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Articles 91 - 120 of 121
Full-Text Articles in Computer Engineering
Inside An Agent, José M. Vidal, Paul A. Buhler, Michael N. Huhns
Inside An Agent, José M. Vidal, Paul A. Buhler, Michael N. Huhns
Faculty Publications
When we discuss agent-based system construction with software developers or ask students to implement common agent architectures using object-oriented techniques, we find that it is not trivial for them to create an elegant system design from the standard presentation of these architectures in textbooks or research papers. To better communicate our interpretation of popular agent architectures, we draw UML (Unified Modeling Language) diagrams to guide an implementer's design. However, before we describe these diagrams, we need to review some basic features of agents. The paper considers an architecture showing a simple agent interacting with an environment. The agent senses its …
Consensus Ontologies: Reconciling The Semantics Of Web Pages And Agents, Larry M. Stevens, Michael N. Huhns
Consensus Ontologies: Reconciling The Semantics Of Web Pages And Agents, Larry M. Stevens, Michael N. Huhns
Faculty Publications
As you build a Web site, it is worthwhile asking, "Should I put my information where it belongs or where people are most likely to look for it?" Our recent research into improving searching through ontologies is providing some interesting results to answer this question. The techniques developed by our research bring organization to the information received and reconcile the semantics of each document. Our goal is to help users retrieve dynamically generated information that is tailored to their individual needs and preferences. We believe that it is easier for individuals or small groups to develop their own ontologies, regardless …
Automating Supply Chains, Michael N. Huhns, Larry M. Stevens
Automating Supply Chains, Michael N. Huhns, Larry M. Stevens
Faculty Publications
A recent study found that supply-chain problems cost companies between 9 and 20 percent of their value over a six-month period (T.J. Becker, 2000). The problems range from part shortages to poorly utilized plant capacity. When you place this in the context of the overall business-to-business (B2B) market expected to reach US$7 trillion by 2004 (37 percent of which is projected to be e-commerce sales), it is easy to see that effective supply-chain management (SCM) tools could save companies billions of dollars. Attempts to automate solutions to these problems are complicated by the need for the different companies in a …
Trust And Persistence, Paul A. Buhler, Michael N. Huhns
Trust And Persistence, Paul A. Buhler, Michael N. Huhns
Faculty Publications
We rely on computers to control our power plants and water supplies, our automobiles and transportation systems, and soon our economic and political systems. Increasingly, software agents are enmeshed in these systems, serving as the glue that connects distributed components. Clearly, we need mechanisms to determine whether these agents are trustworthy. What do we need to establish trust? Agents are often characterized by features such as autonomy, sociability, proactiveness, and persistent identity. This latter feature is key in determining trust. When agents operate over an extended period, they can earn a reputation for competence, timeliness, ease of use, and trustworthiness, …
Hop Integrity In Computer Networks, Mohamed G. Gouda, E.N. Elnozahy, Chin-Tser Huang, Tommy M. Mcguire
Hop Integrity In Computer Networks, Mohamed G. Gouda, E.N. Elnozahy, Chin-Tser Huang, Tommy M. Mcguire
Faculty Publications
A computer network is said to provide hop integrity iff when any router p in the network receives a message m supposedly from an adjacent router q, then p can check that m was indeed sent by q, was not modified after it was sent, and was not a replay of an old message sent from q to p. We describe three protocols that can be added to the routers in a computer network so that the network can provide hop integrity. These three protocols are a secret exchange protocol, a weak integrity protocol, and a strong integrity protocol. All …
An Agent-Based Global Economy, Michael N. Huhns
An Agent-Based Global Economy, Michael N. Huhns
Faculty Publications
Many people are buying music CDs over the Web, but with multiple retail sites offering the same CDs, how do you decide which retailer to buy from? Typically, you visit a few sites and choose the one with the lowest price. Shopbotsshopping agents that automatically search the Internet to obtain information about prices and other attributes of goods and servicesare ideal helpers for such a task.1 The better ones can visit hundreds of sites, giving price-conscious consumers a powerful tool that could work to the detriment of some retailers.
