Intelligent autonomous agents is an emerging technology that excels the applications, having complex distributed nature and requiring communication of complex and diverse forms of information, when deployed in multi-agent system setting. As healthcare is a complex domain and distributed in nature, scientist have started to deploy intelligent agents and multi-agent technologies indifferent healt...

The severity of the (potential) consequences of the use of agents in the military domain imperatively necessitates research on the application of the law of armed conflict, which provides ‘constraints’ on ‘human’ warfare. In this paper, one of the main principles of that law, target discrimination, is used to highlight legal and ethical dilemmas involving the use of autonomous agents. The incid...

Autonomous agents operate in complex environments and, over time, conflicts inevitably occur among them. Negotiation is the predominant process for resolving conflicts. This paper presents a generic negotiation model for autonomous agents that handles multiparty, multi-issue and repeated rounds. The model is based on computationally tractable assumptions, accounts for a tight integration of the...

Notwithstanding the differences displayed by drama criticism for what concerns the theoretical stance and the aims, the key role played by emotions seems to be a common aspect to most definitions of drama. Although the field of computational drama has acknowledged this trend, we argue that the role of emotions in character design deserves more attention, as it is the key to establish a distinct...

The advent of software agents gave rise to much discussion of just what such an agent is, and of how they differ from programs in general. Here we propose a formal definition of an autonomous agent which clearly distinguishes a software agent from just any program. We also offer the beginnings of a natural kinds taxonomy of autonomous agents, and discuss possibilities for further classification...