COST Domain Committee "ICT"

COST Action (IC0801) Start Date 17 October 2008 End Date 16 October 2012

Agreement Technologies

FINAL EVALUATION REPORT

This Report stems from the relevant Domain Committee. It contains four parts:

I. Management Report prepared by the COST Office/Grant Holder II. Scientific Report prepared by the Chair of the Management Committee of the Action. III. Evaluation Report prepared by the “ad hoc” Evaluation Panel, established by the Domain Committee, and edited by the COST Office. IV. DC General Assessment prepared by the Domain Committee

Appendices: Confidentiality: the documents will be made available to the public via the COST Action web page except for chapter II.D. Self evaluation and III. Evaluation Report.

Executive summary of the Scientific Report (max.250 words):

COST Action IC0801 on Agreement Technologies (AT) pursued the vision of next-generation open distributed systems, where interactions between computational agents are based on the concept of agreement. It brought together researchers from different disciplines, including multiagent systems, semantic technologies, and social sciences. Its overall mission was to support and promote the harmonisation of nationally-funded high-quality research towards the vision of AT. For this purpose, fundamental and applied research in five key areas was coordinated: Semantics, Norms, Organisation, Argumentation & Negotiations, as well as Trust. This was complemented by the endeavour to foster interdisciplinary research, so as to achieve solid conceptual foundations for the paradigm, by means of a robust understanding of the notion of agreement and agreement processes. The Action intensively applied the various COST instruments, with quantitative results that exceeded several times the numbers initially stipulated in the MoU. Its interdisciplinary approach produced innovative new knowledge and had significant scientific impact at European level, and world-wide. The Action's networking activities successfully pooled the efforts undertaken across various community fractions and in different COST members states into the novel field of AT, showing a clear potential for tangible impact, both at socio-economic level and in the realm of policy-making. The Action produced a handbook that, for the first time, provides a comprehensive overview of the emerging field of AT, supported by a set of video-lectures, publicly available from the Action web site, which constitutes the foremost repository of information and resources on AT. The International Conference on AT was celebrated towards the end of the Action, as the first event of a series that will be held regularly. The high level of activity within the Action, the strong commitment of key players within the field, as well as the important involvement of early-stage researchers in the AT community bear witness to its sustainability in time.

I. Management Report prepared by the Grant Holder I.A. COST Action Fact Sheet

COST Action IC0801 – Agreement Technologies

Domain: Information and Communication Technologies

Action details:

CSO Approval: 18/06/2008 End date: 16/10/2012

Entry into force: 07/08/2008 Extension:

Objective:

To coordinate national efforts on a new paradigm for next generation distributed systems,

based on the concept of agreement between computational agents

Parties: list of countries and date of acceptance

Austria (20/01/2011) Hungary (07/08/2008) Romania (05/12/2008)

Belgium (01/10/2008) Ireland (07/08/2008) Serbia (20/01/2011)

Croatia (15/03/2010) Israel (26/01/2010) Slovenia (05/02/2009)

Cyprus (22/10/2008) Italy (21/10/2008) Spain (07/08/2008)

Estonia (10/12/2008) Luxembourg (21/10/2008) Sweden (27/10/2008)

Finland (18/06/2009) Malta (11/02/2011) Switzerland (21/08/2008)

France (01/10/2008) Netherlands (13/10/2008) United Kingdom (07/08/2008)

Germany (07/08/2008) Poland (11/06/2009)

Greece (22/09/2008) Portugal (10/12/2008)

Other participants:

o Universidad Nacional del Sur – Bahía Blanca – Argentina

o University of Technology – Sydney – Australia

o Swinburne University of Technology – Melbourne – Australia

o Instituto de Informática da UFRGS – Porto Alegre – Brazil

o Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana – Cuajimalpa – Mexico

o University of Otago – New Zealand

o British University in Dubai – United Arab Emirates

o City University of New York, Brooklyn College – U.S.A.

Chair:

Sascha Ossowski – URJC/CETINIA –

Calle Tulipán, s/n – 28933 Móstoles –

Spain – (+34)916647485 –

sascha.ossowski@urjc.es

DC Rapporteur:

Mieczyslaw Muraszkienwicz,

Warsaw University of Technology- ul.

Nowowiejska 15/19 – 00665 Warsaw –

Poland – mietek@n-s.pl

Science Officer:

Dr. Ralph Stuebner–

ralph.stuebner@cost.eu

Administrative Officer:

Aranzazu Sanchez–

aranzazu.sanchez@cost.eu

Action Web site: http://www.agreement-technologies.eu

Grant Holder Representative: Juan Juliá-Igual – Technical University of Valencia

Working Groups:

WG1 “Semantics” (36 members): Atencia Arcas, Manuel; Bonatti, Piero; Constantini, Stefania;

Davidsson, Paul; De Leenheer, Pieter; Erdem, Esra; Euzenat, Jérôme; Fernández Gil, Alberto;

Florea, Adina; Fornara, Nicoletta; Gandon, Fabien; Gravier, Christophe; Gustafsson Friberger,

Marie; Hogan, Aidan; Ježić, Gordan; Kaerger, Philipp; Kušek, Mario; Meersman, Robert; Mileo,

Alessandra; Pan, Jeff; Paprzycki, Marcin; Passant, Alexandre; Pearce, David Andrew; Pérez,

José Santiago; Rudolph, Sebastian; Salampasis, Michail; Schorlemmer, Marco; Serrano, Juan

Manuel; Stipancic, Tomislav; Straccia, Umberto; Subercaze, Julien; Toni, Francesca; Torroni, Paolo; Villata, Serena; Vouros, George; Zimmermann, Antoine

WG2 “Norms” (60 members): Agotnes, Thomas, Amblard, Frederic, Andrighetto, Giulia, Artikis,

Alexander, Bergenti, Federico, Boella, Guido, Boissier, Olivier, Botti Navarro, , Vicente Juan,

Brazier, Frances, Caire, Patrice, Carmo, Jose, Casanovas, Pompeu, Castelfranchi, Cristiano,

Cholvy, Laurence, Christelis, George, Coelho, Helder, Colin, Jean-Noel, Conte, Rosaria,

Cranefield, Stephen, Criado Pacheco, Natalia, da Rocha Costa, Antônio Carlos, Del Cerro,

Fariñas, Dimuro, Graçaliz, Fagundes, Moser, Gangemi, Aldo, Grossi, Davide, Herzig, Andreas,

Horty, John F., Jamroga, Wojtek, Lamma, Evelina, Lang, Jérôme, Lopes Cardoso, Henrique, Lorini, Emiliano, Luck, Michael, López-Sánchez, Maite, Meneguzzi, Felipe, Meyer, John-Jules,

Miles, Simon, Noriega, Pablo, Norman, Tim, Oren, Nir, Ortiz, Rubén, Parent, Xavier, Peña, Luis,

Pigozzi, Gabriella, Pitt, Jeremy, Quaresma, Paulo, Santos, Filipe, Sartor, Giovanni, Sergot,

Marek, Serrano, JuanManuel, Singh, Munindar P., Slavkovik, Marija, Torroni, Paolo, van der

Torre, Leon, van Engers, Tom M., Villata, Serena, Villatoro, Daniel, Vázquez Salceda, Javier, Wickramasinghe, Leelani

WG3 “Organisations” (38 members): Argente Villaplana, Estefanía; Billhardt, Holger; Boissier,

Olivier; Carrascosa Casamayor, Carlos; Centeno, Roberto; Colombetti, Marco; Cuesta, Carlos

E.; Esparcia, Sergio; Esteva, Marc; Fernandez Gil, Alberto; Fornara, Nicoletta; Garcia, Emilia;

Giret Boggino, Adriana; Görmer, Jana; Hermoso, Ramon; Hubner, Jomi; Kumalakov,

Bolatzhan; Kumalakov, Bolatzhan; Lujak, Marin; Noriega, Pablo; Okouya, Daniel; Oliveira,

Eugenio; Ossowski, Sascha; Padget, Julian; Perez, José Santiago; Ricci, Alessandro; Rocha,

Ana Paula; Rodriguez Aguilar, Juan Antonio; Schumacher, Michael I.; Schumann, Rene; Sierra,

Carles; Tampitsikas, Charalampos; Taveter, Kuldar; van Riemsdijk, Birna; Varga, Laszlo Z.; Vasirani, Matteo; Vizzari, Giuseppe; Weyns, Danny

WG4 “Argumentation & Negotiation” (58 members): Amgoud, Leila; Atkinson, Katie; Baroni,

Pietro; Bench-Capon, Trevor; Bex, Floris; Bistarelli, Stefano; Black, Liz; Bonzon, Elise;

Caminada, Martin; Cerutti, Federico; Chesnevar, Carlos; Costantini, Stefania; Davidsson, Paul;

Dimopoulos, Yannis; Dondio, Pierpaolo; Dunne, Paul; Euzenat, Jérôme; Fan, Xiuyi; Fernandez

Gil, Alberto; Giacomin, Massimiliano; Gratie, Cristian; Hadjinikolis, Christos; Heras, Stella;

Hindriks, Koen; Hunter, Anthony; Kakas, Antonis; Lang, Fabian; Longo, Luca; Lujak, Marin;

Maudet, Nicolas; Medellin Gasque, Rolando; Mileo, Alessandra; Modgil, Sanjay; Moraitis,

Pavlos; Morge, Maxime; Noriega, Pablo; Oren, Nir; Paglieri, Fabio; Pan, Jeff; Piunti, Michele; Prakken, Henry; Rosenschein, Jeffrey; Salampasis, Michail; Santini , Francesco; Schneider,

Jody; Simari, Guillermo; Stathis, Kostas; Toni, Francesca; Torroni, Paolo; Tosic, Predrag;