The Emergence Of Language Among Autonomous Agents, Piotr Gmytrasiewicz, Michael N. Huhns
The Emergence Of Language Among Autonomous Agents, Piotr Gmytrasiewicz, Michael N. Huhns
Faculty Publications
Suppose some autonomous shopbot agents had been representing us by dealing with a vendor's pricebot, and suppose they didn't share an agent communication language (ACL). What should they know at a fundamental level, what could each point to, and how could they establish a common language? Recent research at the University of Texas at Arlington has shown that agents first establish a common vocabulary, progress to a primitive language similar to human pidgin, then enrich the language's grammar to develop a creole, and eventually arrive at a full-blown ACL. During this process, the vocabulary and grammatical structures most important to …
Sensors + Agents + Networks = Aware Agents, Michael N. Huhns, Sreenath Seshadri
Sensors + Agents + Networks = Aware Agents, Michael N. Huhns, Sreenath Seshadri
Faculty Publications
Software agents are being deployed in increasing numbers to help users find and manage information, particularly in open environments such as the Internet. For the most part, they operate independently and are typically designed to be aware only of their users and the environment in which they perform their tasks. Thus, they fail to take advantage of each other's abilities or results. For example, a shopping agent might periodically access several online databases to find the best price for a music CD and then purchase it if the price falls below its user's threshold. Other agents might be tracking prices …
Agent Teams: Building And Implementing Software, Michael N. Huhns
Agent Teams: Building And Implementing Software, Michael N. Huhns
Faculty Publications
Agents will become fundamental building blocks for general-purpose Internet-based software. The software may not display any explicitly agent-like characteristics, but it will exhibit the benefits of tolerance to errors, ease of maintenance, adaptability to change, and speed of construction that agents provide. Moreover, an agent-based approach to software development can lead to new types of software solutions that might not otherwise be obvious. The author considers how an approach based on teams of active, cooperative, and persistent software components, that is agents, shows special promise in enabling the rapid construction of robust and reusable software.
Online Auctions, Michael N. Huhns, José M. Vidal
Online Auctions, Michael N. Huhns, José M. Vidal
Faculty Publications
Auctions on the Internet can involve not only consumers, but also businesses. They can form dynamically and enable the exchange of goods much as stock exchanges manage the buying and selling of securities. But because auctions have a wide scope and a short lifetime, the opportunistic behavior needed for successful interaction requires agents to both participate in and manage auctions. The article focuses on the use of software agents in such Internet based auctions
Networking Embedded Agents, Michael N. Huhns
Networking Embedded Agents, Michael N. Huhns
Faculty Publications
Most of us will soon be managing an intranet in our homes, though we might not realize it. We might also be surprised at the devices that will be networked together. Just about every electrical device now contains one or more microprocessors. Designers typically find this a cost-effective way to provide device functionality, even when much of a processor's power is unnecessary or unused. For example, my coffee maker contains a processor, even though the appliance needn't be very smart and wastes most of its CPU cycles. Nevertheless, it is cheaper to include a general-purpose microprocessor than to incorporate custom …
Personal Ontologies, Michael N. Huhns, Larry M. Stevens
Personal Ontologies, Michael N. Huhns, Larry M. Stevens
Faculty Publications
Corporations can suffer from too much information, and it is often inaccessible, inconsistent, and incomprehensible. The corporate solution entails knowledge management techniques and data warehouses. The paper discusses the use of the personal ontology. The promising approach is an organization scheme based on a model of an office and its information, an ontology, coupled with the proper tools for using it.
Exploiting Expertise Through Knowledge Networks, Michael N. Huhns, Larry M. Stevens
Exploiting Expertise Through Knowledge Networks, Michael N. Huhns, Larry M. Stevens
Faculty Publications
The paper discusses the necessary capabilities of knowledge networks: categorizing (the ability to classify Web pages and other unstructured data automatically); hyperlinking (the ability to add to each item of information appropriate pointers to other relevant items of information); alerting (the automatic notification of users and agents to new information that might be of interest to them); and profiling (the construction of models of users and agents to describe their interests and expertise).
Negotiating For Goods And Services, Michael N. Huhns, Anuj K. Malhotra
Negotiating For Goods And Services, Michael N. Huhns, Anuj K. Malhotra
Faculty Publications
Can a negotiation protocol be both fair and “envy-free” when more than two agents are involved? The authors consider how envy-free apportioning is more difficult than fair apportioning, but both can help to manage critical resources. They discuss an envy-free protocol and agent-based Web auctions.
Benevolent Agents, Michael N. Huhns, Abdulla Mohamed
Benevolent Agents, Michael N. Huhns, Abdulla Mohamed
Faculty Publications
Some agents roaming the Web these days are benevolent-for example, they may clean up stalled or failed database transactions, or share query results that may have cost substantial resources to acquire and might consume more to share. The Agent Behavior Testbed is a tool for studying the economics of agent altruism. As more agents hit the Internet, benevolence and cooperation will help with overall efficiency and productivity. The paper discusses benevolent agents on the Web.
