The U-Mart project has successfully held two domestic open experiments as contests of trading agents in Japan (Pre U-Mart 2000, U-Mart 2001 and U-Mart 2002), and possibility of this approach is confirmed. The U-Mart system is also used as an effective education tool both in schools of economics and computer science in several universities in Japan.

Based on the above experience, we have decided to have an international open experiment of the U-Mart: ``U-Mart International Experiment 2002(UMIE2002)'' at CASOS 2002 Conference held in Carnegie Melon University in June 2002. We produce ``U-Mart International Experiment 2003(UMIE2003)'' at NAACSOS 2003 Conference held in Omni William Penn, Pittsburgh, PA
in June 2003.

The aims of this experiment are:

1. to share an artificial market system as a common test bed for agent-based simulation,
   
2. to share variation of trading strategies, and methodologies for developing them for artificial market study, and
   
3. to know complex behavior of the market consisting of agents having various trading strategies.

The UMIE2003 calls for participation of trading software agents during these
three months. With submitted agents, a demonstrative contest is held at
the site of the conference. Also, the committee carries out intensive
experiments with the submitted agents for various market situations in advance, and the results are reported at NAACSOS2003 conference.
Furthermore, all the codes and documents of the submitted agents also will be
shared by all the participants for further study on the artificial market.

Chair:Hiroshi Deguchi (Tokyo Institute of Technology, JAPAN)

Takao Terano (Univ. of Tsukuba, JAPAN)
Rober Axtell (The Brookings Institution, USA)

Kathleen M. Carley (Carnegie Melon University, USA)

Peter Dittrich (F.-S.-U. Jena, Germany)

Hajime Kita (National Institution of Academic Degrees, JAPAN)

Yoshinori Shiozawa (Osaka City University, JAPAN)

Maksim Tsvetovat (Carnegie Melon University, USA)

Chair:Hiroshi Sato (National Defense Academy, JAPAN)
Hiroyuki Matsui (Kyoto University, JAPAN)

Naolo Mori (Osaka Prefecture University, JAPAN)
Isao Ono (University of Tokushima, JAPAN)

Secretariat of UMIE2003:

Hiroshi Sato (National Defense Academy, JAPAN) &

Hiroyuki MATSUI(Kyoto Univ. JAPAN)

E-Mail: umie2003@u-mart.econ.kyoto-u.ac.jp

(1)First, please obtain UMIE2003-overview.pdf from U-Mart Web Page (http://www.u-mart.econ.kyoto-u.ac.jp/umie2003/)

(2)Second, obtain developer's kit for U-Mart trading agent, according to directions of UMIE2003-overview.pdf.

This kit includes:
* Documents of the U-Mart system,
* Description of the contest specification of UMIE2003,
* Standalone U-Mart simulator for developers(including GUI analyzing tool),
* Sample trading strategies for the standalone simulators.

Further, we are also planing to distribute
* The U-Mart server over TCP/IP,
* Java API for client programs that communicates the U-Mart server over TCP/IP,
* Sample agents using the API,
* GUI clients for manual trading and monitoring,
* Wrapper program to make the strategy developed with the standalone kit U-Mart clients.

All the documents are in English, and the programs are mainly coded in Java.
With this kit, you can develop your own U-Mart clients.

(3)To obtain the developer's kit, send e-mail identifying, after we send E-Mail with account and password to access http://www.u-mart.econ.kyoto-u.ac.jp/umie2003/kit/

Name,
Affiliation,
Postal Address,
Telephone and FAX (with country code), and
e-mail

to umie2003@u-mart.econ.kyoto-u.ac.jp for registration. After completion of registration,the We sent the document of how to get U-Mart developer's kit. The registered person is also added to the mailing list for communication on the UMIE2003 and the U-Mart system. Registration is needed to be a user of the kit, and it doesn't means participation to UMIE2003 by itself.

Second, submit your U-Mart clients (Java source code) and document of the strategies(more 1 page in A4 or Letter paper every 1 agent, in PostScript or PDF, Please make a sample reference ) to the secretariat of the UMIE2003. With all the submitted agents, U-Mart experiments are carried out in advance, and the results are reported in the NAACSOS2003 conference. UMIE2003 requires that both the submitted agents and their description can be open to public for further study.

(4)UMIE2003 participating application will be accepted from May 1, 2003.

Deadline Extended!!
Submission deadline for your entry has been extended.
New Deadline: May 31, 2003

Please access to UMIE2003 Entry Page

This is the innaugural conference for the newly formed North American Association for Computational Social and Organizational Science.

Purpose:
The purpose of this conference is to bring together researchers and practitioners in the area of computational social and organizational science, to present new developments and findings, demonstrate state-of-the-art technologies, and advance the overall state of science and engineering in this area. Of particular interest is recent work in any of the following areas:

Rationale:
Social and organizational science are being fundamentally altered by the use of computational and mathematical modeling. These formal approaches are increasing the rigor, testability, and predictiveness of theories, enabling improved reasoning about complex social processes at a heretofor unprecedented level, enabling theory testing and validation at multiple levels and utilizing data at a larger scale, and privding managers and policy makers with tools to support what-if reasoning about complex socio-technical systems. The work in this area is fundamentally interdisciplinary, team centered, multi-level and multi-scale. NAACSOS, and this conference, provides a venue for researchers and practitioners to advance the tools, theories, and empirical grounding in this area.