Trojahn, Cassia; Van der Weide, Tom; van Gijzel, Bas; Verheij, Bart; Villata, Serena; Wickramasinghe, Leelani; Woltran, Stefan; Wyner, Adam

WG5 “Trust” (40 members): Bistarelli, Stefano; Centeno, Roberto; Dondio, Pierpaolo;

Fabregues, Angela; Fernandez Gil, Alberto; Hang, Chung-Wei; Hartig, Olaf; Hermoso, Ramon;

Jelenc, David; Kaerger, Philipp; Koster, Andrew; Malone, Paul; Mileo, Alessandra; Muller, G.;

Muller, Tim; Nardin, Luis Gustavo; Oliveira, Eugenio; Ossowski, Sascha; Paglieri, Fabio; Pan,

Jeff; Piunti, Michele; Prova, Anna; Rosenschein, Jeffrey; Rusman, Ellen; Sabater-Mir, Jordi;

Santini, Francesco; Sierra, Carles; Staab, Eugen; Such, Jose; Toni, Francesca; Torroni, Paolo;

Tosic, Predrag; Trcek, Denis; Urbano, Joana; Uridia, Levan; Varga, Laszlo; Vercouter, Laurent;

Wickramasinghe, Leelani; Yaich, Reda; Zupancic, Eva

I.B. Management Committee member list

COST Participants:

Name Country E-mail Sascha Ossowski (chair) Spain sascha.ossowski@urjc.es

Vicent Botti (co-chair) Spain vbotti@dsic.upv.es

Katharina Siorpaes (member) Austria katarina.siorpaes@sti2.at

Danny Weyns (member) Belgium danny.weyns@cs.kuleuven.be

Robert Meersman (member) Belgium meersman@vub.ac.be

Mario Kusek (member) Croatia mario.kusek@fer.hr

Gordan Jezik (member) Croatia gordan.jezic@fer.hr

Ana Petric (substitute) Croatia ana.petric@fer.hr Vedran Podobnik (substitute) Croatia vedran.podobnik@fer.hr

Antonios Kakas (member) Cyprus antonis@ucy.ac.cy

Ioanaa Dionysiou (member) Cyprus dionysiou.i@unic.ac.cy

Kuldar Taveter (member) Estonia kuldar.taveter@ttu.ee

Merik Meriste (member) Estonia merik.meriste@ut.ee

Lea Kutvonen (member) Finland lea.kutvonen@cs.helsinki.fi

Pavlos Moraitis (member) France pavlos@mi.parisdescartes.fr

Leila Amgoud (member) France amgoud@irit.fr

Matthias Klusch (member) Germany klusch@dfki.de

Jurgen Dix (member) Germany dix@informatik.tu-clausthal.de

Oliver Keller (substitute) Germany keller@dfki.de

George Vouros (member) Greece georgev@aegean.gr

Michail Salampasis (member) Greece cs1msa@it.teithe.gr

Laszlo Zsolt Varga (member) Hungary laszlo.varga@sztaki.hu

Axel Polleres (member) Ireland axel.polleres@deri.org

Jeffrey Rosenschein (member) Israel jeff@cs.huji.ac.il

Piero Andrea Bonatti (member) Italy bonatti@na.infn.it

Cristiano Castelfranchi (member) Italy cristiano.castelfranchi@istc.cnr.it

Emyl Weydert (member) Luxembourg emil.weydert@uni.lu

Martin Caminada (substitute) Luxembourg martin.caminada@uni.lu

Leon van der Torre (substitute) Luxembourg leon.vandertorre@uni.lu

Mathew Montebello (member) Malta matthew.montebello@um.edu.mt Charlie Abela (substitute) Malta charlie.abela@um.edu.mt

Alexiei Dingli (substitute) Malta alexiei.dingli@um.edu.mt

John Jules Meyer (member) Netherlands jj@cs.uu.nl

Pieter G.M. De Leenheer (member) Netherlands pgm.de.leenheer@few.vu.nl

Marcin Paprzycki (member) Poland marcin.paprzycki@ibspan.waw.pl

Maria Ganzha (member) Poland mganzha@inf.ug.edu.pl

Eugenio Oliveira (member) Portugal eco@fe.up.pt

Adina Magda Florea (member) Romania adina@cs.pub.ro

Viorel Negru (member) Romania vnegru@info.uvt.ro

Mirjana Ivanovic (member) Serbia mira@dmi.uns.ac.rs

Denis Trcek (member) Slovenia denis.trcek@fri.uni-lj.si

Eva Zupancic (substitute) Slovenia iztok.starc@fri.uni-lj.si

David Jelenc (substitute) Slovenia david.jelenc@fri.uni-lj.si

Carles Sierra (member) Spain sierra@iiia.csic.es

Henricus Verhagen (member) Sweden verhagen@dsv.su.se

Paul Davidsson (member) Sweden paul.davidsson@bth.se

Michael Schumacher (member) Switzerland michael.schumacher@hevs.ch

Marco Colombetti (member) Switzerland colombem@lu.unisi.ch

Nicoletta Fornara (substitute) Switzerland nicoletta.fornara@usi.ch

Francesca Toni (member) United Kingdom ft@doc.ic.ac.uk

Michael Luck (member) United Kingdom michael.luck@kcl.ac.uk

Michael Wooldrige (substitute-Pending) United Kingdom mjw@liv.ac.uk

Nick Jennings (substitute-Pending) United Kingdom nrj@ecs.soton.ac.uk

Non-COST Participants:

Name Country E-mail

Carlos Ivan Chesñevar Argentina cic@cs.uns.edu.ar

John Debenham Australia debenham@it.uts.edu.au

Ryszard Kowalczyk Australia rkowalczyk@swin.edu.au

Ana Lucía Bazzan Brazil bazzan@inf.ufrgs.br

Christian Lemaitre Mexico christian.lemaitre@gmail.com

Iyad Rahwan United Arab Emirates irahwan@acm.org

Simon Parsons U.S.A parsons@sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu

Stephen Cranefield New Zealand scranefield@Infoscience.otago.ac.nz

I.C. Overview activities and expenditure Budget Overview YR1 YR2 YR3 YR4 TOTAL Science Expenditure

60.940,00 € 100.500,00 € 81.200,00 € 145.000,00 € 387.640,00 €

FSAC 9.141,00 € 13.500,00 € 12.000,00 € 21.000,00 € 55.641,00 €

TOTAL Action Budget

70.081,00 € 114.000,00 € 93.200,00 € 166.000,00 € 443.281,00 €

Meetings (travel)

Beneficiary Date Place Cost Total

From To

Marco Colombetti 17 December 2008 18 December 2008 Bath (UK) 604,90 €

Axel Polleres 17 December 2008 18 December 2008 Bath (UK) 474,89 €

Cristiano Castelfranchi 18 March 2009 19 March 2009 Dagstuhl (DE) 839,72 €

Axel Polleres 23 April 2009 23 April 2009 Madrid (ES) 245,14 €

MC members 15 May 2009 16 May 2009 Budapest

(HU)

16.136,63 €

Piero Andrea Bonatti 01 June 2009 01 June 2009 Heraklion

(GR)

765,49 €

Carles Sierra 05 June 2009 05 June 2009 London (UK) 534,26 €

Sascha Ossowski 08 June 2009 09 June 2009 Santander

(ES)

670,58 €

TOTAL YR1 20.271,61 €

Guido Boella 01 December 2009 04 December 2009 Luxembourg

(LU)

892,69 €

MC members 15 December 2009 16 December 2009

Ayia Napa

(CY)

17.174,49 €

Antonino Rotolo 18 January 2010 19 January 2010 Amsterdam (NL)

745,85 €

3 participants 15 February 2010 20 February 2010 Barcelona

(ES)

468,00 €

MC meeting & WG workshops 04 June 2010 05 June 2010 Crete (GR) 23.940,77 €

TOTAL YR2 43.221,80 €

9 participants 06 July 2010 06 July 2010 Florence (IT) 3.131,45 €

4 participants 08 September 2010 10 September 2010 Brescia (IT) 1.517,46 €

Francesca Toni 18 October 2010 20 October 2010 Wisla (PL) 306,29 €

MC members 14 December 2010 15 December 2010 París (FR) 16.445,69 €

Giulia Andrighetto 07 February 2011 08 February 2011 Barcelona

(ES)

412,15 €

12 participants 25 March 2011 25 March 2011 London (UK) 3.082,94 €

TOTAL YR3 24.895,98 €

MC members+Invited Experts 14 July 2011 15 July 2011 Barcelona

(ES)

17.678,90 €

MC members+Invited Experts 16 November 2011 16 November 2011 Maastricht

(NL)

10.121,24 €

2 participants 19 December 2011 23 December 2011 Leiden (NL) 788,92 €

1 participant 1 February 2012 1 February 2012 Luxembourg (LU)

373,50 €

10 participants 20 April 2012 20 April 2012 London (UK) 2.417,62 €

MC members+ Invited Experts 1 June 2012 2 June 2012 Valencia (ES) 17.983,39 €

2 participants 10 June 2012 10 June 2012 Rome (IT) 794,98 €

2 participants 10 September 2012 12 September 2012 Vienna (AT) 800, 03 €

MC members + Invited

Experts

15 October 2012 16 October 2012 Dubrovnik

(HR)

25.059,97 €

TOTAL YR4 76.018,55 €

TOTAL 164.407,94 €

Meetings (org. support)

Title Date Place Cost Total

From To

CG Meeting & AT Panel 17 December 2008 18 December 2008 Bath (UK) 1.000,00 €

MC meeting & WG meeting 15 May 2009 16 May 2009 Budapest

(HU)