Workflow Agents, Michael N. Huhns, Munindar P. Singh
Workflow Agents, Michael N. Huhns, Munindar P. Singh
Faculty Publications
Software agents as user agents, resource agents, and brokers may be able to enhance usefulness of workflow applications. Workflow technology is important to network computing because workflows exist naturally wherever distributed resources are interrelated. The problem with current workflow technology is that it is often too rigid. The lack of freedom accorded to human participants causes workflow management systems to appear unfriendly. As a result, they are often ignored or circumvented. This rigidity also causes productivity losses by making it harder to accommodate the flexible, ad hoc reasoning of human intelligence. Another challenge is that system requirements are rarely static. …
Agent Jurisprudence, Michael N. Huhns, Munindar P. Singh
Agent Jurisprudence, Michael N. Huhns, Munindar P. Singh
Faculty Publications
The agent metaphor comes packaged with a number of powerful abstractions. Some of these are psychological, such as beliefs, knowledge, and intentions-abstractions that were traditionally studied in AI. However, there are a number of other abstractions that the agent metaphor brings to the fore. Of these, one has been emphasizing the social abstractions. Close cousins of the social abstractions are the ethical and legal abstractions. These too are being recognized as increasingly important in developing agents that are not only sociable, but also well behaved.
Cognitive Agents, Michael N. Huhns, Munindar P. Singh
Cognitive Agents, Michael N. Huhns, Munindar P. Singh
Faculty Publications
Several researchers have proposed using cognitive concepts as a semantic basis for agent communications (M.N. Huhns and M.P. Singh, 1997). One of the leading candidates for such a semantics is based on Arcol, the communication language used within Artimis. Interestingly, this application (not only of Arcol, but also in general) appears extremely misguided. The intentional concepts are well suited to designing agents, but are not suited to giving a basis to a public, standardizable view of communication. A challenge for using the cognitive concepts is that although they are natural in several respects and can guide implementations, full blown implementations …
Personal Assistants, Michael N. Huhns, Munindar P. Singh
Personal Assistants, Michael N. Huhns, Munindar P. Singh
Faculty Publications
Already there are simple personal agents to help with some of our shopping. There are agents to track stocks in our portfolios, advise us on how to use particular software products, and arrange meetings within corporate workgroups. However, none of these agents takes more than one aspect of our activities into account, nor do they adapt easily to our preferences. Personal assistants, on the other hand, are agents that can represent individuals on the Web. They help users in their day-to-day activities, especially those involving information retrieval, negotiation, or coordination. A personal assistant might schedule a meeting and then, based …
All Agents Are Not Created Equal, Michael N. Huhns, Munindar P. Singh
All Agents Are Not Created Equal, Michael N. Huhns, Munindar P. Singh
Faculty Publications
As the technology advances, we can expect the development of specialized agents to be used as standardized building blocks for information systems. Two trends lend credence to such a prediction. First, software systems in general are being constructed with larger components, such as ActiveX and JavaBeans, which are becoming closer to being agents themselves. They have more functionality than simple objects, respond to events autonomously, and, most importantly, respond to system builders at development time, as well as to events at runtime. Moreover, there is a move toward more cooperative information systems, in which the architecture itself plays an important …
Anthropoid Agents, Michael N. Huhns, Munindar P. Singh
Anthropoid Agents, Michael N. Huhns, Munindar P. Singh
Faculty Publications
In the study of agents on the Internet, we often ascribe to them human qualities, such as beliefs and intentions. These qualities are best understood as metaphors that give developers a way to talk about and design the capabilities and applications of agents. Despite all the progress in computing, users have been slow to accept the technology. They have often accepted what was thrown at them, but only under economic duress. Bringing the technology closer to their emotional needs might ease this resistance. So how can we put a human face on computing? Maybe by putting an animated face on …
An Ontology Tool For Distributed Information Environments, Kuhanandha Mahalingam, Michael N. Huhns
An Ontology Tool For Distributed Information Environments, Kuhanandha Mahalingam, Michael N. Huhns
Faculty Publications
This paper describes how ontologies can be used for query formulation and semantic reconciliation in large distributed information environments. It presents a tool, written in Java, that can be used to create and browse ontologies, and construct ontology-based queries. The tool incorporates several abstraction mechanisms that enable users to manage large ontologies, which are typical of large information environments. The tool is being applied to an information system for healthcare administrators, which spans hospitals, clinics, and governmental health departments.
