When I began studying for my PhD, I knew exactly what field I wanted to work in. It was a subfield of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that was known as Distributed AI (DAI). In DAI, we studied how a number of (semi-)autonomous problem solving systems known as ‘agents’ could be made to cooperate and coordinate their activities to produce effective overall system behaviour (Bond and Gasser, 1988). At the time, not many people were working in distributed AI (only two books had been published on the subject). I found that when I talked about my research, I had to repeatedly explain what ‘agents’ were all about. It was depressing business. More than once, I wished I had gone into a more glamorous area of research - the expert systems people were getting all the glory.

The discipline of agent technology is becoming a mature research area, both from a scientific and an engineering perspective. Strong theoretical and empirical analysis, together with practical experience of deploying systems to solve real problems, give this community the opportunity to make an impact in the world of business. At UKMAS'98, a panel of academics and industrialists met to discuss exactly how this could be done; how could agents and multi-agent systems be used to actually make money?

The paper introduces a software architecture for the specification and verification of knowledge-based systems combining conceptual and formal techniques. Our focus is component-based specification enabling their reuse. We identify four elements of the specification of a knowledge-based system: a task definition, a problem-solving method, a domain model, and an adaptor. We present algebraic specifications and a variant of dynamic logic as formal means to specify and verify these different elements. As a consequence of our architecture we can decompose the overall specification and verification task of the knowledge-based systems into subtasks. We identify different subcomponents for specification and different proof obligations for verification. The use of the architecture in specification and verification improves understandability and reduces the effort for both activities. In addition, its decomposition and modularisation enables reuse of components and proofs. Therefore, a knowledge-based system can be built by combining and adapting different reusable components.

The continual growth of the Global Information Infrastructure (GII) prompts dramatic changes in both the types of information involved, and the kind of people who access it. In this paper, we briefly survey the most recent results with respect to the User Interface area, as emerged from the work presented at the fourth edition of the Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI'98), focusing on interaction with large information spaces, multimodality, and usability issues.