5.194,76 €

Secretarial Local organiser 08 June 2009 12 June 2009 Barcelona

(ES)

2.500,00 €

TOTAL YR1 8.694,76 €

MC Meeting & WG Meetings 15 Dec 09 16 Dec 09 Ayia Napa

(CY)

5.359,50 €

MC Meeting & WG Workshops 04 June 2010 05 June 2010 Heraklion

(GR)

2.652,50 €

TOTAL YR2 8.012,00 €

MC Meeting & WG Workshops 14 December 2010 15 December 2010 Paris (FR) 4.530,00 €

LAF Workshop 25 March 2011 25 March 2011 London (UK) 1.719,19 €

TOTAL YR3 6.249,19 €

MC Meeting Barcelona 14 July 2011 15 July 2011 Barcelona

(ES)

1.821,00 €

MC Meeting Maastricht 16 November 2011 16 November 2011 Maastricht (NL)

834,60 €

LAF 2012 20 April 2012 20 April 2012 London (UK) 1.489,48 €

MC Meeting Valencia 1 June 2012 2 June 2012 Valencia (ES) 1.343,06 €

COST AT Panel 10 September 2012 12 September 2012 Vienna (AT) 400,00 €

MC Meeting Dubrovnik 15 October 2012 16 October 2012 Dubrovnik

(HR)

6.844,00 €

TOTAL YR4 12.732,14 €

TOTAL 35.688,09€

STSMs Beneficiary Date Place Cost Total

From To

George Vouros 17 June 2009 26 June 2009 Galway (IE) 1.980,00 €

Matteo Vasirani 01 March 2009 31 May 2009 Porto (PT) 2.000,00 €

Stella Heras 23 April 2009 30 June 2009 Liverpool (UK) 2.000,00 €

Nardine Osman 09 June 2009 30 June 2009 Rome (IT) 2.000,00 €

René Shumann 21 June 2009 30 June 2009 Madrid (ES) 900,00 €

Oliver Pawloswski 21 June 2009 28 June 2009 Madrid (ES) 1.550,00 €

TOTAL YR1 10.430,00€

Philipp Kärger 20 July 2009 12 August 2009 Galway (IE) 2.000,00 €

Piero Bonatti 26 July 2009 16 August 2009 Galway (IE) 2.000,00 €

Madalina Croitoru 22 August 2009 31 August 2009 London (UK) 1.000,00 €

Sergio Alvarez-Napagao 01 October 2009 31 December 2009 Utrecht (NL) 2.000,00 €

Elena Nardini 01 October 2009 31 December 2009 Sierre (CH) 2.000,00 €

Alexandros Belesiotis 28 October 2009 29 November 2009 Dubai (UAE) 2.500,00 €

Carles Sierra 27 December 2009 26 January 2010 Sydney (AUS) 2.500,00 €

Umberto Straccia 07 June 2010 13 June 2010 Galway (IE) 1.350,00 €

Robrecht Haesevoets 16 January 2010 31 January 2010 Utrecht (NL) 557,18 €

Martin Caminada 29 January 2010 13 February 2010 Dubai (UAE) 2.000,00 €

Nicoletta Fornara 31 January 2010 05 February 2010 Barcelona

(ES)

650,00 €

Stefano Bromuri 01 February 2010 31 March 2010 Sierre (CH) 2.000,00 €

Ángela Fabregues Vinent 01 March 2010 28 March 2010 Jerusalem

(IL)

2.000,00 €

Noelie Bonjean 01 March 2010 30 April 2010 Delft (NL) 2.000,00 €

Marija Slavkovik 21 March 2010 28 March 2010 Torino (IT) 1.500,00 €

Serena Villata 07 June 2010 17 June 2010 Luxembourg

(LU)

1.900,00 €

Giorgios Santipantakis 20 June 2010 29 June 2010 Galway (IE) 1.200,00 €

Cynthia Emilia Villalba 03 May 2010 30 June 2010 Madrid (ES) 2.000,00 €

Janneke van der Zwaan 01 May 2010 30 June 2010 Porto (PT) 2.000,00 €

Elena del Val 01 April 2010 30 June 2010 Saarbrücken

(DE)

2.000,00 €

Roberto Centeno 01 April 2010 01 June 2010 London (UK) 2.000,00 €

TOTAL YR2

37.157,18 €

Emiliano Lorini 05 September 2010 25 September 2010 Barcelona

(ES)

2.000,00 €

Aidan Hogan 05 July 2010 11 July 2010 Napoli (IT) 1.000,00 €

Anca Dumitrache 01 July 2010 01 September 2010 Galway (IE) 2.000,00 €

Francesco Santini 14 August 2010 21 August 2010 Lisbon (PT) 700,00 €

Stefano Bistarelli 03 September 2010 09 September 2010 Scotland (UK) 1.000,00 €

Meritxell Vignals 01 October 2010 30 December 2010 Southampton

(UK)

2.000,00 €

Sylwia Polberg 07 November 2010 18 November 2010 Barcelona

(ES)

750,00 €

David Jelenc 16 May 2011 16 June 2011 Madrid (ES) 1.800,00 €

Carles Sierra 02 January 2011 08 January 2011 London (UK) 900,00 €

Antoine Zimmermann 23 January 2011 05 February 2011 Galway (IE) 600,00 €

Torsten Schaub 20 February 2011 25 February 2011 Galway (IE) 800,00 €

Marija Slavkovic 28 February 2011 05 March 2011 Torino (IT) 830,00 €

Vojciech Jamroga 28 May 2011 05 June 2011 Madrid (ES) 900,00 €

Paolo Torroni 13 March 2011 19 March 2011 London(UK) 1.020,00 €

Michele Piunti 14 March 2011 26 March 2011 London (UK) 1.400,00 €

Alberto Fernández Gil 05 June 2011 20 June 2011 London (UK) 1.700,00 €

Radu Casian Mihailescu 24 April 20110 15 June 2011 Clausthal

(DE)

1.500,00 €

Antonis Kakas 23 March 2011 30 March 2011 London (UK) 1.000,00 €

Reda Yaich 17 April 2011 22 April 2011 Aberdeen

(UK)

900,00 €

Katie Bentley 07 June 2011 14 June 2011 Utrecht (NL) 625,00 €

Pierpaolo Dondio 21 March 2011 30 March 2011 London (UK) 1.000,00 €

Alan Perotti 25 March 2011 17 April 2011 London (UK) 2.000,00 €

Jana Görmer 09 May 2011 19 June 2011 Madrid (ES) 2.000,00 €

Federico Cerutti 25 April 2011 30 June 2011 Liverpool (UK) 1.984,00 €

Philip Obermeier 21 April 2011 15 May 2011 Potsdam (DE) 700,00 €

Alessandra Mileo 02 May 2011 09 May 2011 Potsdam (DE) 1.350,00 €

Henrique Lopes Cardoso 02 May 2011 08 May 2011 Madrid (ES) 850,00 €

Levan Uridia 15 May 2011 30 June 2011 Toulouse (FR) 2.000,00 €

José Miguel Such 31 March 2011 30 June 2011 Edinburgh

(UK)

2.000,00 €

Longo Luca 07 June 2011 16 June 2011 London (UK) 1.300,00 €

Nir Oren 13 June 2011 20 June 2011 Montpellier

(FR)

640,00 €

Henry Prakken 23 May 2011 27 May 2011 London (UK) 1.250,00 €

Moser Silva Fagundes 06 September 2011 15 December 2011 London (UK) 1.000,00 €

TOTAL YR3

41.499,00 €

Sofia Panagiotidi 13 Junio 2011 13 September 2011 Utrecht (NL) 2.000,00 €

Alexander Artikis 26 June 2011 1 July 2011 London (UK) 930,00 €

Alberto Fernández Gil 14 July 2011 12 August 2011 Galway (IE) 1.000,00 €

Pere Pardo 15 July 2011 15 October 2011 Oxford (UK) 2.000,00 €

Natalia Criado Pacheco 17 July 2011 29 July 2011 Utrecht (NL) 1.100,00 €

Bartosz Michalik 01 September 2011 16 October 2011 Vaxjo (SE) 2.000,00 €

Amineh Ghorbani 27 September 2011 12 October 2011 Barcelona

(ES)

1.700,00 €

Levan Uridia 31 October 2011 14 December 2011 Liverpool (UK) 2.000,00 €

Charalampos Tampitsikas 01 November 2011 30 November 2011 Barcelona (ES)

2.000,00 €

Víctor Sánchez Anguix 02 December 2011 11 December 2011 Delft (NL) 1.600,00 €

Luca Longo 11 December 2011 23 December 2011 Israel (IL) 1.800,00 €

Serena Villata 16 December 2011 23 December 2011 Torino (IT) 550,00 €

Jodi Schneider 09 January 2012 08 February 2012 Liverpool (UK) 2.000,00 €

Olivier Boissier 16 January 2012 20 January 2012 Spain (ES) 800,00 €

Alex Carmine Olivieri 27 February 2012 15 March 2012 Sierre (CH) 900,00 €

Emilia García 01 March 2012 30 April 2012 London (UK) 1.200,00 €

Juan M. Alberola 01 March 2012 31 May 2012 Aberdeen

(UK)

1.200,00 €

Tomás Trescak 05 March 2012 31 May 2012 Verona (IT) 1.200,00 €

Matteo Vasirani 26 March 2012 6 April 2012 Zurich (CH) 900,00 €

Tomislav Stipancic 11 April 2012 11 May 2012 Madrid (ES) 1.900,00 €

Eva Zupancic 15 April 2012 15 May 2012 Tallinn (EE) 1.900,00 €

Katarzyna Wasielewska 22 April 2012 28 April 2012 London (UK) 770,00 €

Gillian Basso 23 April 2012 25 May 2012 Sierre (CH) 1.200,00 €

Msury Mahunnah 15 May 2012 15 June 2012 Sierre (CH) 1.900,00 €

Pawel Szmeja 12 June 2012 19 June 2012 Saint Etienne

(FR)

