CWI and Acumex join forces on the development of online negotiation technology

Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), the Dutch national research institute for mathematics and computer science, has agreed on a long-term research collaboration with Acumex to make autonomous online negotiation of complex goods a reality.

Publication date
2 Oct 2018

Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), the Dutch national research institute for mathematics and computer science, has agreed with on a long-term research collaboration with Acumex to make autonomous online negotiation of complex goods a reality.

Acumex is a Danish high-tech SME that has built the first online negotiation platform for trading in complex markets like e.g. pharmaceuticals.

The research partnership will be performed by CWI’s Intelligent & Autonomous Systems group and be led by Veni laureate Tim Baarslag. Together with a post doc student, Tim Baarslag will focus on developing fundamental and applicable solutions for agent negotiations within Acumex’ new online trading platform.

The reason for this collaboration is simple: The world of peer-to-peer trading is changing rapidly. Traditional trading via trade fair, phone and email is rapidly being replaced by online trading platforms. With a fully digitized process it is now possible for vendors to match and discover supply and demand in a more effective and scalable way. This in turn creates a new opportunity to use negotiation agents that can support vendors in their negotiations and eventually make deals autonomously on their behalf.

Tim Baarslag: "I am very glad that we can use our knowledge and expertise of negotiation AI in order to further develop online trading technology. It is very satisfying to work on a research project that will have an actual impact on the experience of the trading users."

Acumex wants to incorporate these state-of-the-art multi-agent techniques in their online trading platform. The objective is to support clients in conducting more efficient (more effective) trading based on organizational, partner and user preferences. Maintaining concept and business logic, Acumex intends to scale the solution globally and across markets.

Flavio Gaier, co-founder and CTO at Acumex: " We believe that applied technology can help humans to perform better, enhancing their capabilities, making processes more streamlined and efficient, freeing resources. We strive to engineer technology that can be very complex behind the scenes and user friendly for our clients, which is why I am excited to begin this journey together with Tim and the great people at CWI."

About Tim Baarslag
Tim Baarslag is a Scientific Staff Member at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), the national research institute for Mathematics and Computer Science in the Netherlands. He is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Nagoya University of Technology and Visiting Fellow at the University of Southampton.

Tim Baarslag studies intelligent and autonomous systems that can collaborate through the process of joint decision making. Practical applications include smart energy trading, the Internet of Things, trading platforms, autonomous vehicles, and digital privacy & security assistants. Read more about Tim on his personal webpage.

About Acumex
Acumex is a Danish high-tech SME founded in 2014. Acumex has built the first online negotiation platform for trading in complex markets (extensive regulation or sheer size) replacing the old trading paradigm with a more structured, cloud-based approach enabling real-time online negotiation and trading.

 

Kick-off


The kick-off of this project took place on 12 December 2018.  Picture, from left to right: Marco Canali, Flavio Gaier, Tim Baarslag, Morten Raahauge, and Niklas Hall. Source: CWI.

 

More information

https://www.acumex.net/
https://www.linkedin.com/organization/acumex