The leading edge of computer science research is notoriously ?ckle. New trends come and go with alarming and unfailing regularity. In such a rapidly changing ?eld, the fact that research interest in a subject lasts more than a year is worthy of note. The fact that, after ?ve years, interest not only remains, but actually continues to grow is highly unusual. As 1998 marked the ?fth birthday of the International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL), it seemed appropriate for the organizers of the original workshop to comment on this remarkable growth, and re ect on...

This carefully edited book constitutes the strictly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages, ATAL'97, held in Providence, Rhode Island, USA, in July 1997.
The 25 revised full papers presented were selected from a total of 76 submissions. The book is divided into sections on methodologies, architectures and infrastructures, coordination planning and monitoring, formal methods, theories, and architectures and methodologies. Like its predecessors published in the Intelligent Agents series, this volume specifically...