Scope and Background:
Intelligent agents are software entities which can carry out some actions on behalf of clients with some degree of autonomy. Through sensing the status of environment, agents perform some operations based on some possessed knowledge in order to change or influence the environment towards their goals. A Multi-Agent System (MAS) is a group or society of agents, and agents interact with others in the group cooperatively and/or competitively in order to reach their individual or common goals. In general, agents possess five common properties which are autonomy (some level of self-control), adaptivity (the ability to learn and improve performance with experience), reactivity (the ability to perceive the environment and to respond in a timely fashion to changes that occur), proactivity (the ability not only to act simply in response to their environment but also to exhibit goal-directed behaviour by taking the initiative) and sociability (the ability to interact, communicate and work with other agents). Research on agent techniques and MASs mainly focus on improving existing or invent innovative frameworks, models, mechanisms, approaches and algorithms to improve agents effectiveness and efficiency in those five aspects for advanced autonomous problem solving abilities in complex environments.

Topics:
We envision a future society where computational agents and humans (physical agents) are living, working and snuggling with each other. Harmonious collaboration among computational agents and humans are of importance in the next-generation society. ICA2018 will call for papers related to the following topics are not limited to:
- Decision making techniques
- Multi-agent communication and interaction protocols
- Negotiation and argumentation
- Game theory and auctions
- Social computing
- Cooperation, collaboration and coordination mechanisms
- Self-organization and self-adaptation
- Computational reasoning
- Machine learning
- Complex systems and system dynamics
- Collective intelligence
- Programming languages
- Internet of things, agents, and people
- Systems designs, development and implementation
- Human and multi-agent systems interaction
- Social science and humanities
- Ethical, legal, and social issues
- Future visions and grand challenges

Agent technique and multi-agent system are very important fields in Artificial Intelligence (AI). We believe that ICA2018 will attract attentions from not only AI researchers, but also domain experts and industrial investigators who are interested in the applications of AI techniques.