[Apologies if you receive more than one copy]

Fifth International Workshop
"Engineering Societies in the Agents World" (ESAW 2004)
20-22 October 2004, Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France
http://www.irit.fr/ ESAW04

*** Extended Submission Deadline ***
5 July 2004
************************************
Organisers
Marie-Pierre Gleizes (Local Chair)
Andrea Omicini
Franco Zambonelli

Aims & Scope
Software systems are undergoing dramatic changes in scale
and complexity. Whether at a planetary scale with Web-
based systems or at a microscopic scale with
nanotechnologies, there is a huge amount of components
interacting dynamically. Whatever the component
granularity is, their interactions provide us with increasingly
complex, context-aware, and content-adaptive services and
functionalities. There is therefore a strong qualitative impact
on the nature, substance and style of interactions between
components. At the macro-level the system is viewed as the
result of the interactions between micro-level components.
These interactions will occur in patterns and via mechanisms
that can hardly be grasped in terms of classical models of
interaction. To some extent, inspiration should be taken
from natural systems and societies for future software
systems will exhibit characteristics closer to these than to
mechanical systems and traditional software architectures.
For example, future systems may need to have self-
assembling capabilities in order to enable the emergence of
the right collective behaviour.
This situation poses exciting challenges to computer
scientists and software engineers. Already, software agents
and multi-agent systems are recognised as both useful
abstractions and effective technologies for the modelling
and building of complex distributed applications. However,
little is done with regard to effective and methodical
development of complex software systems in terms of multi-
agent societies. An urgent need exists for novel approaches
to software modelling and software engineering that can
support the successful deployment of software systems
made up of a massive number of autonomous components.
We need to enable designers to control and predict the
behaviour of their systems, but alternatively to enable
emergent global system properties and discovered
functionality to be commonplace. It is very likely that such
innovations will exploit lessons from a variety of different
scientific disciplines, such as sociology, economics,
organisation science, modern thermodynamics, and biology.
Furthermore, since these systems will be ubiquitous,
persistent, and pervasive, i.e. embedded in the real world,
we need to know what frameworks of law will facilitate their
regulation.
The sequel to successful editions since 2000, ESAW'04
remains committed to the use of the notion of multi-agent
systems as seed for animated, constructive, and highly
inter-disciplinary discussions about technologies,
methodologies, and tools for the engineering of complex
distributed applications. While the workshop places an
emphasis on practical engineering issues, it also welcomes
theoretical, philosophical, and empirical contributions,
provided that they clearly document their connection to the
core applied issues. Prospective papers about new
paradigms, theories, models are also appreciated.

Post-proceedings
The series of ESAW post-proceedings is published by
Springer-Verlag in the LNAI series (LNAI 1972, 2203, 2577.
3071), the last volume being published under the "Hot
Topics" subseries.

Topics of interest...
... therefore include (but are not limited to):
-       analysis, design, development and verification of agent
societies
-       open, large-scale multi-agent systems
-       models of complex distributed systems with agents and
societies
-       interaction-coordination patterns in agent societies
-       inter-disciplinary approaches for agent societies engineering
-       engineering of social intelligence in multi-agent systems
-       self-organisation and self regulation in agent societies
-       autonomy and self-design of agent societies in an
environment
-       security, trust and norms in agent societies
-       middleware infrastructures for agent societies
-       tools and models for agent societies management
-       studies of information ecosystems
-       experiences in building and maintaining large agent
societies
-       evolution of institutions in agent societies
-       insightful analyses of negative results

Important Dates
Submission due: 5 July 2004
Notification of acceptance/rejection: 15 August 2004
Revised papers for Workshop notes: 3 October 2004

Program Committee
Alexander Artikis, Federico Bergenti, Carole Bernon, Olivier Boissier, 
Monique Calisti, Jacques Calmet, Cristiano Castelfranchi, Luca 
Cernuzzi, Vincent Chevrier, Paolo Ciancarini, Helder Coelho, Scott R. 
Cost,  Paul Davidsson, Rino Falcone, Stephan Flake, Zahia Guessoum, 
Andrew Jones, Anthony Karageorgos, Paul Kearney, Barbara Keplicz, 
Yannis Labrou, Lyndon Lee, Mike Luck, Peter McBurney, Pablo Noriega, 
Eugenio Oliveira, Sascha Ossowski, H. Van Dyke Parunak, Paolo Petta, 
Gauthier Picard, Jeremy Pitt, Omer Rana, Alessandro Ricci, Ken Satoh, 
Onn Shehory, Munindar Singh, Kostas Stathis, Robert Tolksdorf, Anand 
Tripathi, Paola Turci, Jos Vidal

Sponsors
AgentLink III, Artal Technologies, ILOG, IRIT, Université Paul 
Sabatier, Whitestein Technologies