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Adaptive Agents and Multi-Agent Systems is an emerging and exciting interdisciplinary area of research and development involving artificial intelligence, computer science, software engineering, and developmental biology, as well as cognitive and social science. This book surveys the state of the art in this emerging field by drawing together thoroughly selected reviewed papers from two related workshops; as well as papers by leading researchers specifically solicited for this book. The articles are organized into topical sections on - learning, cooperation, and communication - emergence and evolution in multi-agent systems - theoretical foundations of adaptive agents

The Asian Computing Science Conference (ASIAN) series was initiated in 1995 to provide a forum for researchers in computer science in Asia to meet and to promote interaction with researchers from other regions. The previous?ve conferences were held, respectively, in Bangkok, Singapore, Kathmandu, Manila, and Phuket. The proceedings were published in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science Series of Springer-Verlag. This year's conference (ASIAN2000) attracted 61 submissions from which 18 papers were selected through an electronic program committee (PC) meeting. The themes for this year's conference are: – Logics in Computer Science – Data Mining – Networks and Performance The key note speaker for ASIAN2000 is Jean Vuillemin (ENS, France) and the invited speakers are Ramamohanarao Kotagiri (U. Melbourne, Australia) and Alain Jean-Marie (LIRMM, France). We thank them for accepting our - vitation. This year's conference is sponsored by the Asian Institute of Technology (Thailand), INRIA (France), the National University of Singapore (Singapore), and UNU/IIST (Macau SAR, China). We thank all these institutions for their continued support of the ASIAN series. This year's conference will be held in Penang, Malaysia. We are much obliged to Universiti Sains Malaysia and Penang State Government for providing the conference venue and to Dr. Abdullah Zawawi Haji Talib for making the local arrangements. We also wish to thank the PC members and the large number of referees for thesubstantialworkputinbytheminassessingthesubmittedpapers.

Electronic Commerce, as a gamut of activities involving electronic transactions performed over a network via software that may be more or less autonomous, is an emerging reality. Strategic studies have shown that electronic commerce is a major growth industry. The book is devoted to the challenges and opportunities that electronic commerce opens for agent technology. For some time, electronic commerce has attracted the avid attention of agent-builders and agent technology researchers, and these have decisively contributed to advancing the state of the art in the field. The second-generation software agents now entering the scene hold great promise for the further advancement of electronic commerce. This book originates from a workshop on Agent-Mediated Electronic Trading held at Agents'98 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in May 1998. The eleven carefully reviewed and revised papers present a unique survey of software agents in the context of electronic commerce.

In this book we present a collection of papers around the topic of Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce. Most of the papers originate from the third workshop on Agent{Mediated Electronic Commerce held in conjunction with the Autonomous Agents conference in June 2000. After two previous workshops, one during the Autonomous Agents conference in 1998 in Minneapolis and the second one in conjunction with the International Joint Conference On Arti cial Intelligence in 1999, this workshop continued the tradition of the previous ones by setting the scene for the assessment of the challenges that Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce faces as well as the opportunities it creates. By focusing on age- mediated interactions, specialists from di erent disciplines were brought together who contribute theoretical and application perspectives in the narrowly focused topic that nevertheless involves wide ranging concerns such as: agent architec- res, institutionalization, economic theory, modeling, legal frameworks and policy guidelines. The main topics for the workshop were: { Electronic negotiation models for agents { Formal issues for agents that operate in electronic market places { Virtual trading institutions and platforms { Trading strategies for interrelated transactions (respectively auctions) The workshop received 12 submissions of which 7 were selected for publication in this volume. Although the number of submissions was less then expected for an important area like agent-mediated electronic commerce there is no reason to worry that this area does not get enough attention from the agent community.

One of the most important reasons for the current intensity of interest in agent technology is that the concept of an agent, as an autonomous system capable of interacting with other agents in order to satisfy its design objectives, is a natural one for software designers. Just as we can understand many systems as being composed of essentially passive objects, which have a state and upon which we can perform operations, so we can understand many others as being made up of interacting semi-autonomous agents. This book brings together revised versions of papers presented at the First International Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, AOSE 2000, held in Limerick, Ireland, in conjunction with ICSE 2000, and several invited papers. As a comprehensive and competent overview of agent-oriented software engineering, the book addresses software engineers interested in the new paradigm and technology as well as research and development professionals active in agent technology.