700,00 €

Mirjana Ivanovic 17 June 2012 30 June 2012 Warsaw (PL) 1.650,00 €

Ulricht Schaechtle 12 August 2012 03 September 2012 Switzerland

(CH)

1.900,00 €

Wojtek Jamroga 05 September 2012 15 September 2012 Portugal (PO) 1.300,00 €

Christoph Schawarz 09 September 2012 16 September 2012 Spain (ES) 1.100,00 €

Sergio Esparcia 10 September 2012 22 September 2012 France (FR) 900,00 €

Alan Perotti 24 September 2012 12 October 2012 London (UK) 1.200,00 €

TOTAL YR4 43.300,00 €

TOTAL 132.386,18 €

Training Schools Title Date from to Place Cost Total

Training School AT –

Scholarships

30 August 2009 04 Sep 2009 Torino (IT) 2.002,73 €

Training School AT –

Lecturers

30 August 2009 04 Sep 2009 Torino (IT) 1.216,34 €

Training School AT-

Org. support

30 August 2009 04 Sept 2009 Torino (IT) 5.130,00 €

TOTAL YR2 8.349,07 €

SEEMAS School 05 July 2010 10 July 2010 Bucharest

(RO)

5.200,00 €

DALT School 10 April 2011 15 April 2011 Cesena (IT) 3.000,00 €

TOTAL YR3 8.200,00 €

EASSS School 2011 11 July 2011 15 July 2011 Girona (ES) 2.500,00 €

Reasoning Web School 23 August 2011 28 August 2011 Galway (IE) 4.868,14 €

EASSS School 2012 28 May 2012 01 June 2012 Valencia (ES) 2.500,02 €

TOTAL YR4 9.868,16 €

TOTAL 26.417,23 €

Dissemination & Other Expenses Title Cost Total

YR1 21.543,63 €

YR2 3.759,95 €

YR3 355,83 €

YR4 3.081,15 €

TOTAL

28.740,56€

Total Science Expenditure: FSAC:

387.640,00 € 55.641,00 €

Total Eligible Costs: 443.281,00 €

II. Scientific Report Index

II.A Action fiche ................................................................................................................. 10

II.B Activities ..................................................................................................................... 12

II.B.1 Meetings ............................................................................................................ 12

II.B.2 Training ............................................................................................................. 14

II.B.3 STSMs ............................................................................................................... 15

II.B.4 Dissemination .................................................................................................... 16

II.B.5 Liaison ............................................................................................................... 16

II.B.6 Coordination and Management .......................................................................... 17

II.C Results ....................................................................................................................... 18

II.C.1 Innovative networking ........................................................................................ 18

II.C.2 Inter-disciplinary networking .............................................................................. 21

II.C.3 New networking ................................................................................................. 23

II.C.4 Results vs. Objectives ....................................................................................... 25

II.A Action fiche

The COST Action IC0801 on Agreement Technologies (AT) pursued the vision of next-generation open distributed systems, where interactions between computational agents are based on the concept of agreement. It brought together researchers from different disciplines, including multiagent systems, semantic technologies, and social sciences. Its overall mission was to support and promote the harmonisation of nationally-funded high-quality research towards a new paradigm for next generation distributed systems based on the notion of agreement between computational agents. For this purpose, fundamental and applied research in five key areas was coordinated: Semantics, Norms, Organisation, Argumentation & Negotiations, as well as Trust. This was complemented by the endeavour to foster interdisciplinary research, so as to achieve solid conceptual foundations for the paradigm, by means of a robust understanding of the notion of agreement and agreement processes. As illustrated by Figure 1, five Working Groups (WGs) were created (one for each of the key areas mentioned above), being foundational and application aspects orthogonal to the WGs' topics of interest.

Figure 1. Working Groups

The Action started in 2008 and was funded for 4 years, ending officially on October 16th, 2012. At the end of the Action, 25 COST countries (see Figure 2) as well as 8 institutions from 7 non-COST countries were members of the Action. In this context, 193 researchers organised in 5 Working groups collaborated to realise the Action's mission.

Figure 2. COST member countries of Action IC0801

The Action's management committee comprised 41 members, 13 substitutes, as well as 8 representatives from non-COST institutions (see Section I.B of this report). Coordination at WG-level was performed by the WG chairs and co-chairs. In the following the aims and scope of each WG is sketched:

WG1 – Semantics (chaired by George Vouros and Antoine Zimmermann)

The WG on Semantics emphasised on large-scale, open, distributed settings for the integration of ontologies and possibly non-monotonic rules; querying over distributed ontologies involving mapping rules and alignments; the alignment with existing Semantic Web standards; and investigating the interaction to other agreement technologies: enhancing semantic alignment techniques to cater for agreement relevant information (e.g. trust, provenance, argumentation and negotiation). Semantic is seen as being at the basis of the Agreement Technologies stack, as it determines the meaning of information at the level of data, services, computational resources, norms and organisation. The meaning permeates a distributed setting by way of semantic alignments built from argumentation processes and assessed according to trust models.

WG2 – Norms (chaired by Cristiano Castelfranchi and Giulia Andrighetto)

This WG studied models of norms and normative systems as well as their dynamics and impact. Agreements presuppose and are based on shared norms of negotiation as well as on the notions of respect and enforcement. In addition, norms evolve and stabilise through “agreements” either between people and groups or between formal instances and subjects. The WG took an interdisciplinary tack towards this problem, paying special attention to the role played by methodologies and tools (experiments, computational, formal and simulation models). It achieved advancements in central deontic aspects of virtual institutions and organisations, market and negotiation, as well as other key areas of AT.

WG3 – Organisations (chaired by Marco Colombetti and Estefanía Argente)

The aim of the WG was to explore how complex tasks can be tackled by a number of agents that have agreed to work together, obeying the rules and norms of an organisation. More specifically, the main challenges tackled were: (i) to identify the main organisational concepts relevant to open multiagent systems; (ii) to study how organisational structures can improve coordination processes in open environments; (iii) to study the effect of organisational regulation on the quality and flexibility of teamwork; (iv) to design mechanisms for team formation and teamwork that exploit organisational information to improve efficiency and effectiveness; and (v) to design mechanisms

for the adaptation of organisations in the face of relevant changes in the environment, task specification, etc.

WG4 – Argumentation and Negotiation (chaired by Francesca Toni and Sanjay Modgil)

Argumentation, initially studied in philosophy and law, has been researched extensively in computing in the last decade, especially for inference, decision making and decision support, dialogue, and negotiation. It provides a powerful mechanism for dealing with incomplete, possibly inconsistent information, and is an important factor for the resolution of conflicts and differences of opinion amongst different parties. Therefore, argumentation is a key ingredient to agreements and agreement processes. The WG explored formal properties of computational argumentation frameworks, and how they can be identified, interpreted and exploited in a negotiation context.

WG5 – Trust (chaired by Carles Sierra and Jordi Sabater)

The Working Group on Trust focused on the study, analysis and development of computational trust and reputation models with special emphasis on the relation with other agreement technologies. Its main objectives were to find synergies among European groups that work in the area of trust and reputation. II.B Activities The following sections summarise the research coordination activities carried out by the Action between October 2008 and October 2012. II.B.1 Meetings

During the Action’s life-time, different types of meetings were held in order to further the goal of promoting the coordination of foundational, applied and interdisciplinary research in the emergent field of Agreement Technologies. These activities are listed in the following. A complete list, as well as additional information on the programme and technical content of the events is available from the Action website (http://www.agreement-technologies.eu/activities/workshopsmeetings).

WG Workshops

The joint WG workshops served as the Action’s main tool for research coordination. In each edition of the workshops, the WGs held their meetings at the same site, in order to facilitate cross-attendance between the different WGs’ sessions. The WG workshops were often co-located with a major event for one of the disciplines targeted by the Action, so as to attract researchers from outside the Action as well. Co-location with events attended by PhD students and young Post-Docs helped attracting ESRs to the Action.

At the first joint WG workshops in May 2009 in Budapest, it became apparent that many interesting strands of research required collaboration among various WGs. Therefore, at the next meeting cross-WG sessions were introduced. This strategy then led to a “special theme” approach followed in subsequent meetings – the workshop programme comprised different sessions, each aimed at shedding light on a particular AT topic from the standpoint of one or several WGs.

The following list includes the 8 joint WG workshops organised by the Action, as well as their organisational and scientific coordinates. Further information about the workshop programmes and results is available through the Action website.

1. Dubrovnik, HR (Oct 2012 ) [YR4], @ AT-2012 – Merged with the AT conference sessions 2. Valencia, ES (Jun 2012) [YR4], @ AAMAS-2012 – Special Theme: Environments for AT 3. Maastricht, NL (Nov 2011) [YR4], @ EUMAS-2011 – Session on Environments for AT 4. Barcelona, ES (Jul 2011) [YR4], @ IJCAI-2011 – Special Theme: AT tools & applications 5. Paris, FR (Dec 2010) [YR3], @ EUMAS-2010 – Special Theme: Trust 6. Heraklion, GR (Jun 2010) [YR2], @ ESWC-2010 – Special Theme: Semantics 7. Ayia Napa, CY (Dec 2009) [YR2], @ EUMAS-2009 – Cross-WG panels 8. Budapest, HR (May 2009) [YR1], @ AAMAS-2009 – Single WG sessions

Supported events

The Action supported the organisation of several other workshops. Some of these events were intrinsically interdisciplinary in nature, focusing both on WG-specific or cross-WG foundational topics. These interdisciplinary workshops usually received a financial contribution from the Action to their organisational costs, as well as a set of travel grants for Action members. A second class of events were supported by the Action for dissemination purposes. These were usually events organised by other communities, on topics related to the field of Agreement Technologies. Action members attended these events and gave presentations so as to raise awareness of the Action and to convey its results. In these cases, a very limited number of travel grants were supported by the Action.

