Product Description: Strategic behavior is the key to social interaction, from the ever-evolving world of living beings to the modern theatre of designed computational agents. Strategies can make or break participants’ aspirations, whether they are selling a house, playing the stock market, or working toward a treaty that limits global warming...read more

Product Description: Edited in collaboration with FoLLI, the Association of Logic, Language and Information, this book collects a set of chapters of the multi-disciplinary project "Games, actions and Social software" which was carried out at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS) in Wassenaar, from September 2006 through January 2007...read more

What makes teamwork tick? Cooperation matters, in daily life and in complex applications. After all, many tasks need more than a single agent to be effectively performed. Therefore, teamwork rules! Teams are social groups of agents dedicated to the fulfilment of particular persistent tasks. In modern multiagent environments, heterogeneous teams often consist of autonomous software agents, various types of robots and human beings. Teamwork in Multi-agent Systems: A Formal Approach explains teamwork rules in terms of agents' attitudes and their complex interplay. It provides the first comprehensive logical theory, TeamLog, underpinning teamwork in dynamic environments. The authors justify design choices by showing TeamLog in action. The book guides the reader through a fascinating discussion of issues essential for teamwork to be successful: What is teamwork, and how can a logical view of it help in designing teams of agents? What is the role of agents' awareness in an uncertain, dynamic environment? How does collective intention constitute a team? How are plan-based collective commitments related to team action? How can one tune collective commitment to the team's organizational structure and its communication abilities? What are the methodological underpinnings for teamwork in a dynamic environment? How does a team and its attitudes adjust to changing circumstances? How do collective intentions and collective commitments arise through dialogue? What is the computational complexity of TeamLog? How can one make TeamLog efficient in applications? This book is an invaluable resource for researchers and graduate students in computer science and artificial intelligence as well as for developers of multi-agent systems. Students and researchers in organizational science, in particular those investigating teamwork, will also find this book insightful.  Since the authors made an effort to introduce TeamLog as a conceptual model of teamwork, understanding most of the book requires solely a basic logical background.

Product Description: What makes teamwork tick? Cooperation matters, in daily life and in complex applications. After all, many tasks need more than a single agent to be effectively performed. Therefore, teamwork rules! Teams are social groups of agents dedicated to the fulfilment of particular persistent tasks...read more

Product Description: Can computer science solve our social problems? With Discourses on Social Software Jan Van Eijck and Rineke Verbrugge suggest it can, offering the reader a fascinating introduction to the innovative field of social software. Compiling a series of discussions involving a logician, a computer scientist, a philosopher, and a number of researchers from various other academic fields, this collection details the many ways in which the seemingly abstract disciplines of logic and computer science can be used to analyze and solve contemporary social problems...read more