FMEC is a small, informal workshop, which has been held regularly since 1987. Participants have included leading researchers and practitioners, drawn largely from North America and Europe.

In 2005, FMEC will be co-located with ICAIL 2005, the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law.

A selection of recent FMEC work will appear as Formal Modelling for Electronic Commerce, Steven O. Kimbrough, D.J. Wu, eds., Springer, 2004. The table of contents and an introductory chapter may be found here in PDF.

Presentations will discuss fundamental issues in the formalization—and automation—of electronic commerce. It is largely through such automation that electronic commerce promises to be, and is, a "lever of riches" worldwide. Difficult and fundamental problems, however, remain to be solved. Among the topics to be discussed at FMEC 2005 are the following:

• Approaches to solving the first trade problem: How can the costs be minimized and the use of automation maximized in creating new trading partnerships?
• A lingua franca for e-commerce: How should general purpose machine communication languages be designed and deployed?
• Social dynamics of artificial agents: How and under what conditions can trust and other forms of cooperative behavior emerge in societies of artificial agents?
• Formal models of business processes: How can business processes be modelled in a way that honors their full complexities, including their normative and deontic aspects?
• Electronic communities: How do we model learning communities? What are the design principles for community platforms?
• Conceptual issues: What is trust in the context of e-commerce? What is the nature of speech acts (asserting, requesting, promising, etc.) for artifical agents? What of norms, conventions, and institutional power?
• Frontiers of automation: Can individual artificial agents learn to negotiate effectively in conditions applicable to e-commerce?
• Applications: How are these and related ideas being implemented? How do new e-commerce developments and applications present opportunities for new forms of FMEC?

We invite contributions (which will be refereed) in the form of full papers or as extended abstracts. Submissions should be made in PDF by April 1, 2005.

Previous workshops have resulted in special issues of prominent refereed journals. Publication arrangements have been made for a special issue of Group Decision and Negotiation, based on the papers and abstracts contributed to FMEC 2005. Participating authors will have the opportunity to revise their contributions to FMEC 2005 and submit them to the special issue.

Send inquiries to the co-organizers of FMEC 2005:

• Andrew J.I. Jones, King's College, London, ajijones@dcs.kcl.ac.uk
• Steven O. Kimbrough, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, kimbrough@wharton.upenn.edu
• Marek Sergot, Imperial College, London, mjs@doc.ic.ac.uk
• D.J. Wu, Georgia Institute of Technology, dj.wu@mgt.gatech.edu