The following list includes the additional 23 events (besides the joint WG workshops) supported by the Action during the 4 years of its life-time. A dedicated event report is available for each of these workshops, and can be freely downloaded from the Action website.

1. First International Conference on Agreement Technologies (AT-2012). October 2012, Dubrovnik [YR4]

2. Panel on the added value of argumentation at COMMA-2012, September 2012, Vienna [YR4] 3. Doctoral Consortium at KR-2012, June 2012, Rome [YR4] 4. 2nd London Argumentation Forum for ESR, April 2012, London (UK) [YR4] 5. Workshop on Judgement Aggregation as an Agreement Methodology in Multiagent Systems,

February 2012, Luxembourg (LU) [YR4] 6. Lorentz Centre Workshop on Multi-Agent Organisation (MAO), December 2011, Leiden (NL)

[YR4] 7. Workshop on Theory and Applications of Formal Argumentation (TAFA): July 2011, Barcelona

(ES) [YR4] 8. 1st London Argumentation Forum for ESR, March 2011, London (UK) [YR3] 9. Interdisciplinary Workshop on the Emergence of Norms, February 2011, Barcelona (ES) [YR3] 10. Workshop on Agent Based Computing, from Model to Implementation (ABC:MI'10), October

2010, Wisła (PL) [YR3] 11. Panel on argumentation and negotiation at COMMA-2010, September 2010, Desenzano del

Garda (IT) [YR3] 12. Multi-Agent Logics, Languages, and Organisations Federated Workshops (MALLOW):

September 2010, Lyon (FR) [YR4] 13. Interdisciplinary Workshop on Norm Compliance, July 2010, Florence (IT) [YR3] 14. Interdisciplinary Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Social Neuroscience, February 2010,

Barcelona (ES) [YR2] 15. Interdisciplinary Workshop on Formal Models of Norm Change, January 2010, Amsterdam

(NL) [YR2] 16. Workshop on Deontic Logic in Computer Science, December 2009, Luxembourg (LU) [YR2] 17. COST AT Argumentation Day at MALLOW, September 2009, Turin (IT) [YR2] 18. Workshop on Joint Action, Commitment and Agreement, June 2009, London (UK) [YR1] 19. International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL), June 2009, Barcelona (ES)

[YR1] 20. Workshop on Trust and Privacy on the Social and Semantic Web, May 2009, Heraklion (GR)

[YR1] 21. Seminar on Agreement and Semantic Technologies, April 2009, Madrid (ES) [YR1] 22. Seminar on Norms and Agreement Technologies, March 2009, Dagstuhl (DE) [YR1] 23. Panel Session on Agreement Technologies at EUMAS-2008, December 2008, Bath (UK)

[YR1]

Endorsed events

Several other events were granted the Action’s label: this was usually the case for workshops organised outside of the Agreement Technologies community, but whose research topics were aligned with the aims and scope of the Action. The events were allowed to mention Action endorsement and to use its logo on their promotional material, while their call for papers and

programmes were publicised through the Action website. However, this did not imply a financial commitment of any type from the Action.

The following list includes 18 events that successfully requested the Action label. Further information on each of these events is available from the Action website.

1. 9th Workshop on Agents for Complex Systems (ACSys-2012), September 2012, Timisoara (RO) [YR4]

2. 2nd Workshop on Applications of Software Agents, September 2012, Novi Sad (RS) [YR4] 3. Workshop on Agent Based Computing: from Model to Implementation (ABC:MI), September

2012, Wroclaw (PL) [YR4] 4. 13th International Workshop on Computational Logic in Multi-Agent Systems (CLIMA), August

2012, Montpellier (FR) [YR4] 5. Trust, Incentives and Norms in open Multi-Agent Systems (TINMAS), March 2012, Salamanca

(ES) [YR4] 6. Logical Aspects of Multi-Agent Systems (LAMAS), November 2011, Osuna (ES) [YR4] 7. 8th Workshop on Agents for Complex Systems (ACSys-2011), September 2011, Timisoara

(RO) [YR4] 8. Joint Agent-oriented Workshops in Synergy (JAWS): September 2011, Szczecin (PL) [YR4] 9. 17th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming,

September 2011, Perugia (IT) [YR4] 10. Workshop on Applications of Software Agents, July 2011, Novi Sad (RS) [YR4] 11. 2nd Int. Workshop on Infrastructures and Tools for Multiagent Systems (ITMAS@AAMAS-

2011): May 2011, Taipei (TW) [YR3] 12. 3rd Int. Workshop on Collaborative Agents, Research and development

(CARE@AAMAS2011), May 2011, Taipei (TW) [YR3] 13. 12th Int. Workshop on Coordination, Organisations, Institutions and Norms in Agent Systems

(COIN@AAMAS-2011), May 2011, Taipei (TW) [YR3] 14. 11th International Workshop on Coordination, Organisation, Institutions and Norms in Multi-

Agent Systems (COIN@MALLOW 2010), September 2010, Lyon (FR) [YR3] 15. Workshop on Intelligent Agents and Technologies for e-Business (IAT4EB@ECAI-2010):

August 2010, Lisbon (PT) [YR3] 16. Workshop on Trust and Privacy on the Social and Semantic Web (SPOT@ESWC-2010): May

2010, Heraklion (GR) [YR2] 17. Workshop on Infrastructures and Tools for Multiagent Systems (ITMAS@AAMAS-2010): May

2010, Toronto (CA) [YR2] 18. Workshop on Coordination, Organisation, Institutions and Norms in Agent Systems

(COIN@AAMAS-2010), May 2010, Toronto (CA) [YR2]

II.B.2 Training

Among the Action’s objectives, the early integration of young researchers (to promote a rapid integration and sustained involvement of early-stage researchers in the community building process), as well as capacity building (the promotion of high-quality teaching in all aspects related to the Agreement Technology paradigm) were of foremost importance.

By consequence, 6 Training Schools were co-organised by the Action. Co-location with existing events in the field of agents and semantic web technology was sought. The Action contributed significantly to these events: senior researchers were sent as lecturers and ESRs attended mainly as students. Where possible, AT related lectures where grouped together so as to increase visibility.

The following list gives a brief overview of the Action’s training schools. Altogether, more than 400 students attended at least one of these schools. Further information on the programme and technical content of the training schools is available from the Action website (http://www.agreement-technologies.eu/activities/training-schools). In addition, Action members gave lectures at training events organised by other COST Actions (see Section II.B.5).

1. European Agent Systems Summer School-2012 (EASSS), May 2012, Valencia (ES) [YR4] 2. Reasoning Web 2011 Summer School (RW), August 2012, Galway(IE) [YR4]

3. European Agent Systems Summer School-2011 (EASSS), July 2011, Girona (ES) [YR4] 4. Int. Spring School on Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies (DALT): April 2011,

Cesena (IT) [YR3] 5. South-Eastern European Multiagent Systems Summer School (SEE-MAS), July 2010,

Bucharest (RO) [YR2] 6. 1st Agreement Technologies Training School @ EASSS, August 2009, Turin (IT) [YR1]

Besides the training schools, the two editions of the LAF workshop (see Section II.B.1) were geared particularly towards ESRs. These “London Argumentation Fora” were conceived as a means for providing an opportunity for PhD students and young Post-Docs researchers to present, discuss and get feedback on their recent work in the field of argumentation. It should also be noted that all editions of the joint WG workshops included a special session (“Agreement Technologies community meeting”) geared towards the needs of ESRs, so as to capture the experiences and expectations of this collective. The success of the Action’s efforts in this field is reflected by the fact that 84% of the beneficiaries of STSMs were ESRs (see also section II.B.3). II.B.3 STSMs

The Action’s STSM programme has been extremely successful over the whole lifetime of the Action. Many of the results presented in Section II.C, including joint papers and project proposals, were prepared within the Action’s STSMs. See Section I.C for a list of STSMs together with their key data. The final reports of all STSMs are available through the Action website (http://www.agreement-technologies.eu/activities/stsm)

While during YR1 7 STSMs were performed, this number rose to 21 during YR2, and reached 33 during YR3 and YR4, resulting in a remarkable overall number of 94 STSMs. This includes 6 RSTSMs whose destinations were research groups based at our non-COST institutions (see Parts I.A and II.C of this report). In line with the MoU, the STSMs can be subdivided in two categories: visits of senior researchers with duration of a few weeks, and ESR stays of up to three months. The average duration of STSM over the four years of Action lifetime was 30 days, with an average cost of 1.470 €. In this context, the high percentage of ESRs among the STSM beneficiaries (84%) is certainly worth mentioning. It should also be noted that the percentage of female researchers participating in the STSM programme reaches 31%, and is thus significantly higher than the relative number of women among Action members (approximately 20%).

Figure 3 shows the distribution of STSMs by home and host countries. While most STSM beneficiaries were from institutions in ES, IT, and FR, the countries most frequently hosting STSM researchers were the UK, ES, and IE. To this respect, not only would we like to highlight the broad coverage of the STSM programme, with STSMs from 19 origin and 17 destination countries. It is also worthwhile mentioning that during YR1 the STSM programme was mainly confined to institutions from Western Europe, and that the Action took measures to open it up to the more recent members of the community, until during YR3 and YR4 all regions and almost all countries involved in the Action actively took part in the programme. The good coverage of the programme extends to the different topics tackled by the Action: out of the 94 STSMs, 19 were associated to WG1, 16 to WG2, 24 to WG3, 19 to WG4 and 16 the WG5.

