A network is a mathematical object consisting of a set of points that are connected to each other in some fashion by lines. It turns out this simple description corresponds to a bewildering array of systems in the real world, ranging from technological ones such as the Internet and World Wide Web, biological networks such as that of connections of the nervous systems, food webs or  protein interactions, infrastructural systems such as networks of roads, airports or the power-grid, to patterns of social and professional relationships such as friendship, sex partners, network of Hollywood actors, co-authorship networks and many more. Recent years have witnessed a substantial amount of interest within the scientific community in the properties of these networks. The emergence of the internet in particular, coupled with the widespread availability of inexpensive computing resources has facilitated studies ranging from large scale empirical analysis of networks in the real world, to the development of theoretical models and tools to explore the various properties of these systems. The study of networks is broadly interdisciplinary and central developments have occurred in many fields, including mathematics, physics, computer and information sciences, biology and the social sciences. This book brings together a collection of cutting-edge research in the field from a diverse array of researchers ranging from physicists to social scientists and presents them in a coherent fashion, highlighting the strong interconnections between the different areas. Topics included are social networks and social media, opinion and innovation diffusion, biological and health-related networks, language networks, as well as network theory, community detection, or growth models for Complex Networks.

A network is a mathematical object consisting of a set of pointsthat are connected to each other in somefashion by lines. It turns out thissimple descriptioncorresponds to a bewildering array of systems in the real world, ranging from technological ones such as the Internet and WorldWide Web, biological networks such as that of connections of thenervous systems, food webs or protein interactions, infrastructural systems such as networks of roads, airports or the power-grid, to patterns of social and professional relationships such as friendship, sex partners, network ofHollywood actors, co-authorship networks and many more.

Recent years have witnessed a substantial amount of interest within thescientific community in the properties of these networks. The emergenceof the internet in particular, coupled with the widespread availability ofinexpensive computing resources has facilitated studies ranging fromlarge scale empirical analysis of networks in the real world, to the developmentof theoretical models and tools to explore the various properties of these systems.The study of networks is broadly interdisciplinary and central developments haveoccurred in many fields, including mathematics, physics, computer and informationsciences, biology and the social sciences.

This book brings together a collectionof cutting-edge research in the field from adiversearray of researchers ranging fromphysicists to social scientists and presents them in acoherent fashion, highlighting thestrong interconnections between the different areas. Topicsincluded are social networks and social media, opinion and innovation diffusion, biological and health-related networks, language networks, as well as network theory, community detection, or growth models for Complex Networks."

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies, DALT 2010, held in Toronto, Canada, on May 10, 2010, as a satellite workshop of the 9th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2010. The 7 revised full papers presented together with 4 invited lectures were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement from 24 initial submissions. DALT aims to make formal methods and declarative technologies and approaches available to and understood by a broader segment of the multi-agent research community; the papers are organized in topical sections on BDI rational agents, communication, coordination and negotiation, as well as social aspects and control systems.

As today's most complex computing environment, the Internet confronts IT researchers, system designers, and application developers with completely new challenges and, as a fascinating new computing paradigm, agent technology has recently attracted broad interest and strong hopes for shaping the future information society. Relating both, the Internet and agents, opens up a whole new range of advanced applications in vibrant subfields of information technology such as middleware, mobile commerce, e-learning, collaborative working, and intelligent information services. Many modern advanced systems are likely to exploit Internet agents - and exploiting Internet agents mostly means dealing with coordination models and technologies of various sorts. This monograph-like anthology is the first systematic guide to models and enabling technologies for the coordination of intelligent agents on the Internet and respective applications.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies, DALT 2005, held in The Netherlands in July 2005 as an associated event of AAMAS 2005, the main international conference on autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. The 14 revised full papers presented were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement for inclusion in the book. The papers are organized in topical sections.

In the last few decades, advances in molecular biology and in the research - frastructure in this ?eld has given rise to the omics revolution in molecular biology, alongwiththeexplosionofdatabases: fromgenomicstotranscriptomics, proteomics, interactomics, and metabolomics. However, the huge amount of b- logicalinformationavailablehasleftabottleneckindataprocessing: information over?ow has called for innovative techniques for their visualization, modelling, interpretationandanalysis.The manyresultsfromthe ?eldsofcomputerscience andengineeringhavethenmetwithbiology, leadingto new, emergingdisciplines such as bioinformatics and systems biology. So, for instance, as the result of - plicationoftechniquessuchasmachinelearning, self-organizingmaps, statistical algorithms, clusteringalgorithmsandmulti-agentsystemstomodernbiology, we can actually model and simulate some functions of the cell (e.g., protein inter- tion, gene expression and gene regulation), make inferences from the molecular biology database, make connections among biological data, and derive useful predictions. Today, and more generally, two di?erent scenarios characterize the po- genomic era. On the one hand, the huge amount of datasets made available by biological research all over the world mandates for suitable techniques, tools and methods meant at modelling biological processes and analyzing biological sequences. On the other hand, biological systems work as the sources of a wide range of new computational models and paradigms, which are now ready to be applied in the context of computer-based syst

