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Distributed A1 (DA1) is the branch of A1 concerned with how to coordinate behaviour among a collection semi-autonomous problem-solving agents - how they can coordinate their knowledge, goals and plans to act together, to solve joint problems, or to make individually or globally rational decisions in the face of uncertainty and multiple, conflicting perspectives. Distributed, coordinated systems of problem solvers are rapidly becoming practical partners in critical human problem-solving environments, and DAI is a rapidly developing field of both application and research, experiencing explosive growth around the world. This book presents a collection of articles surveying several major recent developments in DAI. The book focuses on issues that arise in building practical DAI systems in real-world settings, and covers work undertaken in a number of major research and development projects in the US and in europe. It provides a synthesis of recent thinking, both theoretical and applied, on major problems of DAI in the 1990s.

This book is the first to directly address the question of how to bridge what has been termed the "great divide" between the approaches of systems developers and those of social scientists to computer supported cooperative work--a question that has been vigorously debated in the systems development literature. Traditionally, developers have been trained in formal methods and oriented to engineering and formal theoretical problems; many social scientists in the CSCW field come from humanistic traditions in which results are reported in a narrative mode. In spite of their differences in style, the two groups have been cooperating more and more in the last decade, as the "people problems" associated with computing become increasingly evident to everyone.The authors have been encouraged to examine, rigorously and in depth, the theoretical basis of CSCW. With contributions from field leaders in the United Kingdom, France, Scandinavia, Mexico, and the United States, this volume offers an exciting overview of the cutting edge of research and theory. It constitutes a solid foundation for the rapidly coalescing field of social informatics. Divided into three parts, this volume covers social theory, design theory, and the sociotechnical system with respect to CSCW. The first set of chapters looks at ways of rethinking basic social categories with the development of distributed collaborative computing technology--concepts of the group, technology, information, user, and text. The next section concentrates more on the lessons that can be learned at the design stage given that one wants to build a CSCW system incorporating these insights--what kind of work does one need to do and how is understanding of design affected? The final part looks at the integration of social and technical in the operation of working sociotechnical systems. Collectively the contributors make the argument that the social and technical are irremediably linked in practice and so the "great divide" not only should be a thing of the past, it should never have existed in the first place.

This book is the first to directly address the question of how to bridge what has been termed the "great divide" between the approaches of systems developers and those of social scientists to computer supported cooperative work--a question that has been vigorously debated in the systems development literature. Traditionally, developers have been trained in formal methods and oriented to engineering and formal theoretical problems; many social scientists in the CSCW field come from humanistic traditions in which results are reported in a narrative mode. In spite of their differences in style, the two groups have been cooperating more and more in the last decade, as the "people problems" associated with computing become increasingly evident to everyone.The authors have been encouraged to examine, rigorously and in depth, the theoretical basis of CSCW. With contributions from field leaders in the United Kingdom, France, Scandinavia, Mexico, and the United States, this volume offers an exciting overview of the cutting edge of research and theory. It constitutes a solid foundation for the rapidly coalescing field of social informatics. Divided into three parts, this volume covers social theory, design theory, and the sociotechnical system with respect to CSCW. The first set of chapters looks at ways of rethinking basic social categories with the development of distributed collaborative computing technology--concepts of the group, technology, information, user, and text. The next section concentrates more on the lessons that can be learned at the design stage given that one wants to build a CSCW system incorporating these insights--what kind of work does one need to do and how is understanding of design affected? The final part looks at the integration of social and technical in the operation of working sociotechnical systems. Collectively the contributors make the argument that the social and technical are irremediably linked in practice and so the "great divide" not only should be a thing of the past, it should never have existed in the first place.

In the era of ubiquitous computing and networking, millions of electronic devices with computing facilities in the public space are connected with each other in ad hoc ways, but are required to behave coherently. Massively multi-agent systems, MMAS can be a major design paradigm or an implementation method for ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence. As the infrastructure of massively multi-agent systems, technologies such as grid computing together with semantic annotation can be combined with agent technology. A new system design approach, society-centered design, may be realized by embedding participatory technologies in human society.This book originates from the First International Workshop on Massively Multi-Agent Systems, MMAS 2004, held in Kyoto, Japan in December 2004. The 25 revised full selected and invited papers give an excellent introduction and overview on massively multi-agent systems. The papers are organized in parts on massively multi-agent technology, teams and organization, ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence, and massively multi-agent systems in the public space.