Since the 1980s, software agents and multi-agent systems have grown into what is now one of the most active areas of research and development activity in computing generally. One of the most important reasons for the current intensity of interest in the agent-based computing paradigm certainly is that the concept of an agent as an autonomous system, capable of interacting with other agents in order to satisfy its design objectives, is a natural one for software designers. This recognition has led to the growth of interest in agents as a new paradigm for software engineering.This book reflects the state of the art in the field by presenting 14 revised full papers accepted for the second workshop on this topic, AOSE 2001, together with five invited survey articles. The book offers topical sections on societies and organizations, protocols and interaction frameworks, UML and agent systems, agent-oriented requirements capture and specification, and analysis and design.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Ant Algorithms, ANTS 2002, held in Brussels, Belgium in September 2002.The 17 revised full papers, 11 short papers, and extended poster abstracts presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 52 submissions. The papers deal with theoretical and foundational aspects and a variety of new variants of ant algorithms as well as with a broad variety of optimization applications in networking and operations research. All in all, this book presents the state of the art in research and development in the emerging field of ant algorithms

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the joint International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks and International Conference on Neural Information Processing, ICANN/ICONIP 2003, held in Istanbul, Turkey, in June 2003. The 138 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 346 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on learning algorithms, support vector machine and kernel methods, statistical data analysis, pattern recognition, vision, speech recognition, robotics and control, signal processing, time-series prediction, intelligent systems, neural network hardware, cognitive science, computational neuroscience, context aware systems, complex-valued neural networks, emotion recognition, and applications in bioinformatics.

Agents in multiagent systems are concurrent autonomous entities that need to coordinate and to cooperate so as to perform their tasks; these coordination and cooperation tasks might be achieved through communication. Communication, also called interaction by some authors, thus represents one of the major topics in multiagent systems. This book presents the state of the art of research on communication in multiagent systems. First, three seminal papers by Cohen and Perrault, by Singh, and by Davis and Smith present background information and introduce the newcomer to the area. The main part of the book is devoted to current research work dealing with agent communication, communication for coordination and argumentation, protocols, and dialogue games and conversational agents. Finally, the last paper deals with the future of agent communication.

LNCS volumes 2073 and 2074 contain the proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Science, ICCS 2001, held in San Francisco, California, May 27 -31, 2001. The two volumes consist of more than 230 contributed and invited papers that reflect the aims of the conference to bring together researchers and scientists from mathematics and computer science as basic computing disciplines, researchers from various application areas who are pioneering advanced application of computational methods to sciences such as physics, chemistry, life sciences, and engineering, arts and humanitarian fields, along with software developers and vendors, to discuss problems and solutions in the area, to identify new issues, and to shape future directions for research, as well as to help industrial users apply various advanced computational techniques.

LNCS volumes 2073 and 2074 contain the proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Science, ICCS 2001, held in San Francisco, California, May 27-31, 2001. The two volumes consist of more than 230 contributed and invited papers that reflect the aims of the conference to bring together researchers and scientists from mathematics and computer science as basic computing disciplines, researchers from various application areas who are pioneering advanced application of computational methods to sciences such as physics, chemistry, life sciences, and engineering, arts and humanitarian fields, along with software developers and vendors, to discuss problems and solutions in the area, to identify new issues, and to shape future directions for research, as well as to help industrial users apply various advanced computational techniques.

This volume contains the Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Coordination Models and Languages, Coordination 2000. It was held in the wake of three successful earlier conferences whose proceedings were also p- lished in this series, in volumes 1061, 1282 and 1594. The need for increased programmer productivity and rapid development of complex systems provides pragmatic motivation for the development of coordination languages and m- els. The intellectual excitement associated with such endeavors is rooted in the decades-old desire to cope with increasingly higher levels of abstraction. Coordination-based methods provide a clean separation between individual so- ware components and their interactions within the overall software organization. This separation promises to make application development more tractable, to support global analysis, and to enhance software reuse. These are indeed major concerns in the information age, at a time when all aspects of society are relying, to an ever increasing degree, on software systems of unprecedented complexity. Research on coordination methods is likely to play a central role in addressing these technological concerns by changing the software culture around us and by leading to the development of e?ective technical solutions for a broad range of important problems.

PRIMA 2000 was the third in the series of Paci c Rim International Workshops on Multi-Agents. It was held on August 28-29, 2000, in Melbourne, Australia in conjunction with the Paci c Rim International Conference on Arti cial Intel- gence 2000. PRIMA is the main forum for the agent or multi-agent researchers in paci c rim countries to exchange and discuss their research results. This volume contains selected papers from PRIMA 2000. It covers theory, design, and applications of intelligent agents. The speci c aspects include co- dination, negotiation, learning, architecture, speci cation, allocation, and app- cation of intelligent agents. All papers are of high quality because each of them was reviewed and recommended by at least two international renowned program committee members. Many people contributed to this volume. We would like to thank all the a- hors who submitted papers to the workshop. Many thanks also to the members of the program committee who diligently reviewed all the papers. Finally, we thank the editorial sta of Springer-Verlag for publishing this volume in the Lecture Notes in Arti cial Intelligence series.

