The 6th German Conference on Multiagent System Technologies (MATES 2008) was hosted, together with the co-located 31th German Conference on Artificial Intelligence (KI2008), by the University of Kaiserslautern and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). From September 23th until Septmeber 26th 2008 mostly European research groups presented their work in six sessions frame...

In recent years the concept of emergence has gained much attention as computer systems have started exhibiting properties usually associated with complex systems. Although emergence creates many problems for engineering complex computerized systems by introducing undesired behaviour, it also offers many possibilities for advancements in the area of adaptive self-organizing systems. However, at ...

In the July 2006 issue of P&T, I discussed the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America’s (PhRMA’s) annual review, Pharmaceutical Industry Profile, to give readers an appreciation of how the pharmaceutical industry spends its money.1 Profile 2008 provides a straightforward, “by the numbers” overview of the drug industry.2 Similar to the 2006 review, the 2008 report focuses on how fa...

Recent measurements of the branching fraction for D s → ν disagree with the Standard Model expectation, which relies on calculations of f D s from lattice QCD. This paper uses recent preliminary measurements from CLEO and a new preliminary lattice-QCD result from this conference to update the significance of the discrepancy. The " f D s puzzle " stands now at 3.5σ , with σ predominantly from th...

We propose a modelling strategy to determine from a large set of reactions the smallest set necessary to be compatible with a compendium of required properties and experimental data. We applied this strategy to define a model of hepatic fatty acid metabolism integrating both metabolic pathways and the contribution of some major genetic regulators. We considered the fatty acid metabolism in hepa...

KI 2008 is the 31st edition of the German Conference on Artificial Intelligence, which traditionally brings together academic and industrial researchers from all areas of AI. The technical programme of KI 2008 will comprise paper and poster presentations and a variety of workshops and tutorials. The tutorials will be held the day before the technical program starts. Tutorials will be free of ch...

Im Oktober 2008 fand die Tagung “Lernen, Wissen, und Adaption” (LWA) statt. Seit 1999 treffen sich auf der LWA hauptsächlich in Deutschland angesiedelte Wissenschaftler aus unterschiedlichen Forschungsrichtungen der Informatik. 2008 fanden sich 120 Teilnehmer über drei Tage in Würzburg ein, wo die Tagung durch Joachim Baumeister und Martin Atzmüller organisiert wurde. Das Programm der LWA beinh...

Information Retrieval, especially in connection with the internet, is a well known research field. But as the technologies used for the internet become more and more elaborate, so grows the need to not only find (retrieve) already available information, but to generate knowledge. In this paper the emergence of collective intelligence from information retrieval and social network analysis will b...

In this paper we present a stochastic semantics for Bigraphical Reactive Systems. A reduction and a labelled stochastic semantics for bigraphs are defined. As a sanity check, we prove that the two semantics are consistent with each other. We illustrate the expressiveness of the framework with an example of membrane budding in a biological system.