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.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Cooperative Information Agents, CIA 2007, held in Delft, The Netherlands, September 2007. The 19 revised full papers presented together with four invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 38 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on information search and processing, applications, rational cooperation, interaction and cooperation and trust.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Cooperative Information Systems, CIA'99, held in Uppsala, Sweden in July/August 1999. The 16 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 46 submissions. Also included are ten invited contributions by leading experts. The volume is divided in sections on information discovery and management on the Internet; information agents on the Internet-prototypes systems and applications; communication and collaboration, mobile information agents; rational information agents for electronic business; service mediation and negotiation; and adaptive personal assistance.

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.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Workshop on Cooperative Information Agents - DAI Meets Databases, CIA-97, held in Kiel, Germany, in February 1997. The book opens with 6 invited full papers by internationally leading researchers surveying the state of the art in the area. The 16 revised full research papers presented were carefully selected during a highly competitive round of reviewing. The papers are organized in topical sections on databases and agent technology, agents for database search and knowledge discovery, communication and cooperation among information agents, and agent-based access to heterogeneous information sources.

These are the proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Cooperative Information Agents (CIA 2004), held at the Fair and Congress Center in - furt, Germany, September 27–29, 2004. It was part of the multi-conference Net. ObjectDays 2004, and, in particular, was co-located with the 2nd German Conference on Multiagent Systems Technologies (MATES 2004). In today’s networked world of linked heterogeneous, pervasive computer systems, devices, and information landscapes, the intelligent coordination and provision of relevant added-value information at any time, anywhere, by means of cooperative information agents becomes increasingly important for a variety of applications. An information agent is a computational software entity that has access to one or multiple, heterogeneous, and geographically dispersed data and information sources. It proactively searches for and maintains information on behalf of its human users, or other agents, preferably just in time. In other words,itismanagingandovercomingthedi?cultiesassociatedwithinformation overload in open, pervasive information and service landscapes. Cooperative - formation agents may collaborate with each other to accomplish both individual and shared joint goals depending on the actual preferences of their users, b- getary constraints, and resources available. One major challenge of developing agent-based intelligent information systems in open environments is to balance the autonomy of networked data, information, and knowledge sources with the potential payo? of leveraging them using information agents. Interdisciplinaryresearchanddevelopmentofinformationagentsrequires- pertise in relevant domains of information retrieval, arti?cial intelligence, database systems, human-computer interaction, and Internet and Web techn- ogy.

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.

This book reports on an outstanding thesis that has significantly advanced the state-of-the-art in the area of automated negotiation. It gives new practical and theoretical insights into the design and evaluation of automated negotiators. It describes an innovative negotiating agent framework that enables systematic exploration of the space of possible negotiation strategies by recombining different agent components. Using this framework, new and effective ways are formulated for an agent to learn, bid, and accept during a negotiation. The findings have been evaluated in four annual instantiations of the International Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC), the results of which are also outlined here. The book also describes several methodologies for evaluating and comparing negotiation strategies and components, with a special emphasis on performance and accuracy measures.

More and more transactions, whether in business or related to leisure activities, are mediated automatically by computers and computer networks, and this trend is having a significant impact on the conception and design of new computer applications. The next generation of these applications will be based on software agents to which increasingly complex tasks can be delegated, and which interact with each other in sophisticated ways so as to forge agreements in the interest of their human users. The wide variety of technologies supporting this vision is the subject of this volume. It summarises the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) Action project on Agreement Technologies (AT), during which approximately 200 researchers from 25 European countries, along with eight institutions from non-COST countries, cooperated as part of a number of working groups. The book is the first to provide a comprehensive overview of the emerging field of Agreement Technologies, written and coordinated by the leading researchers in the field. The results set out here are due for wide dissemination beyond the computer technology sector, involving law and social science as well.

This collection of recently published and refereed papers comes from workshops and colloquia held over the last two years. The papers describe the development of command and control systems, military communications systems, information systems, surveillance systems, autonomous vehicles, simulators, and HCI. The collection provides for the first time an overview of the most significant advances in the technology of intelligent agents.