The ?rst workshop "Engineering Societies in the Agents World" (ESAW) was held in August 2000, in conjunction with the 14th European Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence (ECAI 2000) in Berlin. It was launched by a group of - searchers who thought that the design and development of MASs (multi-agent systems) not only needed adequate theoretical foundations but also a call for new techniques, methodologies and infrastructures to develop MASs as arti?cial societies. The second ESAW was co-located with the European Agent Summer School (ACAI 2001) in Prague, and mostly focused on logics and languages, middleware, infrastructures and applications. In Madrid, the third ESAW c- centrated on models and methodologies and took place with the "Cooperative Information Agents" workshop (CIA 2002). The fourth ESAW in London was the ?rst one that ran as a stand-alone event: apart from the usual works on methodologies and models, it also stressed the issues of applications and m- tidisciplinary models. Based on the success of previous ESAWs, and also given that the di?cult challenges in the construction of arti?cial societies are not yet fully addressed, the ?fth ESAW workshop was organized in the same spirit as its predecessors. Inparticular,ESAW2004tookplaceattheIRITlaboratoryoftheUniversit e "Paul Sabatier" (Toulouse, France), at the end of October 2004. It was not - located with any other scienti?c event, in the same way as ESAW 2003. ESAW 2004 remained committed to the use of the notion of MASs as the seeds for animated, constructive and highly interdisciplinary discussions about techno- gies,methodologiesandtoolsfortheengineeringofcomplexdistributedsystems.

The second edition of the workshop on Declarative Agent Languages and Te- nologies (DALT 2004) was held July 2004 in New York City, and was a great success. We saw a signi?cant increase in both the number of submitted papers and workshop attendees from the ?rst meeting, held July 2003 in Melbourne. Nearly 40 research groups worldwide were motivated to contribute to this event by submitting their most recent research achievements, covering a wide variety of the topics listed in the call for papers. More than 30 top researchers agreed to join the Program Committee, which then collectively faced the hard task of selecting the one-day event program. The fact that research in multi-agent systems is no longer only a novel and promising research horizon at dawn is, in our opinion, the main reason behind DALT's (still short) success story. On the one hand, agent theories and app- cations are mature enough to model complex domains and scenarios, and to successfully address a wide range of multifaceted problems, thus creating the urge to make the best use of this expressive and versatile paradigm, and also pro't from all the important results achieved so far. On the other hand, bui- ing multi-agent systems still calls for models and technologies that could ensure system predictability, accommodate ?exibility, heterogeneity and openness, and enable system veri?cation.

The fourth internationalworkshop,"EngineeringSocietiesin the Agents World" (ESAW 2003) was a three-dayevent that took place at the end of October 2003. After previous events in Germany, the Czech Republic, and Spain, the workshop crossed the Channel, to be held at the premises of Imperial College, London. The steady increase in the variety of backgrounds of contributing sci- tists, fascinating new perspectives on the topics, and number of participants, bespeaks the success of the ESAW workshop series. Its idea was born in 1999 among members of the working group on "Communication, Coordination, and Collaboration" of the ?rst lease of life of the European Network of Excellence on Agent-Based Computing, AgentLink, out of a critical discussion about the general mindset of the agent community. At that time, we felt that proper c- siderationsofsystemicaspectsofagenttechnologydeployment, suchasackno- edgement of the importance of the social and environmental perspectives, were sorely missing: a de?ciency that we resolved should be addressed directly by a new forum.