Communities are groupings of distributed objects that are capable of com- nicating, directly or indirectly, through the medium of a shared context. To support communities on a wide scale will require developments at all levels of computing, from low-level communication protocols supporting transparent - cess to mobile objects, through to distributed operating systems, through to high-level programming models allowing complex interaction between objects. This workshop brought together researchers interested in the technical issues of supporting communities. This workshop was the third in the DCW series. The?rst two, entitled D- tributed Computing on the Web, took place in 1998 and 1999 at the University of Rostock, with proceedings published by the University of Rostock Press. This year, the workshop also incorporated the ISLIP (International Symposium on Languages for Intensional Programming) symposium. The ISLIP symposia have taken place every year since 1988, and have led to two volumes published by World-Scienti?c (Intensional Programming I, 1995, and Intensional Progr- ming II, 2000). While the two conferences emerged from di?erent needs, their focus merged to such an extent that it became clear that a joint conference promised to o?er great opportunities.

We welcomed participants to the 1st EurAsian Conference on Advances in Information and Communication Technology (EurAsia ICT 2002) held in Iran. The aim of the conference was to serve as a forum to bring together researchers from academia and commercial developers from industry to discuss the current state of the art in ICT, mainly in Europe and Asia. Inspirations and new ideas were expected to emerge from intensive discussions during formal sessions and social events. Keynote addresses, research presentation, and discussion during the conference helped to further develop the exchange of ideas among the researchers, developers, and practitioners who attended. The conference attracted more than 300 submissions and each paper was reviewed by at least three program committee members. The program committee selected 119 papers from authors of 30 different countries for presentation and publication, a task which was not easy due to the high quality of the submitted papers. Eleven workshops were organized in parallel with the EurAsia ICT conference. The proceedings of these workshops, with more than 100 papers, were published by the Austrian Computer Society. We would like to express our thanks to our colleagues who helped with putting together the technical program: the program committee members and external reviewers for their timely and rigorous reviews of the papers, and the organizing committee for their help in administrative work and support. We owe special thanks to Thomas Schierer for always being available when his helping hand was needed.

The idea of a FAABS workshop was first conceived in 1998 at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, while the Agent Technology Development Group in the Advanced Architectures and Automation Branch (Code 588) was developing a prototype agent community to automate satellite ground operations. While developing this system, several race conditions arose within and between agents. Due to the complexity of the agents and the communications between them, it was decided that a formal approach was needed to specify the agents and the communications between them, so that the system could be checked for additional errors. A formal model of the inter-agent communications was developed, with the expectation that this would enable us to find more errors. Success in this convinced us of the importance of using formal methods to model agent-based systems. To share our own experiences and to learn how others were approaching these issues, we decided to hold a workshop on formal methods and agent-based systems. The response was overwhelming. The result was the first FAABS workshop, which was held at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Posters, paper presentations, panels, and an invited talk by J Moore stimulated much discussion and subsequent collaboration.

Informatics - 10 Years Back, 10 Years Ahead presents a unique collection of expository papers on major current issues in the field of computer science and information technology. The 26 contributions written by leading researchers on personal invitation assess the state of the art of the field by looking back over the past decade, presenting important results, identifying relevant open problems, and developing visions for the decade to come.This book marks two remarkable and festive moments: the 10th anniversary of the International Research and Conference Center for Computer Science in Dagstuhl, Germany and the 2000th volume published in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.

This collection represents the proceedings of the 1st GSFC/JPL Workshop on Radical Agent Concepts (WRAC), which was held on 16–18 January, 2002 at the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) Conference Center in McLean, VA, USA. Over the past few years, agent technologyhas emerged as a powerful force in computing. Agent technology may well form the foundation for the next gen- ation of computing systems. New and innovative agent concepts and techniques may bring further developments to this exploding area of research. Such work is often strongly inspired by theoretical or empirical studies of human behavior, social intelligence, psychology, arts, biology, computer science and philosophy. Thisworkshopaimedatbringingtogether,inaninterdisciplinaryevent,or- inal thinkers, practitioners and academics with an interest in radical (very - novative) concepts for agent-based systems. The workshop provided a forum to present the latest research?ndings in many aspects of agent technology. The - ganizers welcomed participation by those working in agent architectures, agent communities, agent communications, agent modeling, agent applications and other agent-related areas. We were particularly seeking papers on novel and - novative ideas, pushing the envelope of current agent technology. Contributions without a prototype or working system, i.e., purely conceptual contributions, were welcomed, and ”out-of-the-box” thinkers were especially encouraged to participate. The workshop was structured so as to allow the participants adequate time for discussion and interaction, to exchange ideas and re?ect on the motivations, scienti?c grounds and practical consequences of the concepts presented.

Nowadays, the Internet is the most commonly used medium for the exchange of data in di?erent forms. Presently, over 60 million machines have access to the Internet and to its resources. However, the Internet is also the largest distributed system o?ering di?erent computational services and possibilities not only for cluster computing. If the needs of modern mobile computing and multimedia systems are taken into account, it becomes clear that modern methods must ensure an e?ective development and management of the Internet allowing each user fast access to this huge resource space. The Innovative Internet Computing Systems workshop is organized by the Gesellschaft fur ¨ Informatik(GI) in Germany. It intends to be an open me- ing point for scientists dealing with di?erent aspects of this complex topic. In contrast to the Distributed Communities on the Web workshops, which can be 2 considered as the roots of I CS, special attention is given to fundamental - search works and the application of theoretical and formal results in practical implementations.

