2 nd Annual Workshop on Collaboration Agents

The world is changing, and Agents seem to be on everyone’s lips. The world is changing, collaborative technologies and collaboration in general, especially across distance, is becoming more and more important. Combining the power of autonomous, pseudointelligent agents and collaborative systems is not only a good idea, we think it’s vital to making the coordination, collaboration, and communication work for people. Agents can help people share information, schedule people’s time, negotiate privacy preferences, find information, and find people, amongst other things. It is these agents that we call ‘Collaboration Agents.’ COLA 2004, following on from a very successful COLA 2003 in Halifax, will examine collaboration agents from various angles – from how information can be shared to how agents can help in surveillance. As last year, we have had several excellent contributions and look forward to some active discussion. The workshop will not focus on, for example, the development of interface of search agents- forums exist to bring this research to the fore. Our interest is in the building of a community of researchers in the area to allow the growth of a highly exciting field, one in which agents help people come together. A special issue of Computational Intelligence has been negotiated, and all of the papers from COLA 2003 and 2004 are eligible to be revised and submitted. Please bear this in mind when you continue your work. COLA 2004 has a website, and all submissions will be online