Agents
The Reaction RuleML Classification of the Event / Action / State Processing and Reasoning Space
Reaction RuleML is a general, practical, compact and user-friendly XML-serialized language for the family of reaction rules. In this white paper we give a review of the history of event / action /state processing and reaction rule approaches and systems in different domains, define basic concepts and give a classification of the event, action, state processing and reasoning space as well as a discussion of relevant / related work
A Multiagent Simulator for Teaching Police Allocation
Furtado, Vasco, Vasconcelos, Eurico
This article describes the ExpertCop tutorial system, a simulator of crime in an urban region. In ExpertCop, the students (police officers) configure and allocate an available police force according to a selected geographic region and then interact with the simulation. The student interprets the results with the help of an intelligent tutor, the pedagogical agent, observing how crime behaves in the presence of the allocated preventive policing. The pedagogical agent implements interaction strategies between the student and the geosimulator, designed to make simulated phenomena better understood.
A Multiagent Simulator for Teaching Police Allocation
Furtado, Vasco, Vasconcelos, Eurico
This article describes the ExpertCop tutorial system, a simulator of crime in an urban region. In ExpertCop, the students (police officers) configure and allocate an available police force according to a selected geographic region and then interact with the simulation. The student interprets the results with the help of an intelligent tutor, the pedagogical agent, observing how crime behaves in the presence of the allocated preventive policing. The interaction between domain agents representing social entities as criminals and police teams drives the simulation. ExpertCop induces students to reflect on resource allocation. The pedagogical agent implements interaction strategies between the student and the geosimulator, designed to make simulated phenomena better understood. In particular, the agent uses a machine-learning algorithm to identify patterns in simulation data and to formulate questions to the student about these patterns.
NESTA: NASA Engineering Shuttle Telemetry Agent
Semmel, Glenn S., Davis, Steven R., Leucht, Kurt W., Rowe, Dan A., Smith, Kevin E., O', Farrel, Ryan l, Boloni, Ladislau
The Electrical Systems Division at the NASA Kennedy Space Center has developed and deployed an agent-based tool to monitor the space shuttle's ground processing telemetry stream. The application, the NASA Engineering Shuttle Telemetry Agent (NESTA), increases situational awareness for system and hardware engineers during ground processing of the shuttle's subsystems. The agent provides autonomous monitoring of the telemetry stream and automatically alerts system engineers when predefined criteria have been met. Efficiency and safety are improved through increased automation. Sandia National Labs' Java Expert System Shell is employed as the rule engine. The shell's predicate logic lends itself well to capturing the heuristics and specifying the engineering rules of this spaceport domain. The declarative paradigm of the rule- based agent yields a highly modular and scalable design spanning multiple subsystems of the shuttle. Several hundred monitoring rules have been written thus far with corresponding notifications sent to shuttle engineers. This article discusses the rule-based telemetry agent used for space shuttle ground processing and explains the problem domain, development of the agent software, benefits of AI technology, and deployment and sustaining engineering of the product.
Comparative Analysis of Frameworks for Knowledge-Intensive Intelligent Agents
Jones, Randolph M., Wray, Robert E.
This article discusses representations and processes for agents and behavior models that integrate large, diverse knowledge stores, are long-lived, and exhibit high degrees of competence and flexibility while interacting with complex environments. There are many different approaches to building such agents, and understanding the important commonalities and differences between approaches is often difficult. We review four agent frameworks, concentrating on the major representations and processes each directly supports. By organizing the approaches according to a common nomenclature, the analysis highlights points of similarity and difference and suggests directions for integrating and unifying disparate approaches and for incorporating research results from one framework into alternatives.
Comparative Analysis of Frameworks for Knowledge-Intensive Intelligent Agents
Jones, Randolph M., Wray, Robert E.
A recurring requirement for human-level artificial intelligence is the incorporation of vast amounts of knowledge into a software agent that can use the knowledge in an efficient and organized fashion. This article discusses representations and processes for agents and behavior models that integrate large, diverse knowledge stores, are long-lived, and exhibit high degrees of competence and flexibility while interacting with complex environments. There are many different approaches to building such agents, and understanding the important commonalities and differences between approaches is often difficult. We introduce a new approach to comparing frameworks based on the notions of commitment, reconsideration, and a categorization of representations and processes. We review four agent frameworks, concentrating on the major representations and processes each directly supports. By organizing the approaches according to a common nomenclature, the analysis highlights points of similarity and difference and suggests directions for integrating and unifying disparate approaches and for incorporating research results from one framework into alternatives.
Toward Virtual Humans
Swartout, William R., Gratch, Jonathan, Randall W. Hill, Jr., Hovy, Eduard, Marsella, Stacy, Rickel, Jeff, Traum, David
This article describes the virtual humans developed as part of the Mission Rehearsal Exercise project, a virtual reality-based training system. This project is an ambitious exercise in integration, both in the sense of integrating technology with entertainment industry content, but also in that we have joined a number of component technologies that have not been integrated before. This integration has not only raised new research issues, but it has also suggested some new approaches to difficult problems. We describe the key capabilities of the virtual humans, including task representation and reasoning, natural language dialogue, and emotion reasoning, and show how these capabilities are integrated to provide more human-level intelligence than would otherwise be possible.
Cognitive Architectures and General Intelligent Systems
In this article, I claim that research on cognitive architectures is an important path to the development of general intelligent systems. I contrast this paradigm with other approaches to constructing such systems, and I review the theoretical commitments associated with a cognitive architecture. I illustrate these ideas using a particular architecture -- ICARUS -- by examining its claims about memories, about the representation and organization of knowledge, and about the performance and learning mechanisms that affect memory structures. I also consider the high-level programming language that embodies these commitments, drawing examples from the domain of in-city driving. In closing, I consider ICARUS's relation to other cognitive architectures and discuss some open issues that deserve increased attention.
Asynchronous Partial Overlay: A New Algorithm for Solving Distributed Constraint Satisfaction Problems
Distributed Constraint Satisfaction (DCSP) has long been considered an important problem in multi-agent systems research. This is because many real-world problems can be represented as constraint satisfaction and these problems often present themselves in a distributed form. In this article, we present a new complete, distributed algorithm called asynchronous partial overlay (APO) for solving DCSPs that is based on a cooperative mediation process. The primary ideas behind this algorithm are that agents, when acting as a mediator, centralize small, relevant portions of the DCSP, that these centralized subproblems overlap, and that agents increase the size of their subproblems along critical paths within the DCSP as the problem solving unfolds. We present empirical evidence that shows that APO outperforms other known, complete DCSP techniques.