The aesthetics of a non-Soviet form of socialism, drafted by four Yugoslav artists in the 1950s. As the cold war gained momentum in Europe, Tito's break with Stalin led to Yugoslavia's expulsion from the Eastern bloc in 1948. Confronted with this new reality, the Yugoslav government decided to bridge the indeterminacy of its cultural politics through a creative strategy: it commissioned young artists and architects to draft the aesthetics of a non-Soviet form of socialism. Agents of Abstraction frames the liaison of socialist cultural politics and modernist artistic practice by interlinking ideas of decentralization, experiments in state-funded arts and architecture, nonrepresentational forms, and self-reliance. The cultural and geopolitical contexts are accompanied by rare visual material, much of which appears in print for the first time.

The aesthetics of a non-Soviet form of socialism, drafted by four Yugoslav artists in the 1950s. As the cold war gained momentum in Europe, Tito's break with Stalin led to Yugoslavia's expulsion from the Eastern bloc in 1948. Confronted with this new reality, the Yugoslav government decided to bridge the indeterminacy of its cultural politics through a creative strategy: it commissioned young artists and architects to draft the aesthetics of a non-Soviet form of socialism. Agents of Abstraction frames the liaison of socialist cultural politics and modernist artistic practice by interlinking ideas of decentralization, experiments in state-funded arts and architecture, nonrepresentational forms, and self-reliance. The cultural and geopolitical contexts are accompanied by rare visual material, much of which appears in print for the first time.

"The Art of Agent-Oriented Modeling is an introduction to agent-oriented software development for students and for software developers who are interested in learning about new software engineering techniques."--Foreword.

The concept of an intelligent agent - a computational system capable of performing certain tasks autonomously - derived from the growing potential of digital computers in the mid 20th century and had been widely adopted by the early 1990s. Partly in parallel with this concept, the perspective of ambient intelligence (AmI) emerged in the late 1990s. Agent technology and AmI have many similarities, and the main purpose of this book is to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art of the scientific area that integrates these two. The book addresses a wide variety of topics related to agents and AmI, including theoretical, practical, design, implementation, ethical and philosophical issues. The 12 chapters are arranged in four sections. The first consists of three chapters discussing ethical and philosophical issues; the second part explores various approaches that can be used to develop agent-based AmI Systems; the third part contains three chapters that share the goal to endow AmI systems with useful properties like intelligence and adaptivity and the last section presents concrete applications of agent-based AmI systems. This book provides an insight into recent achievements and future challenges at the intersection of agent technology and ambient intelligence and will assist the development of more intelligent, flexible, effective and user-friendly systems as well as posing critical questions about the future of the role of agents within the AmI perspective.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence, ICAART 2015, held in Lisbon, Portugal, in January 2015.The 18 revised full papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 187 submissions. The papers are organized in two topical sections on agents and on artificial intelligence and focus on multi-agent systems and software platforms; distributed problem solving and distributed AI in general; knowledge representation; planning; learning; scheduling; perception; reactive AI systems; and evolutionary computing.