Author Description

missions in fact also treat an envisaged mutual impact among them. As for the 2002 edition in Irvine, the organizers wanted to stimulate this cross-pollination with a program of shared famous keynote speakers (this year we got Sycara, - ble, Soley and Mylopoulos!), and encouraged multiple attendance by providing authors with free access to another conference or workshop of their choice. We received an even larger number of submissions than last year for the three conferences (360 in total) and the workshops (170 in total). Not only can we therefore again claim a measurable success in attracting a representative volume of scienti?c papers, but such a harvest allowed the program committees of course to compose a high-quality cross-section of worldwide research in the areas covered. In spite of the increased number of submissions, the Program Chairs of the three main conferences decided to accept only approximately the same number of papers for presentation and publication as in 2002 (i. e., around 1 paper out of every 4–5 submitted). For the workshops, the acceptance rate was about 1 in 2. Also for this reason, we decided to separate the proceedings into two volumes with their own titles, and we are grateful to Springer-Verlag for their collaboration in producing these two books. The reviewing process by the respective program committees was very professional and each paper in the main conferences was reviewed by at least three referees.