Autonomous agents and multi-agent systems are computational systems in which several (semi-)autonomous agents interact with each other or work together to perform some set of tasks or satisfy some set of goals. These systems may involve computational agents that are homogeneous or heterogeneous, they may involve activities on the part of agents having common or distinct goals, and they may involve participation on the part of humans and intelligent agents. This volume contains selected papers from PRIMA 2002, the 5th Paci?c Rim International Workshop on Multi-Agents, held in Tokyo, Japan, on August 18–19, 2002 in conjunction with the 7th Paci?c Rim International Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence (PRICAI-02). PRIMA is a series of workshops on - tonomous agents and multi-agent systems, integrating activities in the Asian and Paci?c Rim countries. PRIMA 2002 built on the great success of its pre- cessors, PRIMA'98 in Singapore, PRIMA'99 in Kyoto, Japan, PRIMA 2000 in Melbourne, Australia, and PRIMA 2001 in Taipei, Taiwan. We received 35 submissions to this workshop from 10 countries. Each paper was reviewed by three internationally renowned program committee members. After careful reviews, 15 papers were selected for this volume. We would like to thank all the authors who submitted papers to the workshop. We would also like to thank all the program committee members for their splendid work in reviewing the papers. Finally, we thank the editorial sta? of Springer-Verlag for publishing this volume in the Lecture Notes in Arti?cial Intelligence.

Five years ago, with excitement and uncertainty, we witnessed the birth of PRIMA (Paci?c Rim International Workshop on Multi-Agents). The?rst PRIMA in 1998 has now grown into PRIMA 2003, the 6th Paci?c Rim Inter- tional Workshop on Multi-Agents in Seoul, Korea. During a period of?ve years, the notion of agent research has grown so much that we hear the term agent on a daily basis. Various?elds such as business, the Web, software engineering, on-line games and such are now using the term agent as a placeholder, just like the term object is used in the object-oriented paradigm. On the other hand, the research area has extended toward real applications, such as the Semantic Web and ubiquitous computing. The themes of PRIMA 2003 re?ected the following trends: – agent-based electronic commerce, auctions and markets – agent architectures and their applications – agent communication languages, dialog and interaction protocols – agent ontologies – agent programming languages, frameworks and toolkits – agentcities – agents and grid computing – agents and peer computing –agentsandtheSemanticWeb – agents and Web services – arti?cial social systems – con?ict resolution and negotiation – evaluation of multi-agent systems – languages and techniques for describing (multi-)agent systems – meta modeling and meta reasoning – multi-agent planning and learning – multi-agent systems and their applications – social reasoning, agent modeling, and organization – standards for agents and multi-agent systems – teams and coalitions – ubiquitous agents

The increasing importance of intelligent agents and their impact on industry/business worldwide is well documented through academic research papers and industrial reports. There is a strong affinity between the Web a worldwide distributed computing environment and the capability of intelligent agents to act on and through software. The ultimate goal of intelligent agents is to accelerate the evolution of the Web from a passive, static medium to a tuned, highly valued environment. This volume contains selected papers from PRIMA 2001, the fourth Pacific Rim International Workshop on Multi-Agents, held in Taipei, Taiwan, July 28-29, 2001. In this volume, the papers cover specification, modeling, and applications of intelligent agents. PRIMA is a series of workshops on autonomous agents and multi-agent systems, integrating the activities in Asia and the Pacific Rim countries. PRIMA 2001 built on the great success of its predecessors, PRIMA98 i n Singapore, PRIMA99 i n Kyoto, Japan, and PRIMA 2000 in Melbourne, Australia. The aim of PRIMA 2001 was to bring together researchers from Asia and the Pacific Rim and developers from academia and industry to report on the latest technical advances or domain applications and to discuss and explore scientific and practical problems as raised by the participants.

Intelligent agents are one of the most important developments in computer science of the past decade. Agents are of interest in many important application areas, ranging from human-computer interaction to industrial process control. The ATAL workshop series aims to bring together researchers interested in the core/micro aspects of agent technology. Speci?cally, ATAL addresses issues such as theories of agency, software architectures for intelligent agents, methodologies and programming languages for r- lizing agents, and software tools for applying and evaluating agent systems. One of the strengthsoftheATALworkshopseriesisitsemphasisonthesynergiesbetweentheories, languages, architectures, infrastructures, methodologies, and formal methods. This year s workshop continued the ATAL trend of attracting a large number of high quality submissions. In more detail, 71 papers were submitted to the ATAL 2000 workshop, from 21 countries. After stringent reviewing, 22 papers were accepted for publication and appear in these proceedings. As with previous workshops in the series, we chose to emphasize what we perceive asimportantnewthemesinagentresearch. Thisyear sthemeswerebothassociatedwith the fact that the technology of intelligent agents and multi-agent systems is beginning to migrate from research labs to software engineering centers. As agents are deployed in applications such as electronic commerce, and start to take over responsibilities for their human users, techniques for controlling their autonomy become crucial. As well, the availability of tools that facilitate the design and implementation of agent systems becomes an important factor in how rapidly the technology will achieve widespread use.

