A professor of musical technology at Georgia Tech, Gil Weinberg, enlisted the support of graduate student Scott Driscoll to create Haile -- the first truly robotic musician. In this way, he became a sort of Geppetto creating his musical Pinocchio. "Computers have been playing music for 50 years," Driscoll said. "But we wanted to create something that didn't just play back what it heard, but play off it, too." Think of Haile (pronounced Hi-lee) as a robotic partner in the percussion form of dueling banjos.

In heterogeneous multi-agent systems trust is necessary to improve interactions by enabling agents to choose good partners. Most trust models work by taking, in addition to direct experiences, other agents' communicated evaluations into account. However, in an open MAS other agents may use different trust models and the evaluations they communicate are based on different principles: as such they are meaningless without some form of alignment. My doctoral research gives a formal definition of this problem and proposes two methods of achieving an alignment.