Internet-Based Agents: Applications And Infrastructure, Munindar P. Singh, Michael N. Huhns
Internet-Based Agents: Applications And Infrastructure, Munindar P. Singh, Michael N. Huhns
Faculty Publications
Software agents are mitigating the complexity of modern information systems—technically by providing a locus for managing information subsets, and psychologically by providing an abstraction for human interaction with them.
Ontologies For Agents, Michael N. Huhns, Munindar P. Singh
Ontologies For Agents, Michael N. Huhns, Munindar P. Singh
Faculty Publications
An ontology is a computational model of some portion of the world. It is often captured in some form of a semantic network-a graph whose nodes are concepts or individual objects and whose arcs represent relationships or associations among the concepts. This network is augmented by properties and attributes, constraints, functions, and rules that govern the behavior of the concepts. Formally, an ontology is an agreement about a shared conceptualization, which includes frameworks for modeling domain knowledge and agreements about the representation of particular domain theories. Definitions associate the names of entities in a universe of discourse (for example, classes, …
The Agent Test, Michael N. Huhns, Munindar P. Singh
The Agent Test, Michael N. Huhns, Munindar P. Singh
Faculty Publications
The authors consider agents on the World Wide Web, including information retrieval agents. They propose a test for agenthood, involving communication in multi-agent systems.
Mobile Agents, Michael N. Huhns, Munindar P. Singh
Mobile Agents, Michael N. Huhns, Munindar P. Singh
Faculty Publications
A lot of agents are executing on the Web, and some of them are starting to move around. While most agents are static (existing as a single process or thread on one host), others can pick up and move their code and data to a new host where they resume executing.
Conversational Agents, Michael N. Huhns, Munindar P. Singh
Conversational Agents, Michael N. Huhns, Munindar P. Singh
Faculty Publications
When you build or buy an agent for the Web, you want it to perform as well as possible. Increasingly, this means your agent should take advantage not only of the Web's information resources, but also of all the other agents that might be operating there.
Hierarchical Classification As An Aid To Browsing, John R. Rose, Caroline M. Eastman
Hierarchical Classification As An Aid To Browsing, John R. Rose, Caroline M. Eastman
Faculty Publications
An approach to browsing large chemical reaction databases is presented. The method that is described builds on earlier work in which unsupervised hierarchical classification was used to extract generalizations of reaction classes from reaction databases for use in reaction knowledge bases. The method described in this paper involves classification based on both semantic and topological features. It supports the creation of deep hierarchies in which succeeding levels represent increasing degrees of abstraction. The creation of a hierarchy allows the user to quickly locate interesting items or classes of items by performing a tree traversal as opposed to sequentially scanning a …
Automating Workflows For Service Provisioning: Integrating Ai And Database Technologies, Munindar P. Singh, Michael N. Huhns
Automating Workflows For Service Provisioning: Integrating Ai And Database Technologies, Munindar P. Singh, Michael N. Huhns
Faculty Publications
Workflows are the structured activities that take place in information systems in typical business environments. These activities frequently involve several database systems, user interfaces, and application programs. Traditional database systems do not support workflows to any reasonable extent: usually human beings must intervene to ensure their proper execution. We have developed an architecture based on AI technology that automatically manages workflows. This architecture, which executes on top of a distributed computing environment, has been applied to automating service provisioning workflows; an implementation that operates on one such workflow has been developed. This work advances the Carnot Project’s goal of developing …
Declarative Representations Of Multiagent Systems, Munindar P. Singh, Michael N. Huhns, Larry M. Stevens
Declarative Representations Of Multiagent Systems, Munindar P. Singh, Michael N. Huhns, Larry M. Stevens
Faculty Publications
This paper explores the specification and semantics of multiagent problem-solving systems, focusing on the representations that agents have of each other. It provides a declarative representation for such systems. Several procedural solutions to a well-known test-bed problem are considered, and the requirements they impose on different agents are identified. A study of these requirements yields a representational scheme based on temporal logic for specifying the acting, perceiving, communicating, and reasoning abilities of computational agents. A formal semantics is provided for this scheme. The resulting representation is highly declarative, and useful for describing systems of agents solving problems reactively.