With the recent rapid growth of interest in MultiAgent Systems, both in arti cial intelligence and software engineering, has come an associated di culty concerning basic terms and concepts. In particular, the terms agency and autonomy are used with increasing frequency to denote di erent notions with di erent connotations. In this paper we lay the foundations for a principled theory of agency a...

Growth of so‰ware size, lack of resources to perform regression testing, and failure to detect bugs faster have seen increased reliance on continuous integration and test automation. Even with greater hardware and so‰ware resources dedicated to test automation, so‰ware testing is faced with enormous challenges, resulting in increased dependence on complex mechanisms for automated test case sele...

We have proposed the use of autonomous agents for coping with some of the challenges for creating ambient computing systems. The motivation of this research is that ambient computing environments are characterized by the distribution, reactivity, collaboration and adaptation of their artifacts, which are also characteristics attributed to software agents. To assist developers in creating the so...

We design a protocol for two autonomous negotiating agents to incorporate Dung-style argumentation into an ongoing bargaining dialogue. Previous approaches considered bargaining and Dung-Style Argumentation as separated components, we show that intertwining these approaches increases the agents scope of action. In our framework the acceptance of an argument or attack uttered by self-interested ...

Advances in computing hardware, software, and network technology have enabled a new class of interactive applications involving 3D animated characters to become increasingly feasible. Many such applications require algorithms that allow both autonomous and user-controlled animated human figures to move naturally and realistically in response to task-level commands. This thesis presents a resear...

Preface This dissertation describes research in the eld of Distributed Artiicial Intelligence (DAI). DAI is the subbeld of Artiicial Intelligence that investigates the behavior of societies of artiicial agents (high-level, interacting computer programs). The speciic research of the dissertation focuses on multi-agent planning under various models of interaction. Within the eld of DAI there is a...

Autonomy is inseparable from choice. Natural agents, including humans, make choices with probabilities that are proportional to the average reward from each choice (the ‘matching law’), rather than always choosing the alternative with maximum reward. Imbuing artificial agents with this flexibility is non-trivial. We introduce anti-competition mapping to overcome the tendency for high reward cho...

the design cycle is either extremely long or the designers have to rely on approximations. This paper presents a distributed design methodology The use of multi-disciplinary knowledge at the product where designs emerge as a result of the negotiations bedevelopment stage presents opportunities for improving the tween different stake holders in the process, such as cost, product cost to performa...

Wiebe van der Hoek from the University of Utrecht was the tutorial chair. From proposals received, he selected 10 tutorials covering a wide range of topics: “Information Agent Technology for the Internet” (Matthias Klusch, DFKI); “User Modeling and Adaptive Interfaces” (Pat Langley, Daimler The Fourth International Conference on Autonomous Agents took place in Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain) from ...