Agreement Computing

In modern IT-enabled societies, the human user is being assisted with an increasing number of tasks by computational communicating entities/software (usually called agents). Agents interact with and act on behalf of their human users. Their assistance could take different forms, starting with simple technical support such as email filtering, information retrieval, shopping, etc., and moving towards full delegation of more complex tasks, such as service composition for travel organization, dispute resolution in the context of divorces, labour controversies, traffic accidents, etc. To support the agents with the more complex tasks, we argue that the concept of ¿agreement¿ lies at the basis of agent communication and interaction. Interacting agents will need to base their decisions and actions on explicit agreements. Agreement Computing aims at proposing a plethora of adequate theoretical methods and applied techniques in order to allow for the design and implementation of those new generation >intelligent> communicating artefacts that will form the basis of future modern >mixed> societies populated by interconnected and mutually interacting humans and artefacts.This research is been supported by the EU funded research project PRAISE (EU FP7 grant number 388770)Peer Reviewe