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CMSC 791a
Intelligent Agents
Reading
Week one
Hyacinth S. Nwana (1996), Software Agents:
An Overview, The Knowledge Engineering Review Vol 11 (3). (postscript
2.6M). Agent software is a rapidly developing area of
research. However, the 'overuse' of the word agent has tended to mask
the fact that, in reality, there is a truly heterogeneous body of
research being carried out under this banner. This overview paper
presents a typology of agents. It places them in context, defines them
and then goes on, inter alia, to overview critically the rationales,
hypotheses, goals, challenges and state-of-the-art demonstrators of
the various agent types in the typology. Hence, it attempts to make
explicit much of what is usually implicit in the agents literature. It
also proceeds to overview some other general issues which pertain to
all the types of agents in the typology. This paper largely reviews
software agents, and it also contains some strong opinions that are
not necessarily widely accepted by the agent community. [42 pages]
Week two
M. J. Wooldridge and N. R. Jennings, (1995),
Intelligent Agents: Theory and Practice, The Knowledge Engineering
Review 10 (2) 115-152. (
postscript (273K), compressed
postscript (114K))
Week three
KQML as an agent communication language
Tim Finin, Yannis Labrou, and James Mayfield, in Jeff Bradshaw (Ed.),
``Software Agents'', MIT Press, Cambridge, to appear, (1997).
Cohen, P.R. and H. J. Levesque [1990].
Performatives in a rationally based speech act theory, Proceedings
of the 28th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational
Linguistics, 1990, pp. 79-88.
Abstract: A crucially important adequacy test of any theory of speech
acts is its ability to handle performatives. This paper provides a
theory of performatives as a test case for our rationally based theory
of illocutionary acts. We show why ``I request you...'' is a request,
and ``I lie to you that p'' is self-defeating. The analysis supports
and extends earlier work of theorists such as Bach and Harnish [1] and
takes issue with recent claims by Searle [10] that such
performative-as-declarative analyses are doomed to failure.
Week four
Cohen, P.R. and H.J. Levesque [1995].
Communicative Actions for Artificial Agents, Proceedings of the
International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems, AAAI Press, San
Francisco, June, 1995.
Abstract: This paper considers the semantics of the agent
communication language KQML. By using this language for communication,
agents will be able to request and provide services. Indeed, numerous
projects have shown how the language can profitably support
interoperation among distributed agents. However, before becoming a
widely-accepted standard, it would be worthwhile to examine the
language in detail, especially the semantical issues it raises. This
paper identifies numerous difficulties with the language, and an
attempt is made to point to their resolution. The paper illustrates
the kind of semantics we believe to be necessary to characterize agent
communication languages, identifies an important adequacy condition
(compositionality) and shows how to compose a question from a request
and an inform. Finally, the paper discusses possible impacts to be
felt on various KQML decisions from the semantical issues raised here.
Cohen, P.R. and H.J. Levesque [1991].
Teamwork, Nous 25(4), Special Issue on Cognitive Science and
Artifical Intelligence, pp. 487-512.
Abstract: What is involved when a group of agents decide to do
something together? Joint action by a team appears to involve more
than just the union of simultaneous individual actions, even when
those actions are coordinated. We would not say that there is any
teamwork involved in ordinary automobile traffic, even though the
drivers act simultaneously and are coordinated (one hopes) by the
traffic signs and rules of the road. But when a group of drivers
decide to do something together, such as driving somewhere as a
convoy, it appears that the group acts more like a single agent with
beliefs, goals, and intentions of its own, over and above the
individual ones. But given that actions are performed by individuals,
and that it is individuals who ultimately have the beliefs and goals
that engender action, what motivates agents to form teams and act
together? In some cases, the answer is obviously the inherent value in
doing something together, such as playing tennis, performing a duet,
or dancing. These are examples of activities that simply cannot be
performed alone. But in many cases, team activity is only one way
among many of achieving the goals of the individuals. What benefits do
agents expect to derive from their participation in a group effort? In
this paper, we attempt to provide an answer to these questions. In
particular, we argue that a joint activity is one that is performed by
individuals sharing certain specific mental properties. We show how
these properties affect and are affected by properties of the
participants. Regarding the benefits of teamwork, we show that in
return for the overhead involved in participating in a joint activity,
an agent expects to be able to share the load in achieving a goal in a
way that is robust against certain possible failures and
misunderstandings.
Week six
A. Farquhar, R. Fikes, & J. Rice. The
Ontolingua Server: A Tool for Collaborative Ontology
Construction. Knowledge Systems Laboratory, KSL-96-26, September
1996.
