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.
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).
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:
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.