These are the proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Cooperative Information Agents (CIA 2002), held at the Universidad de Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, Spain, September 18–20, 2002. It was colocated with the Third Int- national Workshop on Engineering Societies in the Agents World (ESAW 2002). Since 1997 the annual CIA workshop series has aimed to provide an open forum for all parties interested in the research and development of intelligent infor- tion agents for the Internet and Web. Each event in this renowned series attempts to capture the intrinsic interdisciplinary nature of this research area by calling for contributions from di?erent research communities, and by promoting open and informative discussions on all related topics. In keeping with its tradition, this year’s workshop featured a sequence of regular and invited talks of excellence given by leading experts in the ?elds related to information agent technology. These talks covered a broad area of topics of - terest, such as information agents for mobile computing environments as well as information gathering, exchange, management, and collaborative recommender systems. Other topics included agent interaction and communication, negot- tion strategies for purchasing relevant information, and agent-based distributed knowledge management.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Cooperative Information Agents, CIA 2006, held in Edinburgh, UK in September 2006. The 29 revised full papers presented together with four invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 58 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections.

These are the proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Cooperative Information Agents, held in Modena, Italy, September 6-8, 2001. Information agent technology has become one of the major key technologies for the Internet and the World Wide Web. It mainly emerged as a response to the challenges of cyberspace from both the technological and human user perspective. Development of information agents requires expertise from di?erent research disciplines such as Arti?cial Intelligence (AI), advanced databases and knowledge base systems, distributed information systems, information retrieval, and Human Computer Interaction (HCI). The ?fth international workshop on Cooperative Information Agents (CIA) continued the tradition by capturing the intrinsic interdisciplinary nature of the above research area by calling for contributions from di?erent research communities, and by promoting open and informative discussions on all related topics. In keeping with tradition, the workshop featured a sequence of regular and invited talks of excellence given by leading experts in the ?eld. This year the topics of the talks are mainly on the challenges of information agents in the upcoming age of ubiquitous and pervasive computing. These challenges are in particular due to the necessity of an e?cient utilization, evolution, and trust management of information agents for user-oriented information search, pro- sion, and visualization in networked computing environments with small, mobile, and embedded devices. A di?erent issue concerns the potential of agent-based support of massive distributed data warehousing worldwide.

These are the proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Cooperative Information Agents (CIA 2003), held at the Sonera Conference Center in H- sinki, Finland, August 27–29, 2003. It was co-located with the 4th Agentcities Information Days. One key challenge of developing advanced agent-based information systems is to balance the autonomy of networked data and knowledge sources with the pot- tial payo? of leveraging them by the appropriate use of intelligent information agents on the Internet. An information agent is a computational software entity thathasaccesstooneormultiple,heterogeneous,anddistributeddataandinf- mation sources; proactively searches for and maintains relevant information on behalfofitshumanusersorotheragents,preferablyjust-in-time. Inotherwords, it is managing and overcoming the di?culties associated with information ov- load in the open and exponentially growing Internet and Web. Depending on the application and tasks at hand information agents may collaborate in open, n- worked data and information environments to provide added value to a variety of applications in di?erent domains. Thus, research and development of inf- mation agents is inherently interdisciplinary: It requires expertise in information retrieval, arti?cial intelligence, database systems, human-computer interaction, and Internet and Web technology. Initiated in 1997, the purpose of the annual international workshop series on cooperativeinformationagents(CIA)istoprovideaninterdisciplinaryforumfor researchers, software developers, and managers to get informed about, present, anddiscussthelatesthigh-qualityresultsinadvancementsoftheoryandpractice in information agent technology for the Internet and Web. Each event of this renowned series attempts to capture the intrinsic interdisciplinary nature of this research area by calling for contributions from di?erent research communities, and by promoting open and informative discussions on all related topics.

These arethe proceedingsof the Fourth InternationalWorkshopon Cooperative Information Agents, held in Boston Massachusetts, USA, July 7-9, 2000. Cooperative information agent research and development focused originally onaccessingmultiple,heterogeneous,anddistributedinformationsources. Ga- ingaccesstothesesystems,throughInternetsearchengines,applicationprogram interfaces, wrappers, and web-based screens has been an important focus of - operative intelligent agents. Research has also focused on the integration of this information into a coherent model that combined data and knowledge from the multiple sources. Finally, this information is disseminated to a wide audience, giving rise to issues such as data quality, information pedigree, source reliability, information security, personal privacy, and information value. Research in - operative information agents has expanded to include agent negotiation, agent communities, agent mobility, as well as agent collaboration for information d- covery in constrained environments. TheinterdisciplinaryCIAworkshopseriesencompassesa widevarietyoft- ics dealing with cooperative information agents. All workshop proceedings have been published by Springer as Lecture Notes in Arti?cial Intelligence, Volumes 1202 (1997), 1435 (1998), and 1652 (1999), respectively. This year, the theme of the CIA workshop was ”’The Future of Information Agents in Cyberspace”, a very ?tting topic as the use of agents for information gathering, negotiation, correlation, fusion, and dissemination becomes ever more prevalent. We noted a marked trend in CIA 2000 towards addressing issues related to communities of agents that: (1) negotiate for information resources, (2) build robust ontologies to enhance search capabilities, (3) communicate for planning and problem so- ing, (4) learn and evolve based on their experiences, and (5) assume increasing degrees of autonomy in the control of complex systems.

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.

This book represents the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, AOSE 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.

In this book, we present a collection of papers around the topic of Agent- Mediated Knowledge Management. Most of the papers are extended and - provedversions of work presented at the symposium on Agent-Mediated Kno- edge Management held during the AAAI Spring Symposia Series in March 2003 at Stanford University. The aim of the Agent-Mediated Knowledge Management symposium was to bring together researchers and practitioners of the ?elds of KM and agent te- nologiestodiscussthebene?ts,possibilitiesandadded-valueofcross-fertilization. Knowledge Management (KM) has been a predominant trend in bu- ness in recent years. Not only is Knowledge Management an important ?eld of applicationfor AIandrelatedtechniques,suchasCBRtechnologyforintelligent lessons-learned systems, it also provides new challenges to the AI community, like, for example, context-aware knowledge delivery. Scaling up research pro- typestoreal-worldsolutionsusuallyrequiresanapplication-drivenintegrationof several basic technologies, e.g., ontologies for knowledge sharing and reuse, c- laboration support like CSCW systems, and personalized information services. Typical characteristics to be dealt with in such an integration are: - manifold, logically and physically dispersed actors and knowledge sources, - di?erent degrees of formalization of knowledge, - di?erent kinds of (Web-based) services and (legacy) systems, - con?icts between local (individual) and global (group or organizational) goals.

Life-like characters is one of the most exciting technologies for human-computer interface applications today. They convincingly take the roles of virtual presenters, synthetic actors and sales personas, teammates and tutors. A common characteristic underlying their life-likeness or believability as virtual conversational partners is computational models that provide them with affective functions such as synthetic emotions and personalities and implement human interactive behavior. The wide dissemination of life-like characters in multimedia systems, however, will greatly depend on the availability of control languages and tools that facilitate scripting of intelligent conversational behaviour. This book presents the first comprehensive collection of the latest developments in scripting and representation languages for life-like characters, rounded off with an in-depth comparison and synopsis of the major approaches. Introducing toolkits for authoring animated characters further supports the ease of use of this new interface technology. Life-like characters being a vibrant research area, various applications have been designed and implemented. This book offers coverage of the most successful and promising applications, ranging from product presentation and student training to knowledge integration and interactive gaming. It also discusses the key challenges in the area and provides design guidelines for employing life-like characters.