This volume is the eighth in the Intelligent Agents series associated with the ATAL workshops. These workshops on “Agent Theories, Architectures, and L- guages” have established themselves as a tradition, and play the role of small but internationally well-known conferences on the subject, where besides theory per se also integration of theory and practice is in focus. Speci?cally, ATAL - dresses issues of theories of agency, software architectures for intelligent agents, methodologies and programming languages for realizing agents, and software tools for applying and evaluating agent-based systems. ATAL 2001 featured two special tracks in which both the more theoretical / formal and the more practical aspects were present, viz. “Formal Theories of Negotiation”, organized by Frank Dignum, and “Agents for Hand-Held, Mobile, or Embedded Devices”, organized by Tim Finin. There was also an extra session on RoboCup Rescue, organized and presented by Satoshi Tadokoro and Ranjit Nair. ATAL 2001 attracted 68 papers from over 20 countries all over the world, of which 30 were selected for presentation at the workshop and publication in this volume. We invited two outstanding speakers: Fausto Giunchiglia (Trento, Italy) and Tom Dean (Brown, USA).

1 WorkshopTheme Digital multimedia di?ers from previous forms of combined media in that the bits that represent text, images, animations, and audio, video and other signals can be treated as data by computer programs. One facet of this diverse data in termsofunderlyingmodelsandformatsisthatitissynchronizedandintegrated, hence it can be treated as integral data records. Such records can be found in a number of areas of human endeavour. Modern medicine generates huge amounts of such digital data. Another - ample is architectural design and the related architecture, engineering and c- struction (AEC) industry. Virtual communities (in the broad sense of this word, which includes any communities mediated by digital technologies) are another example where generated data constitutes an integral data record. Such data may include data about member pro?les, the content generated by the virtual community, and communication data in di?erent formats, including e-mail, chat records, SMS messages, videoconferencing records. Not all multimedia data is so diverse. An example of less diverse data, but data that is larger in terms of the collected amount, is that generated by video surveillance systems, where each integral data record roughly consists of a set of time-stamped images – the video frames. In any case, the collection of such in- gral data records constitutes a multimedia data set. The challenge of extracting meaningful patterns from such data sets has led to the research and devel- ment in the area of multimedia data mining.

Welcome to the proceedings of the 6th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Agents. MA 2002 took place in Barcelona, Spain and was co-located with the 4th International Workshop on Mobile Agents for Telecommunications Applications. Both events were held at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, October 22–25, 2002. Mobile agents may be de?ned as programs that, with varying degree of - tonomy, can move between hosts across a network. Mobile agents combine the notions of mobile code, mobile computation, and mobile state. Capabilities of mobile agents include: – Supporting unrealiable networks and disconnected operation – Counteracting low-bandwidth, high-latency communication links – Deploying newbehaviour (through mobile code) and recon?guring systems on-the-?y – Distributing processing load across systems – Improving survivability in the face of network and system failure. Given the above capabilities, mobile agents (while they may not be referred to as such) are nowbecoming accepted as a fundamental architectural construct for the design and development of complex adaptive systems that need to operate in highly dynamic environments. Mobile agents also support applications in several domains such as ubiquitous computing, grid computing, remote sensing, data mining, system management, and agile computing.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the three confederated conferences CoopIS 2002, DOA 2002, and ODBASE 2002, held in Irvine, CA, USA, in October/November 2002. The 77 revised full papers and 10 posters presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 291 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on interoperability, workflow, mobility, agents, peer-to-peer and ubiquitous, work process, business and transaction, infrastructure, query processing, quality issues, agents and middleware, cooperative systems, ORB enhancements, Web services, distributed object scalability and heterogeneity, dependability and security, reflection and reconfiguration, real-time scheduling, component-based applications, ontology languages, conceptual modeling, ontology management, ontology development and engineering, XML and data integration, and tools for the intelligent Web.

RuleML 2003 was the second international workshop on rules and rule markup languages for the Semantic Web, held in conjunction with the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC). The aim of the RuleML workshop series is to stimulate research on all issues related to web rule languages and to provide an annual forum for presenting and discussing new research results. The Semantic Web is a major world-wide endeavor to advance the Web by enriching its multimedia document content with propositional information that can be processed by inference-enabled Web applications. Rules and rule markup languages, such as RuleML, will play an important role in the success of the Semantic Web. Rules will act as a means to draw inferences, to express constraints,tospecifypoliciesforreactingtoevents,totransformdata,etc.Rule markup languages will allow us to enrich Web ontologies by adding de?nitions of derived concepts, to publish rules on the Web, to exchange rules between di?erent systems and tools, etc. RuleML 2003 built on the success of RuleML 2002, which was held in c- junction with ISWC 2002, Sardinia, Italy. The proceedings of RuleML 2002 can be found at http://www.ceur-ws.org/Vol-60/. Special highlights of the RuleML 2003 workshop were the two invited pres- tationsgivenbyPeterChenon“Rules,XML,andtheERModel”andbyHarold Boley on “Object-Oriented RuleML: User-Level Roles, URI-Grounded Clauses, and Order-Sorted Terms”. This proceedings volume also contains an invited - per by Francois ¸ Bry and Sebastian Scha?ert on “An Entailment Relation for Reasoning on the Web”.

