Engineering Societies in the Agents World VIII

The 8th annual international workshop Engineering Societies in the Agents World was hosted by the National Centre for Scienti?c Research Demok- tos , in Athens, Greece, in October 2007. The workshop was organized as a stand-alone event, running over three days. ESAW 2007 built upon the success of prior ESAW workshops: ESAW 2006 held in Dublin, ESAW 2005 held in Ku sadasi, going back to the ?rst ESAW workshop, which was held in Berlin in 2000. ESAW 2007 was attended by 40 participants from 10 di?erent countries. Eachpresentationwasfollowedby highly interactivediscussions,in line with the ESAW spirit of having open discussions with fellow experts. The ESAW workshop series started in 2000 to provide a forum for prese- ing highly inter-disciplinary workon technologies, methodologies, platforms and tools for the engineering of complex arti?cial agent societies. Such systems have found applications in many diverse domains such as space ?ight operations, e-business and ambient intelligence. Despite ESAW traditionally placing - phasis on practical engineering issues and applications, the workshop did not exclude theoretical and philosophical contributions, on the proviso that they clearly documented their connection to the core applied issues. Discussions coalesced around the following themes: electronic institutions; models of complex distributed systems with agents and societies; interaction in agent societies; engineering social intelligence in multi-agent systems; trust and reputation in agent societies; analysis, design and development of agent societies.