The challenge of trust, The Autonomous Agents '98 Workshop on Deception, Fraud and Trust in Agent Societies

Both the advent of large communication networks and the development of agent models designing more and more sophisticated (in some cases autonomous) behaviours, are producing what can be called an Agent Society. Agent societies are constituted by both artificial and human agents (in perspective indistinguishable from each other) communicating with each other (not necessarily each with all the others), with individual or collective tasks, different resources, different skills, and so on. In other words, these agent societies will become more and more similar to the human ones. As in real societies, in these virtual societies it will be necessary to consider all the problems connected with secure and reliable interaction, with trusting the other agents, with the possibility to be frauded, cheated, deceived in some exchange or relationship.