The first international workshop on Intelligent Agents for Telecommunications Applications (IATA’96) was held in July 1996 in Budapest during the XII European Conference on Artificial Intelligence ECAI’96. The workshop program consisted of technical presentations addressing agent based solutions in areas such as network architecture, network management, and telematic services. Presentations gave rise to a lively debate on the advantages and difficulties of incorporating agent technology in telecommunications. The proceedings were published by IOS Press providing introductory papers on agent technology as well as telecom applications and services and also papers about appropriate languages and development tools. The second International Workshop, IATA’98, was held in Paris, in the framework of Agents’ World which brought together the principal scientific and technical events on agent technology such as the International Conference on Multi Agent Systems (ICMAS’98), RoboCup’98 devoted to an international competition between soccer playing robot teams, and six international workshops. Each workshop focused on specific aspects of agent technology such as databases and information discovery on the Internet (CIA’98), Collective Robotics (CRW’98), Simulation (MABS’98), Agent Theories, Architectures and Languages (ATAL’98), Communityware (ACW’98), and Telecommunications Applications (IATA’98). The proceedings of IATA’98 were published by Springer Verlag.
