Special issue: Perspectives on intelligent agents research . . . one year later

A year ago, we published a special issue of The Knowledge Engineering Review entitled "Perspectives on Recent Intelligent Agents Research as Viewed through Two Conferences". Our intention was to provide a snapshot of current research on intelligent agents - an area which continues to grow apace - by looking at the work presented at the 1997 instantiations of two of the major events in the Agent calendar. These were the International Conference on Autonomous Agents (Agents '97) and the International Conference and Exhibition on the Practical Application of Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Technology (PAAM '97). The result was a group of six papers which together spanned the main areas covered by the conferences as well as identifying some of the challenges faced by the agents community as a whole. In particular, we had summaries by the organisers of both of the conferences, speculation on the future of robotics, surveys of expert assistants and electronic commerce, and a discussion of how agents could be used in workflow management.