Intelligent services: towards more autonomy

Collaborative multimedia services present new challenges to distributed systems. There is a need for a model of design centred around user needs and participation, with a deeper conception of interaction. A reorientation of our view of the fundamental nature of interactive systems is needed. It moves away from a view of systems as fixed "black boxes" artifacts, towards a new view of "systems-in-use" open to change. In this paper, we present a multi-agent system for multimedia conference control. Autonomous agents are useful for control as well for cooperative applications, but here we treat only control aspects.