Agent metaphors and technologies are increasingly adopted to harness and g- ernthecomplexityoftoday'ssystems.Asaconsequence, thegrowingcomplexity of agent systems calls for models and technologies that promote system p- dictability and enable feature discovery and veri?cation. Formal methods and declarative technologies have recently attracted a growing interest as a means to address such issues. The aim of the DALT 2003 workshop was two-fold. On the one hand, we wanted to foster a discussion forum to export such techniques into the broader communityofagentresearchersandpractitioners.Ontheotherhand, wewanted to bring in the issues of real-world, complex, and possibly large-scale agent s- tem design in the perspective of formal methods and declarative technologies. Thanks to the very high quality of our program committee, we managed to put together a rich program, including three technical sessions and two panel sessions: TheUseofDeclarativeProgrammingforAgent-OrientedSoftwareEn- neering, moderated by Leon Sterling and Andrea Omicini, and Declarative and Logic-Based Technology for Agent Reasoning and Interactions, organized and moderated by Rafael Bordini and Wiebe van der Hoek, with the participation of ?ve invited panelists. This bookcontainstherevisedandextendedversionsofthe paperspresented at the workshop, as well as three invited contributions by leading researchers of the ?eld. It is composed of three parts: (i) software engineering and multi-agent system prototyping, (ii) agent reasoning, BDI logics and extensions, and (iii) social aspects of multi-agent systems.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th Information Agents, CIA 2002, held in Helsinki, Finland in August 2003. The 17 revised full papers and 6 revised short papers presented together with 2 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 60 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on pervasive information service provision, information agents and peer-to-peer computing, trading and negotiation, information gathering and integration, collaborative search and filtering, collaboration in open environments, trust in agent-based information provision, and information agent systems engineering.

Nowadays, engineering large-scale software systems means dealing with complex systems composed of pervasive software components that move around and adapt to nondeterministic and open environments, like the Internet, in order to achieve systems design goals through the coordination of autonomously distributed services. The agent metaphor, in particular software agents and multi-agent systems (MAS), constitutes a promising approach for covering most of the software development life cycle, from conceptual modeling and requirements specification to architectural definition, design, and implementation. This book presents 17 carefully reviewed papers arranged in order to provide a coherent survey of how to exploit agent properties and MAS issues in today's software systems. The book offers the following topical sections: - software engineering foundations - requirements engineering and software architecture - coordination and mobility - reuse -dependability -empirical studies and applications

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Engineering Societies in the Agents World, ESAW 2001, held in Prague, Czech Republic in July 2001. The 12 revised full papers presented together with a survey by the volume editors were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers are organized in topical sections on foundations of engineering with agents, logics and languages for MAS engineering, and agent middleware and applications.

As today's most complex computing environment, the Internet confronts IT researchers, system designers, and application developers with completely new challenges and, as a fascinating new computing paradigm, agent technology has recently attracted broad interest and strong hopes for shaping the future information society. Relating both, the Internet and agents, opens up a whole new range of advanced applications in vibrant subfields of information technology such as middleware, mobile commerce, e-learning, collaborative working, and intelligent information services. Many modern advanced systems are likely to exploit Internet agents - and exploiting Internet agents mostly means dealing with coordination models and technologies of various sorts. This monograph-like anthology is the first systematic guide to models and enabling technologies for the coordination of intelligent agents on the Internet and respective applications.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the First International Workshop on Engineering Societies in the Agents World, ESAW 2000, held in Berlin, Germany in August 2000. The 10 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book; they are organized in topical sections on emerging issues in multi-agent systems engineering, coordination models and technologies for multi-agent systems, and methodologies and tools.

This volume LNCS 14127 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Workshop, EXTRAAMAS 2023, held in London, UK, in May 2023.  The 15 full papers presented together with 1 short paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 26 submissions. The workshop focuses on Explainable Agents and multi-agent systems; Explainable Machine Learning; and Cross-domain applied XAI.  

Digital democracy is a hot topic nowadays, its relevance growing along with the impact of computational platforms on our(political) life. Communication is the basal fabric on which society is defined, and it appears obvious that the civic organisation and politics itself should take the opportunities the "digital revolution" offers. Institutional inertia, nevertheless, causes large delays in updating and adapting. Therefore, the balance between participation and delegated representation is now facing a crisis. A thorough understanding of the factors involved in participation is a first step towards providing solutions. Using the Internet to fill the gap and build a digital democracy provides an opportunity, along with several risks that need to be carefully analysed. It needs to be implemented using a fully inter- and trans-disciplinary perspective. The six contributions included in this State-of-the Art Survey present research in the field of social sciences as well as mathematics and computer science and aim at contributing to a better understanding of the potential and dangers of digital democracy, helping readers go beyond the misunderstandings, the misconceptions,and the conceptual and practical abuses that the very notion of democracy is undergoing during this age of technological revolution and social turmoils.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems, PRIMA 2015, held in Bertinoro, Italy, in October 2015. The 29 full papers and 24 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 94 submissions. The conference brings together active researchers, developers and practitioners from both academia and industry to showcase, share and promote research in several domains, ranging from foundations of agent theory and engineering aspects of agent systems, to emerging interdisciplinary areas of agent-based research.