Pablo Noriega Livres

Electronic Commerce, as a gamut of activities involving electronic transactions performed over a network via software that may be more or less autonomous, is an emerging reality. Strategic studies have shown that electronic commerce is a major growth industry. The book is devoted to the challenges and opportunities that electronic commerce opens for agent technology. For some time, electronic commerce has attracted the avid attention of agent-builders and agent technology researchers, and these have decisively contributed to advancing the state of the art in the field. The second-generation software agents now entering the scene hold great promise for the further advancement of electronic commerce. This book originates from a workshop on Agent-Mediated Electronic Trading held at Agents'98 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in May 1998. The eleven carefully reviewed and revised papers present a unique survey of software agents in the context of electronic commerce.

A guide to applying the power and wisdom of Chinese Medicine to Bach Flower Therapy.

In recent years, the social and organizational aspects of agency have emerged as significant research topics in multi-agent systems (MAS). Applications of MAS in areas like Web services and ubiquitous computing underscore the importance of these aspects for maintaining social order. The openness, heterogeneity, and scalability of MAS introduce new challenges to traditional interaction models, necessitating a closer examination of agent environments and the regulation of interactions. This shift has expanded the understanding of coordination and governance to include not just agent-centric views but also societal and organizational perspectives. Analyzing the social, legal, economic, and technological dimensions of agent organizations and the co-evolution of interactions presents complex interdisciplinary research questions at various abstraction levels. The MAS research community has approached these issues from multiple angles, gradually coalescing around the four key concepts: coordination, organization, institutions, and norms. The COIN workshops aim to unify this subject by bringing together researchers from diverse fields to foster systematic discussions on these themes. This year, the workshops were held during AAMAS 2006 and ECAI 2006, and the papers in this volume are revised selections from those events.