This book addresses the question of how to achieve social coordination in Socio-Cognitive Technical Systems (SCTS). SCTS are a class of Socio-Technical Systems that are complex, open, systems where several humans and digital entities interact in order to achieve some collective endeavour. The book approaches the question from the conceptual background of regulated open multiagent systems, with the question being motivated by their design and construction requirements. The book captures the collective effort of eight groups from leading research centres and universities, each of which has developed a conceptual framework for the design of regulated multiagent systems and most have also developed technological artefacts that support the processes from specification to implementation of that type of systems. The first, introductory part of the book describes the challenge of developing frameworks for SCTS and articulates the premises and the main concepts involved in those frameworks. The second part discusses the eight frameworks and contrasts their main components. The final part maps the new field by discussing the types of activities in which SCTS are likely to be used, the features that such uses will exhibit, and the challenges that will drive the evolution of this field.

This book addresses the question of how to achieve social coordination in Socio-Cognitive Technical Systems (SCTS). SCTS are a class of Socio-Technical Systems that are complex, open, systems where several humans and digital entities interact in order to achieve some collective endeavour. The book approaches the question from the conceptual background of regulated open multiagent systems, with the question being motivated by their design and construction requirements. The book captures the collective effort of eight groups from leading research centres and universities, each of which has developed a conceptual framework for the design of regulated multiagent systems and most have also developed technological artefacts that support the processes from specification to implementation of that type of systems. The first, introductory part of the book describes the challenge of developing frameworks for SCTS and articulates the premises and the main concepts involved in those frameworks. The second part discusses the eight frameworks and contrasts their main components. The final part maps the new field by discussing the types of activities in which SCTS are likely to be used, the features that such uses will exhibit, and the challenges that will drive the evolution of this field.

In recent years, social and organizational aspects of agency have become - jor research topics in MAS. Current applications of MAS in Web services, grid computing and ubiquitous computing highlight the need for using these aspects in order to ensure social order within such environments. Openness, hete- geneity, and scalability of MAS, in turn, put new demands on traditional MAS interaction models and bring forward the need to investigate the environment wherein agents interact, more speci?cally to design di?erent ways of constra- ing or regulating agents' interactions. Consequently, the view of coordination and control has been expanding to entertain not only an agent-centric persp- tive but societal and organization-centric views as well. The overall problem of analyzing the social, legal, economic and technological dimensions of agent organizations and the co-evolution of agent interactions pose theoretically - manding and interdisciplinary research questions at di?erent levels of abstr- tion. The MAS research community has addressed these issues from di?erent perspectives that have gradually become more cohesive around the four c- cepts that give title to this workshop series: coordination, organization, ins- tutions and norms. The COIN@AAMAS 2007 and COIN@MALLOW 2007 events belong to a workshopseries that started in 2005, and since then has continued with two e- tions per year. The main goalof these workshopsis to bring together researchers from di?erent communities working in theoretical and/or practical aspects of coordination, organization, institutions and norms, and to to facilitate a more systematicdiscussionofthesethemesthathaveuntillatelybeenconsideredfrom di?erent perspectives.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the International Workshop on Coordination, Organization, Institutions and Norms in Agent Systems, COIN 2006, held as two events at AAMAS 2006, the 5th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems in Hakodate, Japan, and ECAI 2006, the 17th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Riva del Garda, Italy.

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.

Bach flower essences provide excellent tools for balancing energetic disturbances generated by emotions. Yet people often have trouble clearly expressing their feelings and emotions, making selection of a specific flower essence difficult. Drawing upon the centuries-old relationships established in Chinese Medicine between emotions and physical disorders, Pablo Noriega shows how to use a person’s descriptions of their complaints and chronic conditions combined with Flower-type personality traits to diagnose which flower essence to prescribe in each unique case. The author includes a full primer on Chinese Medicine, exploring in detail the main principles: Yin and Yang; the Five Elements and their associated Organs; Blood and Energy; the Virtues, the behaviors that can strengthen the Elements; and the Psyches, the energetic spirit of each Organ.  Providing detailed profiles about each of the original 38 Bach flower remedies according to Chinese Medicine, Noriega explains how to prescribe flower essences for prevention of predisposed conditions, for healing of acute and chronic ailments, and for disorders that arise from stagnant energy and yin-yang imbalances. Offering flower essence therapists new possibilities for evaluation and treatment, this guide also helps Chinese Medicine practitioners incorporate Flower Essences into their practice.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 11th International Workshops on Coordination, Organizations, Institutions and Norms in Agent Systems, COIN 2015. The workshops were co-located with AAMAS 2015, held in Istanbul, Turkey, in May 2015, and with IJCAI 2015, held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in July 2015. The 23 full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 46 initial submissions for inclusion in this volume. The papers cover a wide range of topics from work on formal aspects of normative and team based systems, to software engineering with organizational concepts, to applications of COIN based systems, and to philosophical issues surrounding socio-technical systems. They highlight not only the richness of existing work in the field, but also point out the challenges and exciting research that remains to be done in the area.

This book constitutes the thoroughly reviewed joint post-conference proceedings of two international workshops on Coordination, Organization, Institutions and Norms in Agent Systems, COIN@AAMAS 2011, held in Taipei, Taiwan in May 2011 and COIN@WI-IAT 2011, held in Lyon, France in August 2011. The 12 revised full papers presented were carefully selected for presentations. The papers are organized in topical sections on agent coordination, norm-aware agent reasoning, as well as norm creation and enforcement.