The 1999 Asia-Pacific Conference on Intelligent-Agent Technology

challenges and opportunities that this area is or will be facing. The most important feature of IAT’99 was that it emphasized a multifaceted, holistic view of this emerging technology, from its computational foundations in terms of models, methodologies, and tools for developing a variety of embodiments of agent-based systems to its practical impact on tackling realworld problems. Much work went into the IAT’99 technical program: Original, highquality papers were solicited for various aspects of theories, applications, and case studies related to agent technologies. Full papers were submitted from 24 countries and regions of all The Asia-Pacific Conference on Intelligent-Agent Technology (IAT) is a high-quality, highimpact biennial agent conference series. IAT’99 was the first meeting in this new series and was held in Hong Kong from 14 to 17 December. It was sponsored by Hong Kong Baptist University, the Croucher Foundation, the Epson Foundation, The MIT Press, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Hong Kong, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Hong Kong Section Computer Chapter and in cooperation with ACM Special Interest Groups in Artificial Intelligence (SIGART), Knowledge Discovery in Data (SIGKDD), and Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI). Jiming Liu (Hong Kong Baptist University) and Ning Zhong (Yamaguchi University, Japan) were the program chairs, and Setsuo Ohsuga (Waseda University) and Ernest Lam (Hong Kong Baptist University) were the general chairs. IAT’99 successfully brought together over 150 researchers and practitioners to share their original research results and practical development experiences in intelligent-agent technology. The participants were from Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Macau, Malaysia, Norway, Portugal, Singapore, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. As the first international forum on agent technology taking place in the Asia-Pacific region, IAT’99 was aimed at capturing the essence of the current state of the art in intelligent-agent technology and identifying the new sentation and publication. Seventeen technical paper presentation sessions were organized that focused on agent architectures, multiagent cooperation, distributed intelligence, formal agent theories, knowledge discovery and data-mining agents, personalized web agents, software agents, mobile agents, and agent-supported enterprise. K. Suzanne Barber, Anuj Goel, and Cheryl E. Martin from the University of Texas at Austin won the IAT Best Paper Award with their paper entitled “The Motivation for Dynamic Adaptive Autonomy in AgentBased Systems.” IAT’99 was enriched by four invited talks given by internationally well-recognized experts from the areas of agent-based interfaces, autonomous agents and multiagent systems, largescale intelligent systems, and knowledge discovery and data mining. Daniel Ling, Microsoft’s director of research, delivered a speech entitled “Intelligent Agents: Embodied and Disembodied.” Jeffrey Bradshaw, associate technical fellow of The Boeing Company and leader of Boeing’s Intelligent-Agent Technology Program, gave a talk entitled “Steps toward the Permanent Colonization of Cyberspace.” Other invited speakers included Setsuo Ohsuga, a professor at Waseda University and a professor at, and director of, the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Tokyo, and Jan Zytkow, a professor at the University of North Carolina. The titles of their speeches were, respectively, “How Can AI Systems Deal with Large and Complex Problems—Model Building as Problem Solving” and “ROBOT-DISCOVERER: A Role Model for Any Intelligent Agent.” IAT’99 also provided a special panel session on trends and prospects of IAT, which was chaired by Bradshaw, and a half-day agent exhibit, which was chaired by Jianchang Mao of IBM. Both events highlighted a variety of challenges and real-world applications of intelligent-agent technology. These applications range from software agents, information gathering, retrieval, and visualization to web searching, decision support systems in the marketplace, negotiaThe 1999 Asia-Pacific Conference on IntelligentAgent Technology