Eumas 2008

The European Workshop on Multi-Agent Systems (EUMAS) is an annual workshop that takes place at changing places in Europe and aims at encouraging and supporting activity in the research and development of multi-agent systems, in academic and industrial efforts. The workshop is primarily intended as a European forum at which researchers and those interested in activities relating to research in the area of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems can meet, present (potentially preliminary) research results, problems, and issues in an open and informal but academic environment. The EUMAS workshop series was initiated in December 2003, at the University of Oxford (UK) as a merger from a number of related workshops and other scholarly activities that were taking place at both national and European levels. The sixth edition of EUMAS took place in Bath, UK (18th – 19th December) with Julian Padget as General Chair (who in addition, together with Marina De Vos, was responsible for the local organization) and Franziska Klügl as Program Chair. EUMAS 2008 received a total of 71 submissions from Europa, the United States, Brazil, Israel, Australia, Japan and Korea of which 40 were accepted as full and 11 as short papers. The program itself was organized in the parallel sessions, what had the convenient sideeffect that in contrast to big conferences with a lot more sessions one was able to listen to most of the talks and to grasp new ideas as well as to get into interesting discussions with the other participants. For me the two session “IV.2: Norms and Institutions” and “VII.1: Organisation” were of particular interest and importance as in these session high quality talks about approaches and ideas were given that could be integrated into my current work on the enforcement of norms in normative multi-agent systems.