Leon Sterling – författare

Agent metaphors and technologies are increasingly adopted to harness and g- ernthecomplexityoftoday'ssystems.Asaconsequence,thegrowingcomplexity of agent systems calls for models and technologies that promote system p- dictability and enable feature discovery and veri?cation. Formal methods and declarative technologies have recently attracted a growing interest as a means to address such issues. The aim of the DALT 2003 workshop was two-fold. On the one hand, we wanted to foster a discussion forum to export such techniques into the broader communityofagentresearchersandpractitioners.Ontheotherhand,wewanted to bring in the issues of real-world, complex, and possibly large-scale agent s- tem design in the perspective of formal methods and declarative technologies.Thanks to the very high quality of our program committee, we managed to put together a rich program, including three technical sessions and two panel sessions:TheUseofDeclarativeProgrammingforAgent-OrientedSoftwareEn- neering, moderated by Leon Sterling and Andrea Omicini, and Declarative and Logic-Based Technology for Agent Reasoning and Interactions, organized and moderated by Rafael Bordini and Wiebe van der Hoek, with the participation of ?ve invited panelists. This bookcontainstherevisedandextendedversionsofthe paperspresented at the workshop, as well as three invited contributions by leading researchers of the ?eld. It is composed of three parts: (i) software engineering and multi-agent system prototyping, (ii) agent reasoning, BDI logics and extensions, and (iii) social aspects of multi-agent systems.

These are the proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Cooperative Information Agents (CIA 2007), held at the Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, September 19–21, 2007. Intoday’sworldofubiquitouslyconnectedheterogeneousinformationsystems and computing devices, the intelligent coordination and provision of relevant added-value information at any time, anywhere is of key importance to a va- ety of applications. This challenge is envisioned to be coped with by means of appropriate intelligent and cooperative information agents. An information agent is a computational software entity that has access to one or multiple heterogeneous and geographically dispersed data and infor- tion sources. It pro-actively searches for and maintains information on behalf of its human users, or other agents preferably just in time. In other words, it is managing and overcoming the di?culties associated with information overload in open, pervasive information and service landscapes. Each component of a modern cooperative information system is represented by an appropriate intelligent information agent capable of resolving system and semantic heterogeneities in a given context on demand. Cooperative infor- tion agents are supposed to accomplish both individual and shared joint goals depending on the actual user preferences in line with given or deduced limits of time, budget and resources available. One major challenge of developing age- based intelligent information systems in open environments like the Internet and the Web is to balance the autonomy of networked data, information, and knowledge sources with the potential payo?s of leveraging them by the use of cooperative and intelligent information agents.