Awards

The International Automated Negotiation Agents Competition (ANAC) is now in its 15th iteration of bringing together researchers from the negotiation community and spawning novel research in the field of autonomous agent design. Most recently, it was held at the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in Auckland, New Zealand, in May of 2024, where Brown CS students Arnie He and Akash Singirikonda secured second place in the competition’s Supply Chain Management League with faculty member Amy Greenwald as their coach.

The goal of this particular ANAC league is to design and build an autonomous agent that acts as the virtual manager of a factory who needs to buy raw materials, turn them into finished products, and sell them. The challenge for the researchers is that all transactions happen via automated negotiations between autonomous artificial intelligence agents.

“We are team MatchingPennies,” says Arnie He, one of the two student winners. “The name derives from our strategy, which is to interpolate between a linear program that seeks to ‘match the quantities’ offered across multiple simultaneous negotiations with the total demand or supply (depending on our position in the supply chain), and ‘earning pennies’, where our agent focuses more on prices when replying to other agents’ offers.” The name refers to a famous game from the game theory literature called “Matching Pennies,” whose unique solution requires that the agents randomize (e.g., flip a coin to choose their strategy). Similarly, randomization is usually necessary in automated negotiation, because completely predictable behavior can be exploited by other agents.

Amy and Arnie are continuing their research collaboration on automated negotiation this summer.

This victory follows Amy’s multiple wins in 2021 with three different teams of students and in  2019 with Brown CS PhD alum Enrique Areyan Viqeuira. 

For more information, click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communications Manager Jesse C. Polhemus.