Self-adaptive software evaluates its own behavior and changes its behavior when the evaluation indicates that the software does not accomplish what it is intended to do or when better functionality or better performance is possible. The self-adaptive approach in software engineering builds on well-known features like the use of errors and the handling of exceptions in languages like Lisp or Java and aims at improving the robustness of software systems by gradually adding new features of self-adaption and autonomity.This book originates from the First International Workshop on Self-Adaptive Software, IWSAS 2000, held in Oxford, UK in April 2000. The revised full papers presented in the volume together with an introductory survey by the volume editors assess the state of the art in this emerging new field and set the scene for future research and development work.

The 18 revised full papers presented in this book together with an introductory survey were carefully reviewed and constitute the documentation of the Second International Workshop on Self-adaptive Software, IWSAS 2001, held in Balatonfüred, Hungary in May 2001. Self-adaptive software evaluates its own behavior and changes it when the evaluation indicates that the software does not accomplish what it is intended to do or when better functionality or better performance is possible. The self-adaptive approach in software engineering builds on well known dynamic features familiar to Lisp or Java programmes and aims at improving the robustness of software systems by gradually adding new features of self-adaption or autonomy.

The international conference on current trends in the theory and practice of informatics SOFSEM 2000 was held 25 November–2 December 2000 in the c- ference facilities of the Dev?et Skal (Nine Rocks) Hotel, Milovy, Czech-Moravian Highlands, the Czech Republic. It was already the 27th annual meeting in the series of SOFSEM conferences organized in either the Czech or the Slovak Rep- lic. Since its establishment in 1974, SOFSEM has gone through a long dev- opment in parallel with the entire?eld of informatics. Currently SOFSEM is a wide-scope, multidisciplinary conference, with stress on the interplay between the theory and practice of informatics. The SOFSEM scienti?c program consists mainly of invited talks which determine the topics of the conference. Invited talks are complemented by short refereed talks contributed by SOFSEM parti- pants. The topics of invited talks are chosen so as to cover the span from theory to practice and to bring interesting research areas to the attention of conf- ence participants. For the year 2000, the following three streams were chosen for presentation by the SOFSEM Steering Committee: – Trends in Algorithmics – Information Technologies in Practice – Computational Perception The above streams were covered through 16 invited talks given by prominent researchers. There were 18 contributed talks also presented, chosen by the int- national Program Committee from among 36 submitted papers. The program also included a panel on lessons learned from the Y2K problem.

SOFSEM 2001, the International Conference on Current Trends in Theory and Practice of Informatics, was held on November 24 – December 1, 2001 in the? well-known spa Pie?stany, Slovak Republic. This was the 28th annual conference in the SOFSEM series organized either in the Slovak or the Czech Republic. SOFSEM has a well-established tradition. Currently it is a broad, multid- ciplinary conference, devoted to the theory and practice of software systems. Its aim is to foster cooperation among professionals from academia and industry working in various areas of informatics. The scienti?c program of SOFSEM consists of invited talks, which determine the topics of the conference, and short contributed talks presenting original - sults. The topics of the invited talks are chosen so as to cover the whole range from theory to practice and to bring interesting research areas to the attention of conference participants. For the year 2001, the following three directions were chosen for presentation by the SOFSEM Steering Committee: – Trends in Informatics – Enabling Technologies for Global Computing – Practical Systems Engineering and Applications The above directions were covered through 12 invited talks presented by pro- nent researchers. There were 18 contributed talks, selected by the international Program Committee from among 46 submitted papers. The conference was also accompanied by workshops on Electronic Commerce Systems (coordinated by H. D. Zimmermann) and Soft Computing (coordinated by P. H´ajek).

