About the AAMAS Conference

Agents are one of the most prominent and attractive technologies in computer science at the beginning of the new milennium. The technologies, methods, and theories of agents and multiagent systems are currently contributing to many diverse domains such as information retrieval, user interfaces, electronic commerce, robotics, computer mediated collaboration, computer games, education and training, ubiquitous computing, and social simulation. They not only are a very promising technology, but are also emerging as a new way of thinking, a conceptual paradigm for analyzing problems and for designing systems, for dealing with complexity, distribution, and interactivity, while providing a new perspective on computing and intelligence. The AAMAS conferences aim to bring together the world's researchers active in this important, vibrant, and rapidly growing field.

The AAMAS conference series was initiated in 2002 as a merger of three highly respected individual conferences (ICMAS, AGENTS, and ATAL). The aim of the joint conference is to provide a single, high-profile, internationally renowned forum for research in the theory and practice of autonomous agents and multiagent systems. We expect that the 2003 conference, in the attractive and cosmopolitan setting of Melbourne, Australia, will build on the successes and strengths of the 2002 conference, and will confirm AAMAS as a key event on the international computing research calendar.

The AAMAS conference is a merger of three highly successful related events:

• AGENTS (International Conference on Autonomous Agents)
• ICMAS (International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems), and
• ATAL (International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages)

The first AAMAS conference (AAMAS-2002, Bologna, Italy) attracted an astonishing 546 submissions, and is set to be the largest and most significant event in the academic history of agent systems to date. We expect AAMAS03 to build on this success.