Book reviews: when humans and agents collide

"Design of Intelligent Multi-Agent Systems: Human-Centredness, Architectures, Learning and Adaptation" is a collection of papers whose content is grounded in two trends. First, soft-computing technologies have moved out of the laboratory and onto the Internet. Second, agent systems are being applied in areas such as engineering, process control, data mining, and e-business. In this context, three main problems arise: applying soft-computing agents in distributed environments, humanizing their interfaces, and optimizing the solutions they provide.