In the current web, developers are able to create new applications by composing already existing services from third-party vendors. However, the vast amount of choices, technologies and repositories can make it a tedious task. This paper describes a semantic metadirectory of services that helps in the process of discovering services. We propose a semantic service discovery process and description of existing service repositories, such as Programmable Web and Yahoo Pipes, which are two service repositories which provide plenty of services that can be reused by developers to build new web applications. The challenges behind integrating these repositories involved the problems of defining a common model, identifying relevant data and integrating and ranking the extracted data.

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) has received much interest due to its potential to tackle many adaptive system architecture issues that were previously hard to overcome by other computing paradigms. However, it has been facing great difficulty in quickly discovering and dynamically combing available Web services to satisfy given request on-demand. Most of the current researches concentrated o n the semantic model for service discovery, composition, and so on. But there are few studies concerned the intrinsic pattern and law of the service interactions and relationships. To achiev e the vision of SOC in heterogeneous and open environment, in our opinion, not only the semantics of individual Web service but also the interactions and relationships among Web services are needed to be considered seriously. In this paper, beginning with combining Semantic Web and social networking technology within SOC paradigm, we study associations between Web services, mine the relationships among services to design and build Service Network (SN), anal y z e the structural and social characteristics and complexity of SN to reveal the user interests, business requests, information and data flow and direction. In short, we would like to reassess and reconsider the SOC paradigm from the network perspective, through finding new knowledge to build new theoretical basis and approach which can be used to guide and promote the service discovery, composition, and so on, in SOC paradigm.

Nearly 20% of total energy consumption in the United States is accounted for in heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. Smart sensing and adaptive energy management agents can greatly decrease the energy usage of HVAC systems in many building applications, for example by enabling the operator to shut off HVAC to unoccupied rooms. We implement a multimodal sensor agent that is nonintrusive and low-cost, combining information such as motion detection, CO2 reading, sound level, ambient light,and door state sensing. We show that in our live test bed at the USC campus, these sensor agents can be used to accurately estimate the number of occupants in each room using machine learning techniques, and that these techniques can also be applied to predict future occupancy by creating agent models of the occupants. These predictions will be used by control agents to enable the HVAC system increase its efficiency by continuously adapting to occupancy forecasts of each room.

Illegal extraction of forest resources is fought, in many developing countries, by patrols through the forest that seek to deter such activity by decreasing its profitability. With limited resources for performing such patrols, a patrol strategy will seek to distribute the patrols throughout the forest, in space and time, in order to minimize the resulting amount of extraction that occurs or maximize the degree of forest protection, according to one of several potential metrics. We pose this problem as a Stackelberg game. We adopt and extend the simple, geometrically elegant model of (Albers 2010). First, we study optimal allocations of patrol density under generalizations of this model, relaxing several of its assumptions. Second, we pose the problem of generating actual schedules whose site visit frequencies are consistent with the analytically computed optimal patrol densities.

Stackelberg security games form the backbone of systems like ARMOR, IRIS and PROTECT, which are in regular use by the Los Angeles International Police, US Federal Air Marshal Service and the US Coast Guard respectively. An understanding of the runtime required by algorithms that power such systems is critical to furthering the application of game theory to other real-world domains. This paper identifies the concept of the deployment-to-saturation ratio in random Stackelberg security games, and shows that in a decision problem related to these games, the probability that a solution exists exhibits a phase transition as the ratio crosses 0.5. We demonstrate that this phase transition is invariant to changes both in the domain and the domain representation. Moreover, problem instances at this phase transition point are computationally harder than instances with other deployment-to-saturation ratios for a wide range of different equilibrium computation methods, including (i) previously published different MIP algorithms, and (ii) different underlying solvers and solution mechanisms. Our findings have at least two important implications. First, it is important for new algorithms to be evaluated on the hardest problem instances. We show that this has often not been done in the past, and introduce a publicly available benchmark suite to facilitate such comparisons. Second, we provide evidence that this phase transition region is also one where optimization would be of most benefit to security agencies, and thus requires significant attention from researchers in this area.

Computational social science, as with all complex adaptive systems sciences, involves a great amount of uncertainty on several fronts, including intrinsic arbitrariness such as that due to path dependence, disagreement on social theory and how to capture it in software, input data of different credibility that does not exactly match the requirements of software because it was gathered for another purpose, and inexactly matching translations between models that were designed for different purposes than the study at hand. This paper presents a method of formally tracking that uncertainty, keeping the data input parameters proportionate with logical and probabilistic constraints, and capturing proportionate dynamics of the output ordered by the decision points of policy change, for the purpose of risk-based analysis. Once ordered this way, the data can be compared to other data similarly expressed, whether that data is from simulation excursions or from the real world, for objective comparison and distance scoring at the level of dynamic patterns as opposed to single outcome validation. This method enables wargame adjudicators to be run out with data gleaned from the wargame, enables data to be repurposed for both training and testing set, and facilitates objective validation scoring through soft matching. Artificial intelligence tools used in the method include probabilistic ontologies with crisp and Bayesian inference, game trees that are multiplayer non-zero sum and decision point based rather than turn-based, and Markov processes to represent the dynamic data and align the models for objective comparison.

Stackelberg games have been used in several deployed applications of game theory to make recommendations for allocating limited resources for protecting critical infrastructure. The resource allocation strategies are randomized to prevent a strategic attacker from using surveillance to learn and exploit patterns in the allocation. An important limitation of previous work on security games is that it typically assumes that attackers have perfect surveillance capabilities, and can learn the exact strategy of the defender. We introduce a new model that explicitly models the process of an attacker observing a sequence of resource allocation decisions and updating his beliefs about the defender's strategy. For this model we present computational techniques for updating the attacker's beliefs and computing optimal strategies for both the attacker and defender, given a specific number of observations. We provide multiple formulations for computing the defender's optimal strategy, including non-convex programming and a convex approximation. We also present an approximate method for computing the optimal length of time for the attacker to observe the defender's strategy before attacking. Finally, we present experimental results comparing the efficiency and runtime of our methods.

The theoretically elegant yet broadly functional capability of graphical models shows intriguing potential to span in a uniform manner perception, cognition and action; and thus to ultimately yield simpler yet more powerful integrated architectures for intelligent robots and other comparable systems. This position paper explores this potential, with initial support from an effort underway to develop a graphical architecture that is based on factor graphs (with piecewise continuous functions).

This paper extends hierarchical task network (HTN) planning with lightweight learning, considering that in robotics, actions have a non-zero probability of failing. Our work applies to A*-based HTN planners with lifting. We prove that the planner finds the plan of maximal expected utility, while retaining its lifting capability and efficient heuristic-based search. We show how to learn the probabilities online, which allows a robot to adapt by replanning on execution failures. The idea behind this work is to use the HTN domain to constrain the space of possibilities, and then to learn on the constrained space in a way requiring few training samples, rendering the method applicable to autonomous mobile robots.

This paper surveys research in robotics in the AAMAS (Au- tonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems) community. It argues that the autonomous agents community can, and has, impact on robotics. Moreover, it argues that agents re- searchers should proactively seek to impact the robotics com- munity, to prevent independent re-discovery of known results, and to benefit autonomous agents science. To support these claims, I provide evidence from my own research into multi- robot teams, and from others’.