Practical and theoretical innovations in multi-agent systems research

UKMAS has now been running for six years, in 1996 and 1997 under the heading of FoMAS (Foundations of Multi-Agent Systems) both organised by Michael Luck at Warwick University and then subsequently in its current incarnation, UKMAS, first by Michael Fisher at Manchester Metropolitan University then by Chris Preist at Hewlett Packard Laboratories, Bristol and finally by Mark d’Inverno at St Catherine’s College, Oxford in 2000. After the success of the workshop last year at St Catherine’s in providing an excellent opportunity for academics and industrialists to come together to discuss current work and directions in the multi-agent systems field, it was decided by the steering committee to use St Catherine’s once again as the venue for UKMAS 2001. The workshop was sponsored by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and by AgentLink, the European Commission’s IST-funded Network of Excellence for Agent-Based Computing. The UKMAS workshops are concerned both with the dissemination of recent research within multiagent systems and with the provision of an appropriate forum for debate and discussion between students, academics and industrialists alike. As with UKMAS 2000, this year’s event attracted around 80 participants and the format of this meeting was typical of previous years (Luck, 1997; Doran et al., 1997; d’Inverno et al., 1997; Fisher et al., 1997; Luck et al., 1998; Aylett et al., 1998; Binmore et al., 1998; Aylett et al., 2000; Beer et al., 1999; Decker et al., 1999; Chattoe et al., 2000; Rana et al., 2000; Alonso et al. 2001; d’Inverno et al., 2001). There were two excellent invited presentations, the first by Samson Abramsky, the Christopher Strachey Professor of Computing at the Oxford University Computing Laboratory, who gave a talk entitled “From computation to interaction”, and the second from Sarit Kraus of Bar Ilan University, with a presentation on “Real-time cooperation and negotiation”. In addition, there were 18 paper presentations and a panel session entitled “Agents in e-commerce”, which was chaired by Professor Nick Jennings from Southampton University.