Social intelligence is a general term at the intersection between different disciplines including philosophy, social science/sociology, economics, legal science, psychology, etc., and computer science. Broadly speaking, social intelligence is the capacity to understand others and to act rationally and emotionally in relations with others. This is an ability that not only human but also artificial agents have, as modelled in artificial intelligence and agent-based research in particular.

The interactions between philosophy, social sciences and computer science around social intelligence are manifold, and many concepts and theories from social science have found their way into artificial intelligence and agent-based research. In the latter, coordination and cooperation between largely independent, autonomous computational entities are modelled. Conversely, logical and computational models and their implementations have been used in the social sciences to help improve simulations, hypotheses and theories. Among the most prominent subjects at the interface are action and agency, communicative interaction, group attitudes, socio-technical epistemology and social coordination. In computer science, these concepts from social science are sometimes deployed at a more metaphorical level rather than in the form of rigorous implementations of the genuine concepts and their corresponding theories. Equally, the computer models used in social science are not always convincing.

The European Conference on Social Intelligence ECSI-2014 (November 2–4, 2014, Barcelona) provided a productive meeting ground for researchers from the above fields. The conference was part of the activities of the European Network for Social Intelligence (SINTELNET, 2011–2014), whose aim was to identify challenges and opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaboration, to provide guidelines for research and policy-making and to kindle partnerships among participants around the topic of social intelligence. The proceedings of the conference were published as CEUR Workshop Proceedings 1283 (CEUR-WS.org).

The present issue is made up of a selection of the papers that were presented at the conference. Each of the papers was carefully revised by the authors and underwent one or two further reviewing rounds. We would like to thank the authors who contributed to the workshop with their papers and presentations. We would also like to thank the reviewers for their thorough work.