1 WorkshopTheme Data mining as a discipline aims to relate the analysis of large amounts of user data to shed light on key business questions. Web usage mining in particular, a relatively young discipline, investigates methodologies and techniques that - dress the unique challenges of discovering insights from Web usage data, aiming toevaluateWebusability,understandtheinterestsandexpectationsofusersand assess the e?ectiveness of content delivery. The maturing and expanding Web presents a key driving force in the rapid growth of electronic commerce and a new channel for content providers. Customized o?ers and content, made possible by discovered knowledge about the customer, are fundamental for the establi- ment of viable e-commerce solutions and sustained and e?ective content delivery in noncommercial domains. Rich Web logs provide companies with data about their online visitors and prospective customers, allowing microsegmentation and personalized interactions. While Web mining as a domain is several years old, the challenges that characterize data analysis in this area continue to be formidable. Though p- processing data routinely takes up a major part of the e?ort in data mining, Web usage data presents further challenges based on the di?culties of assigning data streams to unique users and tracking them over time. New innovations are required to reliably reconstruct sessions, to ascertain similarity and di?erences between sessions, and to be able to segment online users into relevant groups.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Computer Science Conference, ICSC'99, held in Hong Kong, China, in December 1999.The 30 revised full papers presented together with 30 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 80 submissions. The book is divided into sections on information filtering, data mining, Web databases, user interfaces, modeling, information retrieval, workflow, applications, active networks, mobility and distributed databases, protocols, distributed systems, information retrieval and filtering, Web technologies, and e-commerce.

The ability of production companies to rapidly develop and deploy effective and efficient control systems is critical for success in the consumer-driven environment of contemporary manufacturing. This book presents a novel approach to the design of manufacturing control systems, based around the idea of agents, semiautonomous decision makers that cooperate to process goods and meet orders. This new methodology is DACS – Designing Agent-based Control Systems. Developed at DaimlerChrysler's research labs in Berlin, DACS is the first methodology specifically produced for the design of agent-based control systems. Beginning with a detailed overview of agent technologies, manufacturing control, and design methodologies, the book explains the DACS methodology and illustrates it by way of detailed case studies. The book will be of interest to researchers and practitioners in agent systems, manufacturing control, and software methodologies.

The focus of the Asian Applied Computing Conference (AACC) is primarily to bring the research in computer science closer to practical applications. The conference is aimed primarily at topics that have immediate practical bene?ts. By hosting the conf- ence in the developingnations in Asia we aim to provide a forum for engagingboth the academic and the commercial sectors in that region. The?rst conference “Information Technology Prospects and Challenges” was held in May 2003 in Kathmandu, Nepal. Thisyear theconferencenamewas changedto “Asian AppliedComputingConference” to re?ect both the regional- and the application-oriented nature of the conference. AACC is planned to be a themed conference with a primary focus on a small set of topics although other relevant applied topics will be considered. The theme in AACC 2004 was on the following topics: systems and architectures, mobile and ubiquitous computing, soft computing, man machine interfaces,and innovative applications for the developing world. AACC 2004 attracted 184 paper submissions from around the world, making the reviewing and the selection process tough and time consuming. The selected papers covered a wide range of topics: genetic algorithms and soft computing; scheduling, - timization andconstraintsolving; neuralnetworksandsupportvectormachines;natural language processing and information retrieval; speech and signal processing; networks and mobile computing; parallel, grid and high-performance computing; innovative - plications for the developing world; cryptography and security; and machine lea- ing. Papers were primarily judged on originality, presentation, relevance and quality of work. Papers that had clearly demonstrated results were given preference.

This volume contains the tutorial papers of the Summer School “Reasoning Web,”July25–29,2005(http://reasoningweb. org). TheSchoolwashostedbythe University of Malta and was organized by the Network of Excellence REWERSE “Reasoning on the Web with Rules and Semantics” (http://rewerse. net), funded by the EU Commission and by the Swiss Federal O?ce for Edu- tion and Science within the 6th Framework Programme under the project ref- ence number 506779. The objective of the school was to provide an introduction into methods and issues of the Semantic Web, a major endeavor in current Web research, where the World Wide Web Consortium W3C plays an important role. The main idea of the Semantic Web is to enrich Web data with meta-data carrying a “meaning” of the data and allowing Web-based systems to reason about data (and meta-data). The meta-data used in Semantic Web applications is usually linked to a conceptualization of the application domain shared by di?erent applications. Such a conceptualization is called an ontology and sp- i?es classes of objects and relations between them. Ontologies are de?ned by ontology languages, based on logic and supporting formal reasoning. Just as the current Web is inherently heterogeneous in data formats and data semantics, the Semantic Web will be inherently heterogeneous in its reasoning forms. - deed, any single form of reasoning turns out to be insu?cient in the Semantic Web.

PRIMA is a series of workshops on agent computing and multi-agent systems, integrating the activities in Asia and Pacific Rim countries. Agent computing and multi-agent systems are computational systems in which several autonomous or se- autonomous agents interact with each other or work together to perform some set of tasks or satisfy some set of goals. These systems may involve computational agents that are homogeneous or heterogeneous, they may involve activities on the part of agents having common or distinct goals, and they may involve participation on the part of humans and intelligent agents. The aim of PRIMA 2006 was to bring together Asian and Pacific Rim researchers and developers from academia and industry to report on the latest technical advances or domain applications and to discuss and explore scientific and practical problems as raised by the participants. PRIMA 2006 received 203 submitted papers. Each paper was reviewed by two internationally renowned Program Committee members. After careful reviews, 39 regular papers and 57 short papers were selected for this volume. We would like to thank all the authors who submitted papers to the workshop. We are very grateful to all Program Committee members and reviewers for their splendid work in reviewing the papers. Finally, we thank the editorial staff of Springer for publishing this volume in the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series.

