Today the human world and the digital information world form a complex changing environment. Any combination of human actors and software systems must behave like a process able to maintain its integrity, efficiency and adaptability in such dynamical environments. Humans engage in interaction and cooperation in many different contexts which often coincide in the same space-time interval. We need a better understanding and implementation of effective solutions to support humans in their adaptive, interactive and cooperative processes. The dynamics of cognitive processes and cross-learning are of much interest, especially when decision makers are associated with decision support systems: the advent of a paradigm for human-machine sustainability.

This third conference is in line with the series of Human Centered Processes conferences held previously at Brest (France, 1999) and in Luxembourg (2003) under the umbrella of the EURO Working Group Human Centred Processes (http://www-hcp.enst-bretagne.fr/). The first HCP conference was mainly devoted to the application of cognitive approaches in various fields of process control and other complex industrial problems usually managed by Operational researchers. The second HCP conference was dedicated to distributed decision and man-machine cooperation. Both of these conferences put special emphasis upon cognitive models of decision making.

The third conference (2008) focuses on the human actor and software agent collaboration in safety and time critical systems-of-systems. This focus includes topics ranging from:

* architectural requirements for such systems,
* cognition-based approaches for awareness and decision support,
* context awareness and the effects on learning, reasoning and decision making in both humans and software agents,
* the interaction and socially inspired process models for such collaborating systems and techniques to support them,
* the design, build and testing of such systems, what design patterns are adequate, what methods and tools to use.

In addition, HCP 2008 welcome progress, innovations, demonstrations and case-studies on the following well-known (non-exhaustive) list of HCP-related topics:

* Human Centered Decision Making & Decision Support
  * Cognitive approach
  * Multi-agent paradigm in distributed decision making,
  * Action/decision systems in E and M-commerce,
  * Ethical dilemmas in decision making,
  * Intelligent decision support for sustainable development
* Human Centered Capabilities & Interaction
  * Language engineering,
  * Speech recognition,
  * Knowledge discovery and data visualization,
  * Human abilities/skills in man-machine interaction,
  * Case-based supervised cross learning,
  * Ontology and conceptualization
  * Intelligent computer teaching systems,
* Human Actor & Software System Design Aspects
  * Cognitive engineering and design,
  * Context management in human centered processes,
  * Software internationalization and localization,
  * Modellng of political-social processes,

HCP-2008 will have a plenary interdisciplinary conference, tutorials, workshops, doctoral colloquium and poster and demo sessions in order to foster a shared interest across disciplines and stimulate within-discipline progress and information exchange.