other?
Take for example the Supply Chain Management (SCM) league. Right now in the SCM industry many stakeholders – from people who sell the raw material, to factories which produce goods, to shops who sell them are involved. Each one has their preferences on what they wish to get out of the deal and what they are ready to compromise on. They have to coordinate (i.e. negotiate) with each other all the time for timelines, prices, quantities, etc. It is a cumbersome and cognitively heavy job! 

Imagine a group of AI agents representing each stakeholder does this for you. Wouldn’t things become easier?

You said something about the werewolf track. Could you say more?
It is a social party game where agents are supposed to find who the werewolf is² in a setting where agents lie to each other and/or hide the truth about themselves. How can an agent deal with other agents who behave this way while the agent itself is also deceiving other agents — It is a hard challenge!

We had 90 teams this year out of which 70 sent an agent to the competition. We have 15 finalists and the top three will be discussed tomorrow (August 15)! Keep an eye out 🙂

How can I get involved?
Check out the AI Wolf project page³. You can also get some sample code here – https://github.com/caranha/AIWolfCompo

1http://web.tuat.ac.jp/~katfuji/ANAC2019/

2https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafia_(party_game)

3http://aiwolf.org/en/

Rahul Divekar is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.