The origins of evolutionary computation can be traced back to the late 1950's where it remained, almost unknown, to the broader scientific community for three decades until the 1980's when it started to receive significant attention, as did the study of multi-agent systems (MAS). This focuses on systems in which many intelligent agents interact with each other. Today these systems are not simply a research topic but are also beginning to become an important subject of academic teaching and industrial and commercial application. Co-Evolutionary Computational and Multi-Agent Systems introduces the author's recent work in these two new and important branches of artificial intelligence.

This book addresses agent-based computing, concentrating in particular on evolutionary multi-agent systems (EMAS), which have been developed since 1996 at the AGH University of Science and Technology in Cracow, Poland. It provides the relevant background information on and a detailed description of this computing paradigm, along with key experimental results. Readers will benefit from the insightful discussion, which primarily concerns the efficient implementation of computing frameworks for developing EMAS and similar computing systems, as well as a detailed formal model. Theoretical deliberations demonstrating that computing with EMAS always helps to find the optimal solution are also included, rounding out the coverage.

Computational collective intelligence (CCI) is most often understood as a subfield of artificial intelligence (AI) dealing with soft computing methods that enable group decisions to be made or knowledge to be processed among autonomous units acting in distributed environments. The needs for CCI techniques and tools have grown signi- cantly recently as many information systems work in distributed environments and use distributed resources. Web-based systems, social networks and multi-agent systems very often need these tools for working out consistent knowledge states, resolving conflicts and making decisions. Therefore, CCI is of great importance for today’s and future distributed systems. Methodological, theoretical and practical aspects of computational collective int- ligence, such as group decision making, collective action coordination, and knowledge integration, are considered as the form of intelligence that emerges from the collabo- tion and competition of many individuals (artificial and/or natural). The application of multiple computational intelligence technologies such as fuzzy systems, evolutionary computation, neural systems, consensus theory, etc. , can support human and other collective intelligence and create new forms of CCI in natural and/or artificial s- tems.

This two volume set constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Adaptive and Natural Computing Algorithms, ICANNGA 2007, held in Warsaw, Poland, in April 2007. Coverage in the first volume includes evolutionary computation, genetic algorithms, and particle swarm optimization. The second volume covers neural networks, support vector machines, biomedical signal and image processing, biometrics, computer vision.

A multi-agent system (MAS) is a system composed of multiple interacting intelligent agents. Multi-agent systems can be used to solve problems which are difficult or impossible for an individual agent or monolithic system to solve. Agent systems are open and extensible systems that allow for the deployment of autonomous and proactive software components. Multi-agent systems have been brought up and used in several application domains.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing, ICAISC 2008, held in Zakopane, Poland, in June 2008. The 116 revised contributed papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 320 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on neural networks and their applications, fuzzy systems and their applications, evolutionary algorithms and their applications, classification, rule discovery and clustering, image analysis, speech and robotics, bioinformatics and medical applications, various problems of artificial intelligence, and agent systems.

This volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Hybrid Artificial Intelligence Systems, HAIS 2009, held in Salamanca, Spain, in June 2009. The 85 papers presented, were carefully reviewed and selected from 206 submissions. The topics covered are agents and multi agents systems, HAIS applications, cluster analysis, data mining and knowledge discovery, evolutionary computation, learning algorithms, real world HAIS applications and data uncertainty, hybrid artificial intelligence in bioinformatics, evolutionary multiobjective machine learning, hybrid reasoning and coordination methods on multi-agent systems, methods of classifiers fusion, knowledge extraction based on evolutionary learning, hybrid systems based on bioinspired algorithms and argumentation methods, hybrid evolutionry intelligence in financial engineering.