This second EPRI workshop on hot dry rock (HDR) geothermal energy, held in May 1994, focused on the status of worldwide HDR research and development and used that status review as the starting point for discussions of what could and should be done next: by U.S. federal government, by U.S. industry, by U.S. state governments, and by international organizations or through international agreements. The papers presented and the discussion that took place indicate that there is a community of researchers and industrial partners that could join forces, with government support, to begin a new effort on hot dry rock geothermal development. This new heat mining effort would start with site selection and confirmatory studies, done concurrently. The confirmatory studies would test past evaluations against the most current results (from the U.S. site at Fenton Hill, New Mexico, and from the two sites in Japan, the one in Russia, and the two in western Europe) and the best models of relevant physical and economic aspects. Site selection would be done in the light of the confirmatory studies and would be influenced by the need to find a site where success is probable and which is representative enough of other sites so …

I'd like to welcome you to the Agent 2004 conference. As most of you are aware, this conference is the fifth in a series of meetings that began in 1999. A conference followed the next year in 2000. The 2001 conference was skipped because of some conflicts with other conferences, and the conferences have proceeded annually since then. We have the proceedings of the previous conferences available here on CDs. One CD has the proceedings from 1999, 2000, and 2002; the other contains last year's proceedings. The purpose of these conferences is to advance the state of the computational social sciences and to integrate the social sciences with the decision sciences and something that is traditionally known as the management sciences. Those of you in the operations/research area are familiar with the traditional school of modeling simulation that emerged from that scientific area. This conference will bring together a different group of people to talk about the topic of agent-based theories and simulations. This fifth agent conference is one of a group of conferences held annually around the country. Most of you are probably aware of the CASOS Conference held at Carnegie Mellon University, usually in July. UCLA holds the …