Message from the WI'04 and IAT'04 Conference Chairs and Program Chair

Intelligent Agent Technology (WI'04 and IAT'04). On behalf of the WI'04 and IAT'04 Conference Committees, we would like to thank you for coming to WI'04 and IAT'04, and we hope you will enjoy the conference technical and social programs as well as the beautiful city of Beijing, China. Web intelligence is a field of scientific research and development that deals with the fundamental roles as well as practical impacts of artificial intelligence and advanced information technology on the next generation of Web-empowered products, systems, services, and activities. Following the great success of WI'01 held in Maebashi City, Japan, in 2001 and WI'03 held in Halifax, Canada, in 2003, WI'04 will provide a leading international forum for researchers and practitioners (1) to present information on state-of-the-art WI technologies and (2) to cross-fertilize ideas on the development of Web-based intelligent information systems among different domains. The aim of IAT'04 is to bring together researchers and practitioners from diverse fields, such as artificial intelligence, software engineering, Internet computing, computational sciences, business, and robotics and automation. By encouraging idea sharing and discussions on the underlying logical, cognitive, physical, and biological foundations as well as the enabling technologies of intelligent agents, IAT'04 is expected to stimulate the future development of new models, new methodologies, and new tools for building a variety of embodiments of agent-based systems. Both WI and IAT are interdisciplinary fields of research and development. WI'04 and IAT'04 topics will cover, but not be limited to, the following: WI'04 Topics • World Wide Wisdom Web (W4): distributed resources optimization; goal-directed services support; information and knowledge markets; knowledge community formation and support; meta-knowledge discovery and representation; new social interaction paradigms; Problem-Solver Markup Language (PSML); regularities and laws of W4; search of best means and ends; service self-aggregation; social and psychological contexts; Web inference engines • Social Networks and Social Intelligence: entertainment; knowledge community formation and support; link topology and site hierarchy; intelligent wireless Web; social networks mining; W