Interaction and Emergent Phenomena in Societies of Agents:
Papers from the AAAI Fall Symposium
Goran P. Trajkovski and Samuel G. Collins, Cochairs
October 13–15, 2006, Arlington, Virginia
Technical Report FS-06-05
192 pp., $35.00
ISBN 978-1-57735-303-4
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Although multiagent systems have been extremely helpful in solving engineering problems, much of what we find exciting lies in their applications to contemporary human life. The focus of this symposium was on self-constituting systems and networks composed of human and nonhuman agents characteristic of emergent cyber cultures. Multiagent systems cross disciplinary boundaries by focusing on society and culture as emerging from the interactions of autonomous agents. Poised at the intersection of AI, cybernetics, sociology, semiotics and anthropology, this strand of multiagent systems research enables a powerful perspective illuminating not only how we live and learn now, but also, through focusing on emergence, how we anticipate the future. A wide range of relevant questions were addressed, such as the emergence of prelinguistic concepts, shared representations, meaning and language; characterization of the fungible, shifting networks created by human and nonhuman agents; what are the knowledges, translations or other hierarchies that emerge in such settings; and what tools we use in these explorations.