Imagine a world where your clothes sense your blood pressure, heart rate and body temperature. Suppose the sensors transmit this information to ‘the cloud’, continuously and unobtrusively. Suppose artificial intelligence in ‘the cloud’ detects an anomaly. Suppose it tells your doctor: sighs of relief all round. But then suppose it tells an actuary, who tells your insurer, who tells your employer …This is the world of pervasive adaptation.This Pervasive Day explores the potential — and perils — of daily living with pervasive adaptive computing....

We are increasingly seeing computer systems which are expected to function without operator intervention. This is perhaps acceptable for running computer networks or traffic lights; however, we are now seeing computer systems deployed to qualitatively influence human judgments such as rulings on legal disputes or fitness for work to evaluate disability benefits. In keeping with the precautionary principle, it is important that those who are developing this capability — technologists and scientists — think through its potential implications.The aim of this book is to explore the...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems, PRIMA 2014, held in Gold Coast, QLD, Australia, in December 2014.
The conference was co-located with the 13th Pacific RIM International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, PRICAI 2014.
The 21 revised full papers presented together with 15 short papers and 2 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 77 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on self organization and social networks/crowdsourcing; logic and...