No longer just the province of specialist sectors, agent-based computing is changing the way systems interact and how they are managed. Agent-based computing has already transformed processes such as automated financial markets trading, logistics, and industrial robotics. Now it is moving into the mainstream commercial sector as more complex systems with many different components are used by a wider range of businesses. Read about the new best practices for the ERP systems and how to tackle the growth of ERP integrations. This email address is already registered.

Recently there has been renewed interest in game theory in several research disciplines, with its uses ranging from the modeling of evolution to the design of distributed protocols. In the AI community, game theory is emerging as the dominant formalism for studying strategic and cooperative interaction in multi-agent systems. Classical work provides rich mathematical foundations and equilibrium concepts, but relatively little in the way of computational and representational insights that would allow game theory to scale up to large, complex systems. The rapidly emerging field of computational game theory is addressing such algorithmic issues, and this tutorial will provide a survey of developments so far. As the NIPS community is well-poised to make significant contributions to this area, special emphasis will be placed on connections to more familiar topics.

A virtual-reality drama by University at Buffalo researchers -- aimed at transforming the movie-going experience -- is driving the development of increasingly "self-aware" computational agents that are able to improvise responses to the spontaneous actions of human users. These improvisational computer agents are expected to influence the development of electronic devices of tomorrow, making them much more user-friendly because they will be able to respond to the idiosyncratic needs of each user. The researchers' virtual-reality drama, The Trial The Trail, is a brand new type of dramatic entertainment, where instead of identifying with the protagonist, the audience becomes the protagonist. The multidisciplinary team formed two years ago when Josephine Anstey, assistant professor in the Department of Media Study in the UB College of Arts and Sciences, was looking for ways to make VR dramas more believable. At the same time, Stuart C. Shapiro, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering in the UB School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, was seeking applications to challenge the computerized cognitive agent called CASSIE that he and his colleagues had developed.

I know of no other book on agents...that matches its coprehensive treatment and clear, enjoyable exposition." Van Parunak Centre for Electronic Commerce "Jacques Ferber can legitimately claim to be one of the founders of the discipline that is today known as multi-agent systems. In Multi-Agent Systems, he draws on over a decade of experience as a first-rate researcher and teacher in order to set out a coherent, unified view of the field. The end result is a readable and comprehensive textbook, that will be enthusiastically received by a growing and increasingly important discipline." Mike Wooldridge, Queen Mary and Westfield College "This book is easily the most comprehensive textbook on multi-agent systems and collective intelligence that I have seen.

In a distributed agent framework, we conceptualize a dynamic community of agents, where multiple agents contribute services to the community. When external services or information are required by a given agent, instead of calling a known subroutine or asking a specific agent to perform a task, the agent submits a high-level expression describing the needs and attributes of the request to a specialized Facilitator agent. The Facilitator agent will make decisions about which agents are available and capable of handling sub-parts of the request, and will manage all agent interactions required to handle the complex query. Such a distributed agent architecture allows the construction of systems that are more flexible and adaptable than distributed object frameworks. Individual agents can be dynamically added to the community, extending the functionality that the agent community can provide as a whole.

Published by The AAAI Press, Menlo Park, California. This proceedings is available in book format. Please Note: Abstracts are linked to individual titles, and will appear in a separate browser window. Full-text versions of the papers are linked to the abstract text. Access to full text may be restricted to AAAI members.

The National Information Infrastructure (NII) will have profound effects on the lives of every citizen. It promises to deliver to people in their homes and offices a vast array of information in many forms, changing the ways in which business is conducted, offering new educational opportunities, bringing geographically dispersed library resources and entertainment materials to everyone's doorstep. It will connect people to people, and help them with their jobs and tasks. For the NII to be useful, however, people will need easy and efficient access to its resources. Today's computers are complex and difficult to use, even for experts. The NII will be orders of magnitude more complex than current systems; it could easily become a labyrinth of databases and services that is inconvenient for experts and inaccessible to many Americans. The field of artificial intelligence (AI) can play a pivotal role in meeting major challenges of the NII. AI uses the theoretical and experimental tools of ...

Published by The AAAI Press, Menlo Park, California. This proceedings is available in book format. Please Note: Abstracts are linked to individual titles, and will appear in a separate browser window. Full-text versions of the papers are linked to the abstract text. Access to full text may be restricted to AAAI members.

Then there is the software claiming to be "intelligent agents" because the software is mobile and can go from machine to machine performing tasks on behalf of the human that spawned the agents. One of the more well-know examples of enabling technology for these kinds of agents is General Magic's Telescript. Sun's Java is often also touted as this kind of an agent development technology though its "applets" are even less likely candidates for agenthood than Telescript's remote processes and a characterization of these as "agents" is highly controversial among writers to the agents email list. However, at least one vendor has used the Java technology to build a competitor to Telescript: CyberAgent (not to mention research efforts such as Bill Li's Java-To-Go framework). Let us agree to call some software applications built upon this technology "mobile agents", but understand that the crucial technical meaning is an infrastructure (e.g., a "Listener" for CyberAgent) that allows processes to run securely on foreign machines.

Although real-world solutions for robotic demining have not as yet been demonstrated, multirobot systems will clearly yield significant benefits over a single robot, given the extremely hazardous nature of the domain [JP1999]. Having multiple robots adds a desirable redundancy to the system, as well as potentially reducing the time required to clear an area if the robots are deployed effectively. In this paper, we describe a software implementation of a multirobot demining system that was deployed as part of a larger multiagent system, AgentStorm, to assist human commanders in command and control scenarios. Simulated robotic demining agents coordinate to breach a path through a minefield; demining is modeled as a distributed optimization problem in which the robots strive to minimize an abstract cost function. Although researchers have drawn comparisons between robot demining and foraging [Goldberg & Mataric1997], path breaching cannot be modeled as a simple foraging task because the goal of the exercise is not to optimize on number of mines removed but to assure coverage of a connected path.