Munindar P. Singh - Böcker

This comprehensive text explains the principles and practice of Web services and relates all concepts to practical examples and emerging standards.  Its discussions include: OntologiesSemantic web technologiesPeer-to-peer service discoveryService selectionWeb structure and link analysisDistributed transactionsProcess modellingConsistency management. The application of these technologies is clearly explained within the context of planning, negotiation, contracts, compliance, privacy, and network policies. The presentation of the intellectual underpinnings of Web services draws from several key disciplines such as databases, distributed computing, artificial intelligence, and multi-agent systems for techniques and formalisms.  Ideas from these disciplines are united in the context of Web services and service-based applications. Featuring an accompanying website and teacher’s manual that includes a complete set of transparencies for lectures, copies of open-source software for exercises and working implementations, and resources to conduct course projects, this book makes an excellent graduate textbook.  It will also prove an invaluable reference and training tool for practitioners.

The Practical Handbook of Internet Computing analyzes a broad array of technologies and concerns related to the Internet, including corporate intranets. Fresh and insightful articles by recognized experts address the key challenges facing Internet users, designers, integrators, and policymakers. In addition to discussing major applications, it also covers the architectures, enabling technologies, software utilities, and engineering techniques that are necessary to conduct distributed computing and take advantage of Web-based services.The Handbook provides practical advice based upon experience, standards, and theory. It examines all aspects of Internet computing in wide-area and enterprise settings, ranging from innovative applications to systems and utilities, enabling technologies, and engineering and management. Content includes articles that explore the components that make Internet computing work, including storage, servers, and other systems and utilities. Additional articles examine the technologies and structures that support the Internet, such as directory services, agents, and policies.The volume also discusses the multidimensional aspects of Internet applications, including mobility, collaboration, and pervasive computing. It concludes with an examination of the Internet as a holistic entity, with considerations of privacy and law combined with technical content.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing is currently attracting enormous public attention, spurred by the popularity of file-sharing systems such as Napster, Gnutella, Morpheus, Kaza, and several others. In P2P systems, a very large number of autonomous computing nodes, the peers, rely on each other for services. P2P networks are emerging as a new distributed computing paradigm because of their potential to harness the computing power and the storage capacity of the hosts composing the network, and because they realize a completely open decentralized environment where everybody can join in autonomously. Although researchers working on distributed computing, multiagent systems, databases, and networks have been using similar concepts for a long time, it is only recently that papers motivated by the current P2P paradigm have started appearing in high quality conferences and workshops. In particular, research on agent systems appears to be most relevant because multiagent systems have always been thought of as networks of autonomous peers since their inception.Agents, which can be superimposed on the P2P architecture, embody the description of task environments, decision-support capabilities, social behaviors, trust and reputation, and interaction protocols among peers. The emphasis on decentralization, autonomy, ease, and speed of growth that gives P2P its advantages also leads to significant potential problems. Most prominent among these are coordination ? the ability of an agent to make decisions on its own actions in the context of activities of other agents, and scalability ? the value of the P2P systems in how well they self-organize so as to scale along several dimensions, including complexity, heterogeneity of peers, robustness, traffic redistribution, etc.This book brings together an introduction, three invited articles, and revised versions of the papers presented at the Second International Workshop on Agents and Peer-to-Peer Computing, AP2PC 2003, held in Melbourne, Australia, July 2003.

This carefully edited book constitutes the strictly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages, ATAL'97, held in Providence, Rhode Island, USA, in July 1997. The 25 revised full papers presented were selected from a total of 76 submissions. The book is divided into sections on methodologies, architectures and infrastructures, coordination planning and monitoring, formal methods, theories, and architectures and methodologies. Like its predecessors published in the Intelligent Agents series, this volume specifically focuses on the relationships between the theory and the applications of agents.

This book is the fifth in the successful line of Intelligent Agents volumes published in LNAI. It is based on the fifth workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL'98) held during the Agents World conference in Paris in July 1998. The 25 revised full papers included were selected from a total of 90 submissions during two rounds of reviewing. Also included are an introduction by the volume editors, two summaries of panel discussions held at the workshop, a classification of all papers published so far in the five Intelligent Agents books, and a subject index. This state-of-the art survey is essential reading for anyone interested in agent technology.

This special issue is the result of the selection and re-submission of advanced and revised versions of papers from the workshop on "Trust in Agent Societies" (11th edition), held in Estoril (Portugal) on May 10, 2008 as part of the Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 2008 Conference (AAMAS 2008), and organized by Rino Falcone, Suzanne Barber, Jordi Sabater-Mir, and Munindar Singh. The aim of the workshop was to bring together researchers from different fields (artificial intelligence, multi-agent systems, cognitive science, game theory, and social and organizational sciences) that could contribute to a better understanding of trust and reputation in agent societies. The workshop scope included theoretical results as well their applications in human–computer interaction and electronic commerce. It was constituted by a main session integrated with two others: the first on the formal models of trust, and the second on reputation models. In this volume we present papers from the three workshop sessions: the main s- sion with papers on theoretical and applicative aspects of trust (from a engineering, cognitive, computational, sociological point of view); the formal model session with works in the field of applied logic and applied mathematics; the reputation models session with papers that specifically address models of reputation systems, theo- driven and empirically backed-up guidelines for designing reputation technologies, and analysis and discussion of existing reputation systems.