Intelligent Adaptive Agents: A Highlight of the Field and the AAAI-96 Workshop

There is a great dispute among researchers about the roles, characteristics, and specifications of what are called agents, intelligent agents, and adaptive agents. Most research in the field focuses on methodologies for solving specific problems (for example, communications, cooperation, architectures), and little work has been accomplished to highlight and distinguish the field of intelligent agents. As a result, more and more research is cataloged as research on intelligent agents. Therefore, it was necessary to bring together researchers working in the field to define initial boundaries, criteria, and acceptable characteristics of the field. The Workshop on Intelligent Adaptive Agents, presented as part of the Thirteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, addressed these issues as well as many others that are presented in this article.