As the field of Artificial Intelligence matures, AI systems begin to take their place in human society as our helpers. Thus it becomes essential for AI systems to have sophisticated social abilities, to communicate and interact. Some systems support us in our activities, while others take on tasks on our behalf. For those systems directly supporting human activities, advances in human-computer interaction become crucial. The bottleneck in such systems is often not the ability to find and process information; the bottleneck is often the inability to have natural (human) communication between computer and user. Clearly such AI research can benefit greatly from interaction with other disciplines such as linguistics and psychology. For those systems to which we delegate tasks: they become our electronic counterparts, or agents, and they need to communicate with the delegates of other humans (or organisations) to complete their tasks. Thus research on the social abilities of agents becomes central, and to this end multi-agent systems have had to borrow concepts from human societies. This interdisciplinary work borrows results from areas such as sociology and legal systems. An exciting recent development is the use of AI techniques to support and shed new light on interactions in human social networks, thus supporting effective collaboration in human societies. The research then has come full circle: techniques which were inspired by human abilities, with the original aim of enhancing AI, are now being applied to enhance those human abilities themselves. All of this underscores the importance of communication, interaction and social intelligence in current Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science research.

In addition to providing a home for state-of-the-art research in specialist areas, the convention also aims to provide a fertile ground for new collaborations to be forged between complementary areas.