Due to the rapid world-wide spreading of the new coronavirus infections (COVID-2019), we have decided to hold WOA 2020 not as an in-person conference as originally planned, but as an online virtual conference.

The twenty-first edition of the Workshop “From Objects to Agents” (WOA) will be held online to serve as a forum for researchers and practitioners working on all aspects of agents and multi-agent systems (MAS). Following the significant interest that all facets of Artificial Intelligence have been recently obtaining, the topic for WOA 2020 is

• MAS for Human-centred Intelligent Systems

It is increasingly recognised that AI's vision for the future must be guided by a commitment to study, design and develop intelligent systems as human-centred AI technologies and applications. On the other hand, agents and MAS have been at the core of the design of intelligent systems since their very beginning, and their long-term history in developing intelligent systems might open new ways to engineer human-centred AI.

Approaching MAS from a human-centred perspective includes explicitly recognising the human perspective and abstractions in developing intelligent system as well as reframing MAS design and implementation on situated human practices, therefore exploring the co-adaptation of humans and MAS. A human-centred understanding of MAS can lead not only to more usable MAS technologies, but to new ways of framing intelligent system from a computational point of view.

WOA 2020 will bring together researchers to discuss those issues and suggest future research questions and perspective aimed at creating a human-centred approach to MAS and intelligent systems. The workshop therefore aims to be an interdisciplinary and global hub for thinkers, students, researchers, and developers who wish to understand and exploit the impact and potential of MAS in the future of intelligent systems.

• Agents theory and technology related to human-centred intelligent systems 
• Software engineering techniques for human-centred intelligent systems
• Languages and tools for agent-oriented human-centred intelligent systems
• Agent-oriented architectures for human-centred intelligent systems
• Responsabile and ethical AI in agent-oriented models and architectures
• Responsabile and ethical AI in agent-based simulations and applications
• MAS for interpretability and explainability of intelligent systems
• Trust, security, and privacy in human-centred intelligent systems