Reusable ontologies are becoming increasingly important for tasks such
as information integration, knowledge-level interoperation, and
knowledge-base development. We have developed a set of tools and
services to support the process of achieving consensus on common
shared ontologies by geographically distributed groups. These tools
make use of the world-wide web to enable wide access and provide users
with the ability to pub-lish, browse, create, and edit ontologies
stored on an ontology server. Users can quickly assemble a new
ontology from a library of modules. We discuss how our system was
constructed, how it exploits existing protocols and browsing tools,
and our experience supporting hundreds of users. We describe
applications using our tools to achieve con-sensus on ontologies and
to integrate information. The Ontolingua Server may be accessed
through the URL http://ontolingua.stanford.edu/.
R. Fikes, A. Farquhar, & W. Pratt.
Information Brokers: Gathering Information from Heterogeneous
Information Sources. In John H. Stewman, Ed., Ninth Florida
Artificial Intelligence Research Symposium (FLAIRS-96), Key West,
Florida, 192-197. Eckerd College, 1996.
The Internet provides dramatic new opportunities for gathering
information from multiple, distributed, heterogeneous information
sources. However, this distributed environment poses difficult
technical problems for the information-seeking client, including
finding the information sources relevant to an interest, formulating
questions in the terms that the sources understand, interpreting the
retrieved information, and assembling the information retrieved from
several sources into a coherent answer. In this paper, we describe
techniques that will enable vendors and buyers to build and maintain
network-based information brokers capable of retrieving information
about services and products via the Internet from multiple vendor
catalogs and data bases for both human and computer-based clients.
Read for April 14
James Mayfield, Tim Finin, Rajkumar Narayanaswamy, Chetan Shah
William MacCartney & Keith Goolsbey,
The Cycic Friends Network: Getting Cyc agents to reason together.
Proceedings of the CIKM '95 Workshop on Intelligent Information Agents.
(PostScript version, 150Kb),
Presentation Slides (PostScript version, 350Kb).
Read for April 16
Agent Development Support for Tcl, R. Scott Cost, Tim Finin,
Jeegar Lakhani, Ethan Miller, Charles Nicholas and Ian Soboroff,
submitted to 5th Annual Tcl/Tk Workshop '97, July 14-17, 1997 Boston.
Tcl/Tk is an attractive language for the design of intelligent agents
because it allows the quick construction of prototypes and user
interfaces; new scripts can easily be bound at runtime to respond to
events; and execution state is encapsulated by the interpreter, which
helps in agent migration. However, a system of intelligent agents
must share a common language for communicating requests and knowledge.
We have integrated KQML (Knowledge Query Manipulation Language), one
such standard language, into Tcl/Tk. The resulting system, called
TKQML, provides several benefits to those building intelligent agent
systems. First, TKQML allows easy integration of existing tools which
have Tcl/Tk interfaces with an agent system by using Tcl to move
information between KQML and the application. Second, TKQML is an
excellent language with which to build agents, allowing on-the-fly
specification of message handlers and construction of graphical
interfaces. This paper describes the implementation of TKQML, and
discusses its use in our intelligent agent system for information
retrieval.
Read for Monday, April 21, 1997
Grace Crowder and Charles Nicholas, Resource
Selection in CAFE: an Architecture for Network Information
Retrieval Networked Information Retrieval workshop at SIGIR'96,
August 1996. Final versions of all the workshop papers are available
in electronic form here.
Claudia Pearce and Ethan
Miller, "The
TELLTALE Dynamic Hypertext Environment: Approaches to
Scalability," in Advances in Intelligent
Hypertext, J. Mayfield and C. Nicholas, eds. Lecture Notes in
Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, in preparation.
Read for Wednesday, April 22, 1997
This class will look at the Foundation for Intelligent
Physical Agents.
Promotion of the development and specification of agent technologies
is the task of the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents
(FIPA). FIPA is an international non-profit association of companies
and organisations which agree to share efforts to produce in a timely
fashion internationally agreed specifications of generic agent
technologies that are usable across a large number of applications
providing a high level of interoperability across applications. The
target of FIPA-specified agent technologies are Intelligent Physical
Agents (IPA). IPAs are devices intended for the mass market, capable
of executing actions to accomplish goals imparted by or in
collaboration with human beings or other IPAs, with a high degree of
intelligence.
Visit the FIPA site and
read the current draft FIPA proposal for a standard Agent
Communication Language along with some comments (hardcopy).
Read for Wednesday, April 30, 1997
Mobile
Agents White Paper, Jim White, General Magic, 1996.
Mobile Agents:
Are they a good idea?, Colin Harrison, David Chess and Aaron
Kershenbaum. Research report, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, March
1995.
Additional readings:
Robert S. Gray. Agent Tcl: A flexible and secure mobile-agent
system. In Mark Diekhans and Mark Roseman, editors, Proceedings
of the Fourth Annual Tcl/Tk Workshop (TCL 96), Monterey,
California, July 1996. This paper describes the architecture of Agent
Tcl and its security mechanisms. The paper is available in
compressed postscript (71,833 bytes).
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