Connections with other fields
Multi-agent systems is a field spanning many disciplines of the sciences and the humanities. The study of social situations where many "agents" collaborate or compete, and the resulting dynamics, were since antiquity the object of political philosophy (agents = citizens, game rules = legislation, action sets = individual rights, etc.). The modern study of multi-agent systems is heavily influenced by economics, and in particular the Von Neumann-Morgenstern expected utility maximization principle in decision theory, as well as game theory, initiated by Nash's work in the early 1950s.With the advent of the Internet, electronic markets, social networks, crowd sourcing and peer production, computer science and applied mathematics have in recent years explored the problems in multi-agent systems under a different eye, focused also on (i) algorithms and (ii) computational complexity. The algorithmic approach focuses on game dynamics and how communication, partial knowledge of the world, and modeling decisions alter the system's properties. The complexity branch mainly concerns itself with what is computationally feasible and how hard each particular problem is to solve.
Also important in recent years is the experimental and empirical aspect of multi-agent systems. Many times an optimal solution is very hard to compute. Also, when humans are part of the multi-agent system, their behavior only partly adheres to the strict utility maximization principle. Recent research aims to explore these grey areas, usually by making systems adaptive to different forms of behavior or providing better models for human choices. Important in this respect are the fields of behavioral economics and psychology. Empirical research is enabled through new data sets on online markets and social networks.
Academic conferences
The main conference for multi-agent system is the International Conference on Automous Agents and Multi-agent Systems (AAMAS). You can visit the website (to be held in Taipei, Taiwan). Another related conference is the ACM Conference on Electronic Cmmerce (ACMEC), which was held at Harvard this June and will be held in San Jose at FCRC next year. There are also smaller workshops, such as the International Workshop on Computational Social Choice and the Workshop on Internet and Network Economics (WINE).Research at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
The Artificial Intelligence Research Group (AIRG) is very active in the field of multi-agent systems. Radhika Nagpal and her students develop multi-agent systems composed of very simple, limited capability agents, which, however, exhibit complex and nuanced properties on the whole. Krzysztof Gajos is an expert in Human-Computer Interaction and the design of intelligent interactive systems, studying how AI can enable novel ways of interaction with computation. Barbara Grosz and Stuart Shieber are famous for work in computational linguistics as well as human decision making, for which they have developed a rich experimental architecture (Colored Trails). Yiling Chen is an expert in prediction markets, social computing, and mechanism design. Finally, David Parkes, the instructor for this course, has a very diverse research portfolio spanning mechanism design, stochastic optimization, game theory and social computing.