Stefan Kirn - Böcker

Pervasive healthcare is an emerging research discipline, focusing on the development and application of pervasive and ubiquitous computing technology for healthcare and wellness. Pervasive healthcare seeks to respond to a variety of pressures on healthcare systems, including the increased incidence of life-style related and chronic diseases, emerging consumerism in healthcare, need for empowering patients and relatives for self-care and management of their health, and need to provide seamless access for healthcare services, independent of time and place. Pervasive healthcare may be defined from two perspectives. First, it is the development and application of pervasive computing (or ubiquitous computing, ambient intelligence) technologies for healthcare, health and wellness management. Second, it seeks to make healthcare available to anyone, anytime, and anywhere by removing locational, time and other restraints while increasing both the coverage and quality of healthcare. This book proposes to define the emerging area of pervasive health and introduce key management principles, most especially knowledge management, its tools, techniques and technologies. In addition, the book takes a socio-technical, patient-centric approach which serves to emphasize the importance of a key triumvirate in healthcare management namely, the focus on people, process and technology. Last but not least the book discusses in detail a specific example of pervasive health, namely the potential use of a wireless technology solution in the monitoring of diabetic patients.

Pervasive healthcare is an emerging research discipline, focusing on the development and application of pervasive and ubiquitous computing technology for healthcare and wellness. Pervasive healthcare seeks to respond to a variety of pressures on healthcare systems, including the increased incidence of life-style related and chronic diseases, emerging consumerism in healthcare, need for empowering patients and relatives for self-care and management of their health, and need to provide seamless access for healthcare services, independent of time and place. Pervasive healthcare may be defined from two perspectives. First, it is the development and application of pervasive computing (or ubiquitous computing, ambient intelligence) technologies for healthcare, health and wellness management. Second, it seeks to make healthcare available to anyone, anytime, and anywhere by removing locational, time and other restraints while increasing both the coverage and quality of healthcare. This book proposes to define the emerging area of pervasive health and introduce key management principles, most especially knowledge management, its tools, techniques and technologies. In addition, the book takes a socio-technical, patient-centric approach which serves to emphasize the importance of a key triumvirate in healthcare management namely, the focus on people, process and technology. Last but not least the book discusses in detail a specific example of pervasive health, namely the potential use of a wireless technology solution in the monitoring of diabetic patients.

The downsizing and decentralization of large corporations have led to new approaches to organization, management and internal structuring, and comparative computing plays a key role in processing and disseminating knowledge within such "intelligent organizations". The development of such "intelligent organizations" forms the central theme of this volume. It provides an interdisciplinary assessment of the topic, emphasizing the need for effective coordination of activities and presenting the theoretical foundations of an integrated theory of coordination. The text should be of interest to scientists and practitioners in organizational research, CSCW, business and information systems, and multi-agent systems.

1 Multiagent Engineering: A New Software Construction Paradigm Multiagent systems have a long academic tradition. They have their roots in distributed problem solving in Artificial Intelligence (AI) from where they emerged in the mid-eighties as a distinctive discipline. Research in multiagent systems owes much to the work of Rosenschein on rationality and autonomy of intelligent agents, the European MAAMAW workshop series, and last but not least the famous readings of Bond & Gasser (1988) and Jacques Ferber´s book on multiagent systems (1991). It gained further by a public discussion via the Distributed AI mailing list in summer 1991, when the pioneers of the field compared in much detail the concepts of distributed problem solvers to multiagent systems. Within only five years, a new exciting field of research had been established. Now, 15 years later, the field has matured to a degree that allows the - sults of academic research to be passed on to practical use and commercial exploitation. This potential coincides with a need for much larger flexib- ity of our IT infrastructure in light of its highly distributed character and extreme complexity, but also the global character of the business processes and the large number of business partners due to outsourcing and specia- zation. Many experts claim that multiagent systems are the right software technology for the needed IT infrastructure at the right time. The appeal has much to do with the broad perspectives of multiagent systems research.

For the sixth time, the German special interest group on Distributed Arti?cial Intelligence in cooperation with the Steering Committee of MATES organized the German Conference on Multiagent System Technologies – MATES 2008. This conference, which took place during September 23–26, 2008 in Kaisersla- ern, followed a series of successful predecessor conferences in Erfurt (2003, 2004, and 2006), Koblenz (2005), and Leipzig (2007). MATES 2008 was co-located with the 31st German Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence (KI 2008) and was hosted by the University of Kaiserslautern and the German Research Center for Arti?cial Intelligence (DFKI). As in recent years, MATES 2008 provided a distinguished, lively, and - terdisciplinary forum for researchers, users, and developers of agent technology to present and discuss the latest advances of research and development in the area of autonomous agents and multiagent systems. Accordingly, the topics of MATES 2008 covered the whole range: from the theory to applications of agent and multiagent technology. In all, 35 papers were submitted from authors from 11 countries. The accepted 16 full papers included in this proceedings volume and presented as talks at the conference were chosen based on a thorough and highly selective review process. Each paper was reviewed and discussed by at least three Program Committee members and revised according to their c- ments. We believe that the papers of this volume are a representative snapshot of current research and contribute to both theoretical and applied aspects of autonomous agents and multiagent systems.