Figure 3. STSMs by Origins and Destinations

II.B.4 Dissemination

The Action’s web site has been its foremost means of dissemination. Other major dissemination activities included the preparation of a Springer book describing the state of the art in Agreement Technologies, the recording of a set of video-lectures supporting the book, and the organisation of the 1st International Conference on Agreement Technologies (AT-2012) (see Section II.C.1 for further details on these results). The participation of Action members in a variety of workshops and conferences organised within related communities, presenting Action activities and their results, was already mentioned in Section II.B.1.

Several types of promotional material were generated within the Action, and distributed at a broad variety of events. This includes an Action poster and, in particular, Action leaflets (see Figure 4) with general information about the Action's mission and objectives, aims and scope, as well as a short description of its WGs and STSM programme. At the beginning of the Action, its aims and scope was also announced in various scientific journals. A tailorable Powerpoint presentation of the Action as well as a set of Action logos can be freely downloaded from the Action website (http://www.agreement-technologies.eu/resources/downloads).

Figure 4. Action leaflet

II.B.5 Liaison

As stipulated in the Memorandum of Understanding, the Action took appropriate measures to ensure an effective cooperation with other COST Actions. This endeavour was particularly successful for COST Action IC0602 (“Algorithmic Decision Theory”) and IC0702 ("Combining Soft Computing Techniques and Statistical Methods to Improve Data Analysis Solutions"). The cooperation gave rise to a variety of concrete measures, including a mechanism to jointly announce the activities of the three Action, and presentations of the liaised Actions at the respective MC meetings. Members of our Action also gave lectures at training schools organised by Action IC0702, such as the "Spring School on Reasoning and Decision Making under Uncertainty and Imprecision" or the "Summer School on Soft Computing and Statistics" (see http://www.agreement-technologies.eu/activities/related-events).

Together with representatives from COST Actions IC0602, IC0702 and FP0804, our Action contributed to an Exploratory Workshop organised by the COST office on November 25th, 2010 in Brussels, with the aim of exploring future funding opportunities in the field of “Decision Sciences and Technology”. Both representatives from COST office (ICT DC) and the European Commission (DG INFSO, DIGIT) were present. The workshop provided an opportunity to discuss the objectives of the Framework Programmes, funding availability, and a possible positioning of the field of Decision Sciences and Technology within the upcoming Work Plan of the Eighth Framework Programme (FP8).

The Action undertook liaison activities with other European projects as well. For instance, part of the Joint WG workshops in Paris were organised in coordination with the Interdisciplines Workshop on Trust and Reputation, supported by the FP7 STREP "Liquid Pub". The SINTELNET Coordination Action of the FET area organised a panel at the First Int. Conference on Agreement Technologies (AT-2012). The CHIST-ERA project "Autonomic Software Engineering for online

cultural experiences (ACE)" co-located its technical meeting with AT-2012. A list of relevant projects is available from the Action website (http://www.agreement-technologies.eu/resources/project-database)

II.B.6 Coordination and Management The Action's total budget amounts to modest 443.281 € for its entire 4 years life-time. A detailed overview of cost items in the different categories is given in Section I.C of this report.

Figure 5 shows the budget amounts assigned to the Action on a yearly basis. In this context, it should be noticed that the yearly budgets were always assigned entirely, up to the last cent, at the end of each financial year.

Figure 5. Action budget by year

Figure 6 analyses the budget by cost categories. About 45% of the budget was assigned to meetings, including both organisational costs and travel grants. Slightly less than one third was dedicated to STSMs. The various training activities performed by the Action could be sustained with only 6% of the budget, while another 6% was assigned to dissemination and other costs. With about 12,5% of the available funds spent on scientific and administrative coordination, the Action is clearly below the maximum amount of 15% stipulated by the COST office.

Figure 6. Action budget by cost categories

In line with the "Rules and Procedures for implementing COST Actions", the Management Committee (MC) was in charge of the Action's strategic decision-making. For this purpose, MC meetings were held biannually, usually co-located with the Action's joint WG workshops, as shown in the following list:

MC Kick-off meeting, Brussels, BE (October 2008)

2nd MC meeting, Budapest, HU (May 2009)

3rd MC meeting, Ayia Napa, CY (December 2009)

4th MC meeting, Heraklion, GR (June 2010)

5th MC meeting, Paris, FR (December 2010)

6th MC meeting, Barcelona, ES (July 2011)

7th MC meeting, Maastricht, NL (November 2011)

8th MC meeting, Valencia, ES (June 2012)

9th MC meeting, Dubrovnik, HR (October 2012 )

Urgent strategic decisions that had to be taken between these meetings (such as budget revisions etc) were realised by the MC through email vote.

The operational coordination was performed by the Action's Core Group (CG), comprising the Action chair and co-chair, as well as the WG chairs and co-chairs. Initially, an on-site meeting was held in December 2008 in Bath (UK), co-located with EUMAS. In the following, the CG performed the day-to-day coordination by email and, when necessary, through audio-conferences. The minutes of MC and CG meetings and audio-conferences are available through the private area of the Action website. Several times, the Action's Advisory Board provided input to the decision-making of MC and CG. Further information on membership in the Action's management bodies is available in Part I of this report, as well as from the Action website (http://www.agreement-technologies.eu/management).

The Action management fully complied with its scientific and financial reporting duties. The Action's work and budget plans and revisions were submitted approximately every 6 months. A scientific progress report was submitted to the COST office on a yearly basis, and presented by the Action Chair at the COST ICT Annual Progress Conferences (both reports and APC presentations are publicly available through the Action website). Financial reports were submitted to the COST office at the end of each COST financial year. All reports were submitted complete and by the deadlines. II.C Results II.C.1 Innovative networking

The Action managed to produce innovative knowledge and to achieve significant scientific breakthroughs in the field of Agreement Technologies, with the potential of achieving important socio-economic impact at national and European level, as well as worldwide. The main results of innovative networking are summarised in the following paragraphs.

Action Website

The Action’s web site (http://www.agreement-technologies.eu/) has been its foremost means of dissemination. First of all, it offers a brief overview of the area of Agreement Technologies, and describes the COST Action and its members. It also constitutes a major means for distributing information related to the field: updated information on workshops and conferences, training schools, as well as the Action's visits programme can be accessed. Most importantly, the website gives access to a set of resources produced by the COST Action. This includes information on the AT book, AT video-lectures, and AT conference series (see below). But it also facilitates access to a clearinghouse of AT papers and reports, a repository of AT software and tools, as well as a list of AT applications and related projects. Several other useful items such as a tailorable Powerpoint presentation of the Action, Action poster and flyer, or a set of Action logos are available through the resources section of the website as well.

There are sub-sites for each of the Action’s WGs (see Figure 7). Each sub-site provides WG specific information (objectives, members, etc.) and resources (blogs, mailing lists, etc). The

Figure 7. Action website

institution maintaining the website (URJC, ES) has committed to keep it online after the end of the COST Action, and to dedicate local resources to it so as to keep its content up to date.

AT Book

A major outcome of the COST Action is the book "Agreement Technologies" published in December 2012 in the Law, Government and Technology Series (LGTS) of Springer Verlag. The back cover of this volume of the interdisciplinary LGTS collection states that

the book is the first one to provide a comprehensive overview of the emerging field of Agreement Technologies, written and coordinated by the leading researchers in the field. The results set out here are due for wide dissemination beyond the computing sector, involving law and social science fora as well.

The books encompasses over xlv, 645 pages, VII parts and 37 chapters, written by a huge collaborative effort of more than 90 Action members. To this respect, it should be noted that most teams of chapter authors comprise researchers from different Action institutions and member countries which, as we believe, is an indicator for the success of the Action's research coordination activities.

Figure 8 shows an outline of the book. Parts II to VI are dedicated to scientific results in each of the 5 WGs of the Action. Part I discusses foundational issues of Agreement Technologies, while Part VII describes several applications with potential socio-economic impact. Further information on the book is available from the Action website (http://www.agreement-technologies.eu/resources/at-book).

Figure 8. Outline of the AT book

AT Video-lectures

A set of video-lectures were produced to raise awareness of the emerging field of Agreement Technologies among the target groups of the COST Action, as well as to encourage the early adoption of the technology and to promote its applications. As such, they summarise and complement the different parts and chapters of the Agreement Technologies Book that the COST Action publishes with Springer Verlag. Ten lectures of approximately 10 minutes each are available on foundational (1, matching part I of the AT book), technological (5, matching parts II to VI of the AT book) and application (4, matching different chapters of part VII of the AT book) topics related to Agreement Technologies:

Agreement Technologies: A Bird’s-Eye view

Semantics in Agreement Technologies

Norms in Agreement Technologies

Organisations in Agreement Technologies

Agreement Technologies and Argumentation

Trust & Reputation in Agreement Technologies

A Case Study for Virtual Markets

Coordinating Emergency Medical Assistance

A Call Centre Study Case

An e-Government Application for Water Rights Agreements

The lectures can be freely downloaded from the Action website (http://www.agreement-technologies.eu/resources/videolectures).

AT Conference series

The Action’s efforts in the field of community building, promoting innovative and pragmatic joint research across the community fractions related to Agreement Technologies, as well as fostering interdisciplinary research in the field, and supporting a rapid integration and sustained involvement of early-stage researchers in the community, have given rise to a new international conference series. The events of the series aim at constituting an interdisciplinary forum that brings together researchers and practitioners working on the various topics comprising this emergent and vibrant field, providing an avenue to discuss and exchange new ideas and techniques for the design, implementation and verification of next generation open distributed systems centred on the notion of agreement among computational agents.

