Autonomy is a characterizing notion of agents, and intuitively it is rather unambiguous. The quality of autonomy is recognized when it is perceived or experienced, yet it is difficult to limit autonomy in a definition. The desire to build agents that exhibit a satisfactory quality of autonomy includes agents that have a long life, are highly independent, can harmonize their goals and actions with humans and other agents, and are generally socially adept. Agent Autonomy is a collection of papers from leading international researchers that approximate human intuition, dispel false attributions, and point the way to scholarly thinking about autonomy. A wide array of issues about sharing control and initiative between humans and machines, as well as issues about peer level agent interaction, are addressed.

The general idea that brains anticipate the future, that they engage in prediction, and that one means of doing this is through some sort of inner model that can be run of?ine, hasalonghistory. SomeversionoftheideawascommontoAristotle, aswell as to many medieval scholastics, to Leibniz and Hume, and in more recent times, to Kenneth Craik and Philip Johnson-Laird. One reason that this general idea recurs continually is that this is the kind of picture that introspection paints. When we are engaged in tasks it seems that we form images that are predictions, or anticipations, and that these images are isomorphic to what they represent. But as much as the general idea recurs, opposition to it also recurs. The idea has never been widely accepted, or uncontroversial among psychologists, cognitive scientists and neuroscientists. The main reason has been that science cannot be s- is?ed with metaphors and introspection. In order to gain acceptance, an idea needs to be formulated clearly enough so that it can be used to construct testable hypot- ses whose results will clearly supportor cast doubtupon the hypothesis. Next, those ideasthatare formulablein one oranothersortof symbolismor notationare capable of being modeled, and modeling is a huge part of cognitive neuroscience. If an idea cannot be clearly modeled, then there are limits to how widely it can be tested and accepted by a cognitive neuroscience communit

Based on two international workshops on trust in agent societies, held at AAMAS 2003 and AAMAS 2004, this book draws together carefully revised papers on trust, reputation, and security in agent society. Besides workshop papers, several contributions from leading researchers in this interdisciplinary field were solicited to complete coverage of all relevant topics.

The 13 papers presented take into account issues from multiagent systems, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, game theory, and social and organizational science. Theoretical topics are addressed as well as applications in human-computer interaction and e-commerce.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the International Workshop on Deception, Fraud, and Trust in Agent Societies, held in Bologna, Italy in July 2002 during AAMAS 2002. Most papers presented were carefully selected from the workshop contributions during two rounds of reviewing and revision; a few papers were particularly solicited in order to provide complete coverage of all relevant topics. All relevant aspects of the field are addressed.

Autonomy is a characterizing notion of agents, and intuitively it is rather unambiguous. The quality of autonomy is recognized when it is perceived or experienced, yet it is difficult to limit autonomy in a definition. The desire to build agents that exhibit a satisfactory quality of autonomy includes agents that have a long life, are highly independent, can harmonize their goals and actions with humans and other agents, and are generally socially adept. Agent Autonomy is a collection of papers from leading international researchers that approximate human intuition, dispel false attributions, and point the way to scholarly thinking about autonomy. A wide array of issues about sharing control and initiative between humans and machines, as well as issues about peer level agent interaction, are addressed.

This book is based on a workshop on Deception, Fraud, and Trust in Agent Societies held during the Autonomous Agents Conference in Barcelona, Spain in June 2000.Besides carefully reviewed revised full papers presented at the workshop the book presents invited papers from experts in the field allowing for complete coverage of the field.

This special issue is the result of the selection and re-submission of advanced and revised versions of papers from the workshop on "Trust in Agent Societies" (11th edition), held in Estoril (Portugal) on May 10, 2008 as part of the Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 2008 Conference (AAMAS 2008), and organized by Rino Falcone, Suzanne Barber, Jordi Sabater-Mir, and Munindar Singh. The aim of the workshop was to bring together researchers from different fields (artificial intelligence, multi-agent systems, cognitive science, game theory, and social and organizational sciences) that could contribute to a better understanding of trust and reputation in agent societies. The workshop scope included theoretical results as well their applications in human-computer interaction and electronic commerce. It was constituted by a main session integrated with two others: the first on the formal models of trust, and the second on reputation models. In this volume we present papers from the three workshop sessions: the main s- sion with papers on theoretical and applicative aspects of trust (from a engineering, cognitive, computational, sociological point of view); the formal model session with works in the field of applied logic and applied mathematics; the reputation models session with papers that specifically address models of reputation systems, theo- driven and empirically backed-up guidelines for designing reputation technologies, and analysis and discussion of existing reputation systems.

Cristiano Castelfranchi is one of the pioneers in the theory of goals and goal-directed behavior. His first seminal contributions date back to the 70s, and his work has provided invaluable insights on a variety of topics, such as the nature and functions of mental representations, the dynamics of belief and reasoning, the anatomy of emotions and motivations, power and dependence relationships, trust and delegation, communication, norms, organizations, institutions, and agent-based social simulation. Across all these areas, Castelfranchi's approach has been systematically problem-oriented and markedly interdisciplinary, achieving worldwide prominence in such diverse domains as cognitive psychology, social science, Artificial Intelligence, and philosophy of mind. What gave consistency and order to his bold and broad theorizing of the human mind and society is the view that, as he puts it in this volume, goals are the true center of cognition. This collection of essays to honor Castelfranchi's outstanding career reflects both his wide interests and their unifying focus. Over sixty leading scholars in their respective fields offer comments, elaborations, extensions, and cogent criticisms of Castelfranchi's ideas, exploring their implications and often uncovering unexpected connections with other theories. This collection is then completed by a survey of decades of research on the theory of goals, authored by Castelfranchi himself. Thus the volume provides not only a fitting homage to Cristiano Castelfranchi, but also an invaluable reference to anyone interested in goal-directed behavior, at both the individual and the social level.