Artificial social intelligence: a necessity for agent systems' developments

Often, the problems encountered by applications and developments of software agents require further investigation and improvements of agents' social capacities, that is, of the properties enabling them to act adaptively in multiagent domains. This is so for at least three reasons. First, quite often software agents are designed for reasoning upon and interacting with other agents (both human and artificial), as is the case in client-server and personal assistants. Secondly, to accomplish their primary task, these systems ought to reason upon, predict and eventually coordinate with, or at least prevent obstacles from, other systems accomplishing the same or different tasks in a concurrent way (think of electronic commerce, meeting agents, etc.). Thirdly, many applications are actually distributed over a set of agents with their specific roles and tasks, which are expected to participate in a joint activity, aimed at achieving a given global outcome.