The 1st International Conference on Agreement Technologies (AT-2012) was held from October 15th to 16th, 2012, at the Centre for Advanced Academic Studies (CAAS) in Dubrovnik (HR). It focused on the following topics of interest, related to the aims and scope of the Action's WGs: Argumentation, negotiation, Trust and reputation, Coordination and distributed decision making, Computational Social Choice, Semantic alignment, Inter-theory Relations, Decision and game theoretic foundations for agreement, Agent Commitments, Semantic Service Coordination, Normative Systems, Individual reasoning about norm adoption, Collective deliberation about norm adoption, Autonomic Electronic Institutions, Group planning agreements, Deliberative Agreement: social choice and collective judgment, Evolution of organisational structures, Social intelligence, Logics for Agreements, Real-time agreements, Agreement patterns, Agreement technologies architectures, environments and methodologies, Applications of agreement technologies (e.g. web service composition, contract automation, supply chain automation, sensor networks, etc.).

With the help of an international programme committee, composed almost exclusively of Action members, out of 71 submitted papers 27 were accepted as full papers, an acceptance ratio of 38%. In addition, 25 position papers representing either a summary of original work that has already been published in other media, a summary of original results obtained as a product of STSMs funded by the Action, or ongoing research that can lead to important contributions to or of Agreement Technologies were accepted. The conference proceedings were published online as volume 918 of CEUR (http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-918/) and are indexed in the DBLP database. Selected papers were revised and extended for publication in the Artificial Intelligence Journal (2011 Impact factor 1.213). In addition, an AT stream was included in the AI Communications journal (2011 Impact factor 0.5).

The Actions MC meeting and WG workshop, as well as the technical meeting of the European ACE project were co-located with AT-2012, and a panel organised by the SINTELNET FP7 FET Coordination Action was part of the conference programme. Besides the COST Action, six other institutions and projects supported the event. Out of 73 delegates attending AT-2012, 20 were not members of the COST Action, showing that there is still significant potential for growth in the AT community.

Figure 9. AT video-lecture

Figure 10. AT-2012 logo

A Steering Committee was established for the AT conference series, comprising all 12 members of the Action's CG. This committee will assure the sustainability of the series along time. Further information on AT conferences is available from the Action website (http://www.agreement-technologies.eu/resources/at-conference).

Spin-off and socio-economic impact

The Action has given rise to several new projects in the field of Agreement Technologies, at national, European, and international level. Prominent examples are “SINTELNET: European Network on Social Intelligence” (FP7 FET CA, 2011-2014 ), “ACE: Autonomic Software Engineering” (CHIST-ERA, 2011-2013), or “Responsive automated negotiation in open distributed environments” (ARC Discovery Project, 2011-2013). The COST Action was the key driver for the approval of the project “Open Interaction Frameworks: A Model Based on Artificial Institutions – Towards a Governing Environment” funded by the Swiss State Secretariat for Education and Research SER and the Hasler Foundation, and carried out within the research groups led by our MC members for Switzerland. A list of related and spin-off projects is available from the Action website (http://www.agreement-technologies.eu/resources/project-database). Still, the Action’s spin-off was not limited to the raise of additional research funds. For instance, thanks to the AT network, in the follow-up of an STSM visit, Alessandra Mileo (initially based at U Potsdam, DE) was hired by the Digital Enterprise Research Institute at National University of Ireland, Galway, and is now leading a research unit there.

A variety of demonstrators in high profile domains have been developed in the many of the research projects associated to the Action. This includes applications on Medical Emergency Management, Crowd-sourcing, Intelligent Transportation Management, Policy Modelling and Evaluation and Customer Support, just to name a few. A functional description of these demonstrators and links to their corresponding project pages can be accessed through the aforementioned website. Technical details on the demonstrators can be found in Part VI of the Agreement Technologies book (see above).

The Action actively approached the actors of its socio-economic context so as to foster knowledge transfer towards the industrial sector. Furthermore, organised within the national research projects associated to the Action, several events targeting the industrial outreach of AT were undertaken. In February 2011, the 1st Agreement Technologies Industrial Day was held in Madrid. Several companies from services and product industries, consultant companies and other potential technological partners were invited, and demonstrators in the field of procurement and sourcing, IT health, as well as energy and water resource management, were presented to them. In September 2011, the 2nd Agreement Technologies Industrial Day was held in Valencia, where AT researchers proposed initial solutions to challenges posed by industry. At the 3rd Agreement Technologies Industrial Day, held in March 2012 in Barcelona, practitioners from industry and professors from a business schools oversaw the innovation proposals from ESRs in the field of AT. Further information on these events can be accessed through the "Related Events" section of the Action website. II.C.2 Inter-disciplinary networking

The Action's WGs brought together researchers from the different scientific target communities of the Action. Scholars from disciplines such as philosophy, logics, law, engineering (ICT), psychology, social sciences, linguistics, or cognitive science were participating actively in activities of the Action and its WGs. In particular, many of the events mentioned in Section II.B.1 fostered networking across disciplines. The following paragraphs give some examples.

In YR1, Action members took part in the workshop Joint action, Commitment, and Agreement, held on June 5th, 2009, in London, which was jointly organised by the London Institute of Philosophy and the University of Manchester. Margaret Gilbert from the University of Irvine talked about agreements, rights and joint intentions. Thomas Smith talked about collective self-governance and discussed collective intentions. Oliver Black, from King's College, defended the thesis that agreements and intentions are loosely coupled and that law tightens them. Thomas Pink, form King's College, sustained that promises are in fact a mechanism to signal reciprocity to the others; he gave a very academic discussion on several British philosophers on the notion of promise. Michael Bratman, from Stanford, gave a clear talk about the notion of shared intentions. The meeting clarified different points that are important for the automatic establishment of agreements.

During YR2, the Workshop on linking artificial intelligence with social neuroscience, held from February 18th-19th, 2010 in Barcelona, constitutes a good example of inter-disciplinary networking activities. The workshop gathered around 40 people in a relaxed atmosphere. Arcadi Navarro (UPF, ES) discussed the biological basis of cooperation and strongly argued of the genetic basis as the explanation of differences in behaviour. Along this line of work, Adolf Tobeña (UAB, ES) spoke about a psycho-pharmacology of agreement. A very interesting viewpoint was defended by Christian Keysers (U Groningen, NL) who argued that mirror neurons play a fundamental role in agreement-making as they are key in the process of ‘putting yourself in the position of the other’. Henry Prakken (U Utrecht, NL) and Mike Wooldridge (U Liverpool, UK) talked about the expressive power of argumentation and logic formalisms to represent and reason about agreements. Rosemarie Nagel (UPF, ES) argued that game theory is a good tool to support rational decision-making. Jordi Sabater-Mir (CSIC, ES) focused on cognitive models of trust as a basis for the management of agreements, and Paul van Lange (VUB, BE) talked about the influence of generosity and empathy on negotiation. The Interdisciplinary Workshop on Formal Models of Norm Change held in January 2010 in Amsterdam should also be mentioned in this context. The event tackled the dynamic aspects involved in normative systems, by pursuing an interdisciplinary approach at the interface of (deontic) logic, artificial intelligence, and socio-economical disciplines. More specifically, topics addressed included norms and games, norms for the dynamics of interaction (procedures), the dynamics of normative systems, norm change and the dynamics of different cognitive attitudes (e.g. knowledge and preference).

In YR3, it is worthwhile to mention the interdisciplinary workshop on norm compliance, held on July 6th, 2010, at the European University Institute in Florence, IT. The workshop aimed at developing a shared framework for understanding “norm compliance”, i.e. the process enabling an external request or command to be obeyed. Scholars from cognitive science, deontic logic, anthropology, law, social sciences, computer science, philosophy and experimental economics had the opportunity to tackle difficult problems and discuss theories and results about norm compliance, trying to exceed the boundaries of the single disciplines. Special attention was devoted to the role played by methodologies and tools, including experiments on norm compliance with humans, psychological and anthropological investigations, but also computational and simulation models on the subject matter. To further an inter-disciplinary discussion, every presentation was commented by a discussant coming from a different discipline, who summarised the main theses of the papers and then offered hints on how cross-fertilisation between the two domains could advance knowledge on the topic. The authors had then some minutes to reply, followed by a general discussion. The collaboration with the FP7 FET project “LiquidPub” in the framework of the Action’s joint WG workshops held on December 14th and 15th in Paris, FR, had a strong interdisciplinary focus as well. Several position papers on the topic of trust and reputation were submitted before the meeting by researchers with background from several disciplines. Critical comments regarding these contributions were exchanged with the help of an online tool developed by the LiquidPub project, and served as the basis for the final discussion at the workshop. The workshop was very successful and gathered 60 participants. As compared to traditional conferences, the goal of the workshop was not to present research that had already been conducted. Rather, this workshop was conceived as a venue for people to meet, interact and start collaborations with researchers from other fields and backgrounds

Finally, in YR4, the Panel session on the notion of agreement in science and engineering at the Action’s 5th Joint Working Group Workshops, held on July 15th, 2011, at the University of Barcelona, ES, constitutes a good example of the Action's inter-disciplinary networking activities. It

aimed at exploring the notion of agreement and agreement processes across disciplines. Pompeu Casanovas (UAB, ES) approached the topic from the perspective of Philosophy and Sociology of Law. Michael Luck (KCL, UK) pointed to the central role of the notion of contracts, as a specific type of public agreement, in the field of multiagent systems. Pablo Noriega (IIIA-CSIC, ES) made contributions from the viewpoint of Coordination Science. Finally, Luc Steels (Sony, FR) reported on models and experiments concerning emerging agreements on semantics, and language in general, among robotic agents. The Workshop on Multi-Agent Organisation (MAO), held from December 19th to 23rd, 2011, at the Lorentz Centre in Leiden, NL, had a distinctively interdisciplinary character as well. The goal of this workshop was to promote the discussion and exchange of ideas concerning computational models and programming frameworks for the design and development of normative multi-agent system organisations. For this purpose, it brought together researchers from different areas, including software engineering, logic, and social sciences to discuss their computational theories, models, tools, and techniques that can be utilised in the development of normative multi-agent organisations. Last but not least, the Panel on Social

Intelligence Principles and Engineering, chaired by Cristiano Castelfranchi at the 1st international Conference on Agreement Technologies (AT-2012) should be mentioned in this context. A variety of exciting questions were tackled by the panellists Andrew J I Jones, Pablo Noriega, and Enric Plaza: Are computer scientists sufficiently informed by conceptual models of social phenomena that they are engineering? In this context, is the path from theory construction, to formalisation, implementation, and application the right one? Did the work on AI and multiagent systems affect some crucial theories in Social Sciences the like the classical notions of "intelligence" and of "rationality" in philosophy, psychology, and economics?