Agent and multiagent concepts offer higher level abstractions and mechanisms which address issues such as knowledge representation and reasoning, communication, coordination, cooperation among heterogeneous and autonomous parties, perception, commitments, goals, beliefs, and intentions all of which need conceptual modeling. The AOSE 2005 workshop sought to examine the credentials of agent-based approaches as a software engineering paradigm, and to gain an insight into what agent-oriented software engineering will look like, and what its benefits will be. This book represents the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, AOSE 2005, held in Utrecht, The Netherlands, in July 2005 as part of AAMAS 2005. The 18 revised full papers were carefully selected from 35 submissions during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers are organized in topical sections on modeling tools, analysis and validation tools, multiagent systems design, implementation tools, and experiences and comparative evaluations.

ANTS – The International Workshop on Ant Colony Optimization and Swarm Intelligence is now at its?fth edition. The series started in 1998 with the - ganization of ANTS 1998. At that time the goal was to gather in a common meeting those researchers interested in ant colony optimization: more than 50 researchers from around the world joined for the?rst time in Brussels, Belgium, to discuss ant colony optimization and swarm intelligence related research. A selectionofthebest paperspresentedatthe workshopwaspublished asa special issue of the Future Generation Computer Systems journal (Vol. 16, No. 8, 2000). Two years later, ANTS 2000, organized again in Brussels, attracted more than 70 participants. The 41 extended abstracts presented as talks or posters at the workshopwere collected in a booklet distributed to participants, and a selection of the best papers was published as a special section of the IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation (Vol. 6, No. 4, 2002). After these?rst two successful editions, it was decided to make of ANTS a seriesofbiannualeventswitho?cialworkshopproceedings.Thethirdandfourth editions were organized in September 2002 and September 2004, respectively. Proceedings were published by Springer within the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series. The proceedings of ANTS 2002, LNCS Volume 2463, contained 36 contri- tions: 17 full papers, 11 short papers, and 8 extended abstracts,selected out of a total of 52 submissions. Those of ANTS 2004, LNCS Volume 3172, contained 50 contributions:22 full papers, 19 shortpapers, and 9 extended abstracts,selected out of a total of 79 submissions.

Thesearetheproceedingsofthe21stInternationalSymposiumonComputerand? Information Sciences (ISCIS 2006) held in Istanbul, Turkey, November 1 – 3, 2006. ISCIS 2006 was organized by the Faculty of Engineering and Natural S- ences of Sabanc?University. These proceedings include updated versions of 106 papers selected by the program committee for presentation at the symposium. The increasing com- tition for presenting at the symposium, which relies on the success of previous ISCIS symposia,has led to many excellent papers and a higher standard overall. From a record-breaking 606 submissions, scheduling constraints dictated that only 106 papers could be accepted, resulting in a 17.5% acceptance rate. The program committee and external reviewers worked very hard and went through all submissions meticulously to select the best in a limited time frame. The selection process was especially hard when some of the good submissions could not be selected for publication due to space and time limitations. Another interesting fact about the submissions is that they were by authors from 41 countries covering all habitable continents (excluding Antarctica). This is a clear indication of the ever-increasing popularity of ISCIS symposia among researchersallaroundtheworldasamediumtoshareanddisseminatetheresults of their research activities.

This book constitutes the refereed post-proceedings of the International Workshop on Agents, Norms and Institutions for Regulated Multiagent Systems, ANIREM 2005, and the International Workshop on Organizations in Multi-Agent Systems, OOOP 2005, held in Utrecht, The Netherlands, July 2005. This is the first volume in a new series on issues in Coordination, Organizations, Institutions and Norms (COIN) in multi-agent systems. Topics include modeling, analyzing and programming organizations and more.

Intelligent agents are one of the most important developments in computer science in the 1990s. Agents are of interest in many important application areas, ranging from human-computer interaction to industrial process control. The ATAL workshop series aims to bring together researchers interested in the core aspects of agent technology. Speci?cally, ATAL addresses issues such as th- ries of agency, software architectures for intelligent agents, methodologies and programming languages for realizing agents, and software tools for developing and evaluating agent systems. One of the strengths of the ATAL workshop series is its emphasis on the synergies between theories, infrastructures, architectures, methodologies, formal methods, and languages. This year's workshop continued the ATAL trend of attracting a large n- ber of high-quality submissions. In more detail, 75 papers were submitted to the ATAL-99 workshop, from 19 countries. After stringent reviewing, 22 papers wereacceptedforpresentationattheworkshop.Aftertheworkshop,thesepapers were revised on the basis of comments received both from the original reviewers and from discussions at the workshop itself. This volume contains these revised papers.