This book documents the efforts undertaken by the EG AgentLink Special Interest Group on Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce, SIG AMEC. First and foremost, the book presents a roadmap of research and current technological development in the area of agent mediated electronic commerce. A particularly interesting part of this roadmap is the joint perspective on future developments. The book also contains a number of papers that fill in parts of this roadmap in a European context. Some of the papers present significant current R&D results while other papers indicate some clear directions for future research. The book is structured in topical sections on negotiation, markets, user preferences, and security.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the two International Workshops on Agent Communication, AC 2005 and AC 2006, held in Utrecht, Netherlands in July 2005 and in Hakodate, Japan in May 2006 as associated events of AAMAS 2005/2006. The 20 revised full papers cover semantics of agent communication, commitments in agent communication, protocols and strategies, as well as reliability and overhearing.

A first attempt to develop a standardized agent communication language (ACL) resulted in KQML, probably the most widely used such language. However, a lot of technical work remains to be done. Even worse, so far, there seems to be little consensus on the basics of agent communication and there is no clear understanding of the semantics of individual speech acts or even of the basic concepts that should be used to define the semantics. This book documents two workshops on communication in MAS held in 1999, one on Specifying and Implementing Conversation Policies (SICP) and the other in Agent Communication Languages and presents the current state of the art of research in the field. A detailed introductory overview by the volume editors highlights a number of issues that play an important role in agent communication.

This book presents 12 revised full papers on Agent-Mediated Electronic Commerce: seven papers were initially presented at the AMEC 2000 Workshop and the five others were solicited by the volume editors in order to achieve competent coverage of all relevant topics. The book is divided in topical sections on electronic negotiation models for agents, formal issues for agents operating on electronic market places, virtual trading institutions and platforms, and trading strategies for interrelated transactions.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the first two international workshops on computational models of collaboration in distributed systems: CARE 2009, held as satellite event of the 22nd Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence AI09 in Melbourne, Australia, in December 2009 and CARE 2010, held in conjunction with the International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT) in Toronto, Canada, in August 2010. The 12 revised full papers presented together with 2 invited lectures were carefully selected from a total of 45 submissions to both events. The workshops' thematic focus is on collaborative and autonomous agents that plan, negotiate, coordinate, and act under conditions of incomplete information, uncertainty, and bounded rationality.

InthisbookwepresentacollectionofpapersaroundthetopicofAgentCom- nication. The communication between agents has been one of the major topics of research in multi-agent systems. The current work can therefore build on a number of previous workshops, the proceedings of which have been published in earlier volumes in this series. The basis of this collection is the accepted s- missions of the workshop on Agent Communication Languages which was held in conjunction with the AAMAS conference in July 2003 in Melbourne. The workshop received 15 submissions of which 12 were selected for publication in this volume. Although the number of submissions was less than expected for an important area like Agent Communication there is no reason to worry that this area does not get enough attention from the agent community. First of all, the 12 selected papers are all of high quality. The high acceptance rate is only due to this high quality and not to the necessity to select a certain number of papers. Besides the high-quality workshop papers, we noticed that many papers on Agent Communication found their way to the main conference. We decided therefore to invite a number of authors to revise and extend their papers from this conference and to combine them with the workshop papers. We believe that the current collection comprises a very good and quite complete overview of the state of the art in this area of research and gives a good indication of the topics that are of major interest at the moment.

Abstract: "In this paper we discuss the role that deontic logic plays in the specification of information systems, either because constraints on the systems directly concern norms, or, and even more importantly, system constraints are considered ideal but violable (so- called 'soft'constraints). To overcome the traditional problems with deontic logic (the so-called paradoxes), we first state the importance of distinguishing between ought-to-be and ought-to-do constraints and next focus on the most severe paradox, the so-called Chisholm paradox, involving contrary-to-duty norms. We present a multi-modal extension of standard deontic logic (SDL) to represent the ought-to-be version of the Chisholm set properly. For the ought-to-do variant we employ a reduction to dynamic logic, and show how the Chisholm set can be treated adequately in this setting. Finally we discuss a way of integrating both ought-to-be and ought-to-do reasoning, enabling one to draw conclusions from ought-to-be constraints to ought-to-do ones, and show by an example the use(fulness) of this."