ESAW'01

DAI researchers and technology makers are paving the way towards new worlds to build, where a multitude of independent entities interact within artificial societies pursuing goals on our behalf, both as individuals and as groups. Applications and systems built as societies of autonomous and intelligent agents promise to provide computer scientists and engineers with the expressive and computational power to tackle levels of complexity never reached before.

Going far beyond the boundaries of DAI, multi-agent systems (MAS) are rapidly evolving into an independent research field, which gathers contributions from many different areas such as Distributed Systems, Social & Cognitive Sciences, Mobile Computing, and so on. In particular, MAS engineering may actually represent the next frontier for the design and development of complex software systems, by providing agents and societies as powerful abstractions for decomposing tasks, modelling complex domains, and embedding intelligence into real-world applications.

In this context, there is an urgent need not only for theoretical foundations making MAS conceptual setting clear, but also for specific methodologies driving MAS design, for specific technologies and processes driving MAS development, and for powerful and manageable infrastructures making MAS a viable approach to embed intelligence into applications.

Building on the success of the previous edition, ESAW'01 is devoted to discuss technologies, methodologies and models for the engineering of complex applications based on MAS, and aims at bringing together researchers and contributions from both within and outside the DAI field — from Software Engineering, Distributed Systems, Social Sciences, and so on —, so as to promote cross-fertilisation among different research areas. By focussing on the social aspects of MAS, ESAW'01 concentrates on the space of agent interaction, rather than on intra-agent issues, and on the technology and methodology issues rather than on the pure theoretical aspects.

ESAW'01 will be hosted by the Czech Technical University, in Prague, and be co-located with the Advanced Course on Artificial Intelligence (ACAI-01), incorporating the Third European Agent Systems Summer School (2-13 July 2001).

• coordination models and technologies for engineering of agent societies
• analysis, design, development and verification of agent societies
• engineering social intelligence and emergent behaviours in MAS
• application experiences in building agent societies
• centralised vs. decentralised social control
• interaction-coordination patterns in agent societies
• security and mobility issues in agent societies
• enabling infrastructures for agent societies
• visibility and individuality of agents
• methodologies, tools and artifacts for engineering agent societies
• design vs. self-organisation
• insightful analyses of negative results