The fourth internationalworkshop,"EngineeringSocietiesin the Agents World" (ESAW 2003) was a three-dayevent that took place at the end of October 2003. After previous events in Germany, the Czech Republic, and Spain, the workshop crossed the Channel, to be held at the premises of Imperial College, London. The steady increase in the variety of backgrounds of contributing sci- tists, fascinating new perspectives on the topics, and number of participants, bespeaks the success of the ESAW workshop series. Its idea was born in 1999 among members of the working group on "Communication, Coordination, and Collaboration" of the ?rst lease of life of the European Network of Excellence on Agent-Based Computing, AgentLink, out of a critical discussion about the general mindset of the agent community. At that time, we felt that proper c- siderationsofsystemicaspectsofagenttechnologydeployment,suchasackno- edgement of the importance of the social and environmental perspectives, were sorely missing: a de?ciency that we resolved should be addressed directly by a new forum.

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Multi-disciplinary Models for Agent Societies.- Emergence of Collective Behaviour and Problem Solving.- Social Order and Adaptability in Animal and Human Cultures as Analogues for Agent Communities: Toward a Policy-Based Approach.- Using Swarm Intelligence in Linda Systems.- Engineering Democracy in Open Agent Systems.- A Liberal Approach to Openness in Societies of Agents..- Welfare Engineering in Multiagent Systems.- Dynamics of Collective Attitudes during Teamwork.- Coordination, Organization and Security of Agent Societies.- Privacy-Aware Mobile Agent: Protecting Privacy in Open Systems by Modelling Social Behaviour of Software Agents.- Interaction Monitoring and Termination Detection for Agent Societies: Preliminary Results.- Competition, Cooperation, and Authorization.- Competent Agents and Customising Protocols.- Coordination and Conversation Protocols in Open Multi-agent Systems.- MAS Organization within a Coordination Infrastructure: Experiments in TuCSoN.- Adaptability Patterns of Multi-agent Organizations.- Integrating and Orchestrating Services upon an Agent Coordination Infrastructure.- Abstractions, Methodologies and Tools for Engineering Agent Societies.- Formalizing the Reusability of Software Agents.- A Design Complexity Evaluation Framework for Agent-Based System Engineering Methodologies.- Laying Down the Foundations of an Agent Modelling Methodology for Fault-Tolerant Multi-agent Systems.- Patterns Reuse in the PASSI Methodology.- Designing Agents' Behaviors and Interactions within the Framework of ADELFE Methodology.- Supporting Tropos Concepts in Agent OPEN.- Dynamic Analysis of Agents' Behaviour - Combining ALife, Visualization and AI.- Applications of Agent Societies.- Advancing Profile Use in Agent Societies.- A Computational Framework for Social Agents in Agent Mediated E-commerce.- You've Got Mail From Your Agent: A Location and Context Sensitive Agent System.