This book gives detailed descriptions of the development of two large scale multiagent systems: Agent.Hospital and Agent.Enterprise. These two systems have been developed in close cooperation with more than 20 enterprises and hospitals. They demonstrate clearly that multiagent technology has a great potential for innovative information systems, if a high degree of flexibility of the overall systems is required, e.g. because human actors and technical systems exhibit a great degree of local autonomy, or if the work environment is highly dynamic.

Hendrik Witt examines user interfaces for wearable computers and analyses the challenges imposed by the wearable computing paradigm through its dual-task character. He introduces a special software tool as well as the "HotWire" evaluation method to facilitate user interface development and evaluation. Based on the results of different end-user experiments conducted to study the management of interruptions with gesture and speech input in a wearable computing scenario, the author derives design guidelines and general constraints for forthcoming interface designs.

This handbook gives an overview on engineering of business information systems with agent technology. It introduces into this challenge, describes how to identify and to address the relevant technical problems, and explains how to engineer, integrated and test multiagent systems for real world applications. The book gives detailed descriptions of the development of two large scale multiagent systems: Agent.Hospital and Agent.Enterprise. These two systems have been developed in close cooperation with more than 20 enterprises and hospitals. They demonstrate clearly that multiagent technology has a great potential for innovative information systems, if a high degree of flexibility of the overall systems is required, e.g. because human actors and technical systems exhibit a great degree of local autonomy, or if the work environment is highly dynamic.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 22nd Annual German Conference on Artificial Intelligence, KI-98, held in Bremen, Germany, in September 1998.
The 16 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the proceedings. Also included are three invited papers and abstracts of two invited talks, as well as an appendix containing up-to-date descriptions of German AI projects. Thus the volume gives a unique overview of AI research in Germany.

The IBM project LILOG presented in this volume represents a fundamental stepbeyond computer science as hitherto understood. It was a successful project in every respect and has shed light on conjectured basic interrelations between knowledge processing and language definition. Knowledge processing is strongly coupled to the natural language used, and for applied knowledge processing an information base is neededwhich defines the semantic contents and interrelations of the language. The LILOG project was an implementation of an information basein the German language. A set of tools was also developed to work with the system, including structured man-machine interfaces using natural language, inference algorithms, and a complete subsystem to acquire and store the required knowledge. The LILOG project started in 1985 and a functional system was demonstrated in 1991. The project involved approximately 200 of the scientists working in Germany in the fields of computational linguistics, natural language understanding systems, and artificial intelligence. The project proves that a cooperative project between universities and industry can produce useful results both in pure research and in implemented methods and tools.

Eine Arbeitsgruppe des Fachbereichs KI der Gesellschaft fur Informatik hatte auf Anregung von W. Bibel hin ein neues Konzept fur die Jahrestagung dieses Fachbereichs erarbeitet. Christopher Habel, Clans-Rainer Rollinger und Thomas Christaller sind an erster Stelle als Autoren des Vorschlags zu nennen, auf dem wesentliche Elemente dieser 17. KI-Jahrestagung autbauen. Diese neue KI-93 besteht im wesentlichen aus zwei Teilen mit einem gemeinsamen Tag: - vom 13. - 15. September findet der "Wissenschaftliche Kongress" statt, der aus Vortragen und 17 Workshops besteht (Leitung des Programmkomitees: Thomas Christaller), -vom 15. -16. September schliesst sich der, Anwender Kongress" an, der durch Vortrage den erfolgreichen Einsatz von KI-Methoden demonstrieren wird (\I orsitz des Programmkomitees: Dieter Schutt). Daneben wird es auch zahlreiche Demonstrationen von Anwendungsbeispielen und von experimen tellen KI-Programmen zur Weiterentwicklung geben. Gastgeber der KI-93 ist dankenswerterweise die Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin (Leiter der lokalen OrganisationlDemos: Hans-Dieter Burkhard - schon jetzt vielen Dank an Renate Zirkelbach). Die, HUB" freut sich bereits auf viele Gaste -und fur den Mittwoch Abend ist schon eine Schiffsfahrt auf der Spree organisiert. Mit dem neuen Tagungskonzept sollen - die neuesten Entwicklungen und Trends in der KI deutlich werden, -junge Wissenschaftler die Moglichkeit haben, ihre Arbeiten vorzustellen, -"Wissenschaftler und Praktiker" auf dem Gebiet der KI zusammenfmden konnen. Die Zusagen "gestandener Wissenschaftler" fur eingeladene Vortrage, die zahlreichen Anmeldungen fur Workshops und die Qualitat der eingereichten Vortrage zeigen, dass dieses Konzept Beifall fand."

Ingrid Rugge fuhrt eine umfassende Recherche technischer Komponenten fur Mobile Solutions sowie eine Bestandsaufnahme bereits vorhandener oder konzipierter so genannter Wearable-Computing-Losungen durch. Die Autorin arbeitet deren jeweilige spezifische Eigenschaften heraus und zeigt Moglichkeiten und Grenzen auf. Sie stellt die technischen Fakten den qualitativ ermittelten Anforderungen und Erwartungen aus den potenziellen Einsatzbereichen gegenuber."