The corresponding event reports describing their programmes and results are available from the Action web site.

In this context, it should be noted that many of the topics addressed by the WGs raised interdisciplinary challenges. For instance, WG3 aimed at building computational models inspired by organisational theories. To do so, researchers in this area systematically draw upon concepts and principles from scientific disciplines such as Organisational Theory and Activity Theory (see for instance the concepts of environment, artefact, etc.). While a majority of the members of WG3 were computer scientists, they have thoroughly exploited scientific ideas and results from these areas of research. In addition, many of the WG1 sessions at the joint WG workshops (especially the ones in Ayia Napa and Heraklion) were devoted to interdisciplinary topics as well. It should be noted that the interdisciplinary interactions at these events resulted in new knowledge and insights that gave rise to various scientific articles published jointly with members of other WGs, as well as cross-fertilization of ideas on combining work on semantics with work in other Agreement Technologies domains. II.C.3 New networking

Figure 11 shows the evolution of Action membership over time. The Action started already with significant size, managing to stabilise membership at 25 COST countries and 7 non-COST countries. All Action WGs have sufficient critical mass to enable significant cross-fertilisation among their members (notice that some of the 193 Action members belong to various WGs).

About 50% of Acton members are ESRs, and their contribution to the Action’s activities was significant and often essential. As an example, recall that 84% of the STSM beneficiaries were ESR, and have co-authored the conference and workshop papers that resulted from these missions. As mentioned in Section II.B.2, this strong involvement of ESR in the Action has been achieved by actively promoting the interests of ESRs and addressing their particular needs, as pointed in Section II.B.2

The number of female researchers among Action members remained stable at about 20% during the life-time of the Action. While there is certainly room for improvement, based on the numbers reported at the COST APC, this figure appears to be similar to the situation of most Actions in the ICT domain. It should be noticed that the Action actively promoted gender balance, reaching a level of 30% female members in the CG, and of 31% female STSM beneficiaries.

Figure 11 Evolution of Action members and number members per WG

As shown in Part I.A of this report, eight non-COST institutions are members of the Action. They have been participating actively in the Action's activities. One RSTSM was realised to non-COST institutions during YR1 (British University in Dubai, UAE), two during YR2 (TU Sydney, Australia, and British University in Dubai, UAE), one in YR3 (Universidad Nacional del Sur, Argentina) and two during YR4 (Swinburne University of Technology and TU Sydney, Australia). During YR1, John Debenham (TU Sydney) performed a research visit to IIIA-CSIC (ES) under the COST Reciprocal Agreement with Australia. Carlos Chesñevar (Universidad Nacional del Sur) joined the Budapest WG workshops as an invited expert. Bastin Tony Roy Savarimuthu (University of Otago) participated actively in the Dagstuhl WG2 meeting under the COST Reciprocal Agreement Scheme. During YR2, Carlos Chesñevar (Universidad Nacional del Sur) attended the Crete WG workshops and MC meeting. Dr Hiroshi Hosobe, National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, participated in the joint WG workshops at Cyprus (without Action funding). In YR3, Simon Parsons (City University of New York), Ryszard Kowalczyk (Swinburne University of Technology) and Stephen Cranefield (University of Otago) joined the MC meeting and joint WG workshops held in December 2010 in Paris (the former as invited expert, the latter two under the COST reciprocal scheme with Australia and New Zealand). Along YR4, Simon Parsons (City University of New York) gave a lecture at the EASSS Summer School in Girona. Carlos Chesñevar (Universidad Nacional del Sur) joined the MC meeting and WG workshops in Barcelona. Ryszard Kowalczyk (Swinburne University of Technology) was present at the MC meeting and WG workshops in Maastricht. Stephen Cranefield (University of Otago) attended the Action’s Valencia meeting, and Carlos Chesñevar (Universidad Nacional del Sur) was present at the latter meeting as well as at the AT-2012 conference in Dubrovnik under the reciprocal scheme with Argentina. It should also be noted that European Action members are taking part in the project "Responsive automated negotiation in open distributed environments”, funded by the Australian research Council (ARC Discovery Project, 2011-2013), and led by the non-COST partner Swinburne University of Technology, Australia. Figure 12 shows a world map highlighting Action member countries and the countries of non-COST institutions taking part in the Action.

Figure 12. COST Action members

Advancement, promotion, and dissemination of scientific knowledge have been essential for the Action during its entire life-time. As outlined in section II.B, a variety of outreach activities have been performed, including talks by Action members at events organised by related scientific communities (see Section II.B.1), and the production and distribution of promotional material such as posters, flyers, etc. (see Section II.B.4). The liaison activities with COST and FP7 projects should also be mentioned to this respect (see Section II.B.5). More concretely, over 150 publications have been published within the Action. A list is available from the paper clearinghouse on the Action web site (http://www.agreement-technologies.eu/resources/paper-clearinghouse). It should be noticed that many of these publications involve authors from different Action member countries and institutions. Several of them were the direct result of STSMs, or resulted from specific sessions or panels at joint WG workshops. Furthermore, the success of the Action’s outreach activities is reflected by its strong scientific impact. To this respect, it is worthwhile to mention the high interest in the Action web site (over 1300 clicks per day on average over the entire duration of the Action), the fact that event organisers actively seek association with the COST Action by requesting its "label" (even though no funding is involved), and the inclusion of the topic of interest “Agreement Technologies” into major national and international conferences (IJCAI, ECAI, AAMAS, MATES, CAEPIA, …). In addition, several demonstrators in high-profile areas testify the significant potential of Agreement Technologies for achieving relevant socio-economic impact.

II.C.4 Results vs. Objectives The Action has fully complied with the quantitative objectives put forward by the result indicators outlined in the MoU, and in most cases managed to surpass them significantly, as indicated in Table 1. Notice that the first number in the row “Workshops and conferences” refers to events that received financial support from the Action, while the second indicates the number of events with Action label (see Section II.B.1). The success of the STSM programme is particularly noticeable, as the number of STSMs effectively realised is more than 6 times higher than initially foreseen in the MoU.

Activity Year 1 Year 2 Year 3 Year 4 Total MoU

MC meeting / WG workshops

2/1 2/2 1/1 4/4 9/8 5/4

STSMs 7 21 33 33 94 15

Training Schools 0 1 2 3 6 1

Workshops and Conferences

6 4+3 6+5 7+10 23+18 15

Table 1. Quantitative result indicators (as of October 2012)

Furthermore, regarding a more qualitative evaluation of the Action, we would like to point out that, besides the high level of activity concerning research coordination, the Action has produced several important tangible results, as outlined in the previous sections. We believe that the high level of activity within the Action, the strong commitment of key players within the field, and the important involvement of early-stage researchers in the community bear witness to its sustainability in time.

IV. DC General Assessment prepared by the Domain Committee

Jürgen Habermas rightly emphasised the role of communicative reason for the humanity. In the age of man-machine and machine-machine communications this concept and its paraphernalia whose elements are negotiations, consents and agreements need to be enhanced and equipped with concrete methods and tools, especially of the ICT provenience. This Action is part of and positively contributes to this stubbornly difficult task.

The Action has achieved its objectives despite a complexity and inherent uncertainty related to the Action subject matter, and certain issues it encountered on its way, especially some budgetary problems. It provided a solid scientific and organizational background for advanced research and developments in the area of agreement technologies where autonomous software agents negotiate with one another, typically on behalf of humans, in order to reach mutually acceptable agreements. The scientific outcome of the Action is of the highest quality and ranks at the top of scientific standards. The Action successfully promoted joint and interdisciplinary research towards the emerging paradigm of Agreement Technologies, as well as fostering capacity building and the involvement of early-stage researchers in Europe. All the Action endeavours were given appropriate amount of attention and care by the Action’s Chair, Management Committee, and persons responsible for specific tasks, operation of WGs, and coordination of training schools and STSMs. Noteworthy, the Action enhanced its coverage to non-European countries such as: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, United Arab Emirates, USA, and New Zealand. The only criticism, if any, could be addressed to a weak resonance of the industrial side to the initiatives undertaken by the Action members.

One outcome of the Action deserves a special emphasis and can be considered a true “success story”, namely the “Agreement Technologies Book” (published in the Law, Government and Technology Series of Springer Verlag). The book is a comprehensive and readable summary of the research carried by the Action and now is a reference material and a blueprint for further research in the area of agreement technologies. Without any risk of exaggeration the book is a “bible” of a sort for this new scientific discipline. The person behind this successful enterprise is Prof. Sacha Ossowski, Action Chair.