The Trading Agent Competition

这是一项与会议相关的赠款，用于支持约16名学生参加在日本函馆举行的贸易代理竞赛的旅费、生活费和报名费，并提供计算资源以支持教育体验。贸易代理大赛(TAC)是一个国际论坛，旨在促进和鼓励关于贸易代理的高质量研究。TAC为研究人员提供了一个平台，通过在模拟市场场景中与其他设计小组的代理人竞争来评估程序化交易技术。自2000年以来，TAC锦标赛每年举行一次，吸引了来自世界各地数十个国家的机构的参赛者。美国学生的参与不仅将推动他们在计算机科学领域的个人职业生涯，还将为国家未来的科学和技术劳动力做出贡献。这项活动通过开发和演示让学生参与人工智能体的设计和竞争性使用的方法来促进课程发展。贸易智能体竞赛的参赛作品是为在电子市场进行交易而设计的软件程序。他们之所以被称为“代理商”，是因为这些程序在市场上是自主运作的：发出报价、请求报价、接受报价，以及通常根据市场规则谈判交易。尽管代理的活动最终由其程序员决定，但交易行为本身是完全自动化的：在谈判过程中，人类不会干预。交易代理面临着一项最具挑战性的任务。为了有效地玩市场，代理人必须在不确定和快速变化的环境中做出实时决策，并考虑到正在做同样事情的其他代理人的行动。有能力的代理迅速吸收来自许多来源的市场信息，预测未来事件，优化复杂的报价和资源分配，预测战略互动，并从经验中学习。成功的交易代理采用并扩展了人工智能、运筹学、统计学和其他相关领域的最先进技术。发起了一年一度的交易代理竞赛，以促进交易代理技术方面的研究和教育。在一年一度的竞赛中，交易策略技术的开发者会评估这些想法，并在一个公共论坛上交流他们的结果，以造福于更广泛的研究社区。TAC的教育功能体现在学生在几乎所有参赛队伍中的重要作用上。许多大学使用TAC作为电子商务和人工智能技术教学的练习。TAC在课堂上是一个有用的辅助工具，因为它本质上是计算机科学家的动手(实验室式)体验。对交易代理的研究和教育有望提高其发展的艺术水平和实践水平，并最终导致更有效的电子市场。同样重要的是，随着自主软件代理系统在商业和其他领域变得更加普遍，这一领域的公共知识的增加促进了对此类系统行为的理解。

This is a conference-related grant to support the travel, subsistence and registration expenses of approximately 16 student participants in a trading agent competition, being held in Hakodate, Japan, plus providing computational resources to enable educational experiences. The Trading Agent Competition (TAC) is an international forum designed to promote and encourage high-quality research about trading agents. TAC provides a platform for researchers to evaluate programmed trading techniques by competing with agents from other design groups in a simulated market scenario. TAC tournaments have been held annually since 2000, and have attracted participants from institutions in dozens of countries around the world. Involvement of American students will not only advance their individual careers in computer science, but will also contribute to the nation's future science and technology workforce. This activity contributes to curriculum development by developing and demonstrating methods for involving students in the design and competitive use of artificial agents.Entries in the Trading Agent Competition are software programs designed to trade in electronic markets. They are called "agents" because these programs operate autonomously in the market: sending bids, requesting quotes, accepting offers, and generally negotiating deals according to market rules. Although the agent's activity is ultimately determined by its programmers, the trading behavior is itself fully automated: humans do not intervene while the negotiation is in progress. Trading agents face a most challenging task. To play the market effectively, an agent must make real-time decisions in an uncertain and fast-changing environment, taking into account the actions of other agents that are doing the same. Capable agents rapidly assimilate market information from many sources, forecast future events, optimize complex offers and resource allocations, anticipate strategic interactions, and learn from experience. Successful trading agents adopt and extend state-of-the-art techniques from artificial intelligence, operations research, statistics, and other relevant fields. The annual trading agent competitions were initiated to promote research and education in the technology underlying trading agents. At the annual competition, the developers of techniques in trading strategy evaluate these ideas and communicate their results in a public forum for the benefit of the broader research community. The educational function of TAC is manifest by the significant role of students on almost all teams entering the competition. Many universities use TAC as an exercise for teaching about electronic commerce and artificial intelligence techniques. TAC is a useful aid in the classroom because it is by nature a hands-on (laboratory-like) experience for computer scientists. Research and education in trading agents promises to improve the state of art and practice in their development, and ultimately lead to more effective electronic markets. Equally important, increasing public knowledge in this area promotes understanding of the behavior of autonomous software agents as such systems become more prevalent in commerce and other domains.