Two fundamental background books for understanding the field of Multiagent Systems (MAS) are:

• The textbook "An Introduction to Multiagent Systems", by Michael Wooldridge (John Wiley and Sons, 2002).
• Gerhard Weiss' collection of essays, entitled "Multiagent Systems: A Modern Approach to Distributed Artificial Intelligence" (MIT Press, 1999).

There are several conferences that focus on multiagent systems, the most prominent of which is the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), held most recently, May 2006, in Hakodate, Japan. Next year's conference will be in Honolulu, Hawaii, this coming May 2007.

From within Hebrew University, we have access to the ACM Digital Library, which includes the archived proceedings of the AAMAS conferences.

The general artificial intelligence conferences, the U.S. conference AAAI, the European conference ECAI (organized by ECCAI), and the international conference IJCAI, are also popular venues for publishing MAS research, as is the ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC).

Another useful resource is the journal, Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, which is published by Kluwer Academic Publishers. Similarly, the major artificial intelligence journals like the AI Journal and the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research also regularly publish MAS research.

The course that I give during the fall semester, Introduction to Multiagent Systems, gives pointers to weekly "additional readings". Check out the course's web page to see, for each week, what articles were recommended for each topic.

There are a few mailing lists that deal with agent issues in general, and distributed artificial intelligence in particular. Subscribing to these mailing lists helps keep you updated about workshops, conferences, special issues of journals, new books, and the like. Two that I find useful are the Agents Digest and the DAI-List Digest:

1. AGENTS-DIGEST@CS.UMBC.EDU is a digest form of the software agents mailing list. For more information, send mail to MAJORDOMO@CS.UMBC.EDU with "info agents" in the message body or see http://www.cs.umbc.edu/agentslist/.
2. DAI-List: Check out the DAI-List page. There you can join the list and send messages. If for any reason you have a problem with that page, try this one.

There is also a FAQ (frequently asked questions) page about Artificial Intelligence Newsgroups and Mailing Lists. You might want to subscribe to the AIAlert news mailing, which is a biweekly email sent out by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI, formerly the American Association for Artificial Intelligence), reviewing "AI in the News".