Bücher von Andrea Omicini

The fourth internationalworkshop,"e;EngineeringSocietiesin the Agents World"e; (ESAW 2003) was a three-dayevent that took place at the end of October 2003. After previous events in Germany, the Czech Republic, and Spain, the workshop crossed the Channel, to be held at the premises of Imperial College, London. The steady increase in the variety of backgrounds of contributing sci- tists, fascinating new perspectives on the topics, and number of participants, bespeaks the success of the ESAW workshop series. Its idea was born in 1999 among members of the working group on "e;Communication, Coordination, and Collaboration"e; of the ?rst lease of life of the European Network of Excellence on Agent-Based Computing, AgentLink, out of a critical discussion about the general mindset of the agent community. At that time, we felt that proper c- siderationsofsystemicaspectsofagenttechnologydeployment,suchasackno- edgement of the importance of the social and environmental perspectives, were sorely missing: a de?ciency that we resolved should be addressed directly by a new forum.

The ?rst workshop "e;Engineering Societies in the Agents World"e; (ESAW) was held in August 2000, in conjunction with the 14th European Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence (ECAI 2000) in Berlin. It was launched by a group of - searchers who thought that the design and development of MASs (multi-agent systems) not only needed adequate theoretical foundations but also a call for new techniques, methodologies and infrastructures to develop MASs as arti?cial societies. The second ESAW was co-located with the European Agent Summer School (ACAI 2001) in Prague, and mostly focused on logics and languages, middleware, infrastructures and applications. In Madrid, the third ESAW c- centrated on models and methodologies and took place with the "e;Cooperative Information Agents"e; workshop (CIA 2002). The fourth ESAW in London was the ?rst one that ran as a stand-alone event: apart from the usual works on methodologies and models, it also stressed the issues of applications and m- tidisciplinary models. Based on the success of previous ESAWs, and also given that the di?cult challenges in the construction of arti?cial societies are not yet fully addressed, the ?fth ESAW workshop was organized in the same spirit as its predecessors. Inparticular,ESAW2004tookplaceattheIRITlaboratoryoftheUniversit' e "e;Paul Sabatier"e; (Toulouse, France), at the end of October 2004. It was not - located with any other scienti?c event, in the same way as ESAW 2003. ESAW 2004 remained committed to the use of the notion of MASs as the seeds for animated, constructive and highly interdisciplinary discussions about techno- gies,methodologiesandtoolsfortheengineeringofcomplexdistributedsystems.