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Articles 301 - 320 of 320

Full-Text Articles in Computer Engineering

Negotiating For Goods And Services, Michael N. Huhns, Anuj K. Malhotra Jan 1999

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.

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Cognitive Agents, Michael N. Huhns, Munindar P. Singh Jan 1998

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 …

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Personal Assistants, Michael N. Huhns, Munindar P. Singh Jan 1998

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 …

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Workflow Agents, Michael N. Huhns, Munindar P. Singh Jan 1998

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. …

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All Agents Are Not Created Equal, Michael N. Huhns, Munindar P. Singh Jan 1998

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 …

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Anthropoid Agents, Michael N. Huhns, Munindar P. Singh Jan 1998

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 …

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Agent Jurisprudence, Michael N. Huhns, Munindar P. Singh Jan 1998

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.

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An Ontology Tool For Distributed Information Environments, Kuhanandha Mahalingam, Michael N. Huhns Jun 1997

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.

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The Agent Test, Michael N. Huhns, Munindar P. Singh Jan 1997

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.

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Internet-Based Agents: Applications And Infrastructure, Munindar P. Singh, Michael N. Huhns Jan 1997

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.

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Mobile Agents, Michael N. Huhns, Munindar P. Singh Jan 1997

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.

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Conversational Agents, Michael N. Huhns, Munindar P. Singh Jan 1997

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.

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Agents Are Everywhere!, Michael N. Huhns, Munindar P. Singh Jan 1997

Agents Are Everywhere!, Michael N. Huhns, Munindar P. Singh

Faculty Publications

A decade ago this claim would have evoked images from the Cold War—and probably gotten this column classified! Today, it describes one of the hottest technical areas on the Internet.

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Hierarchical Classification As An Aid To Browsing, John R. Rose, Caroline M. Eastman Jan 1997

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 …

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Ontologies For Agents, Michael N. Huhns, Munindar P. Singh Jan 1997

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, …

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Detection For A Statistically-Known, Time-Varying Dispersive Channel, David W. Matolak, S. G. Wilson Dec 1996

Detection For A Statistically-Known, Time-Varying Dispersive Channel, David W. Matolak, S. G. Wilson

Faculty Publications

Detection for the statistically known channel (SKC) is aimed at obtaining good performance in situations where our statistical knowledge of a time-varying channel is good, and where other equalization/detection schemes are either too complex to implement, or their performance is limited due to the rapidity of channel fading, or where we are simply unable to perform channel estimation. By using a statistical characterization of the channel, we develop a new detector that performs maximum-likelihood sequence estimation (MLSE) (given the channel model) on blocks of N symbols. Both symbol-spaced and fractionally spaced samples are used, to obtain two different detectors, that …

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Automating Workflows For Service Provisioning: Integrating Ai And Database Technologies, Munindar P. Singh, Michael N. Huhns Oct 1994

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 …

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Declarative Representations Of Multiagent Systems, Munindar P. Singh, Michael N. Huhns, Larry M. Stevens Oct 1993

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.

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Three Points Of Great Height On Elliptic Curves, Andrew Bremner, Duncan A. Buell Jul 1993

Three Points Of Great Height On Elliptic Curves, Andrew Bremner, Duncan A. Buell

Faculty Publications

We give three elliptic curves whose generators have great height, demonstrating along the way a moderately efficient method for finding such points.

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Resource Integration Using A Large Knowledge Base In Carnot, Christine Collet, Michael N. Huhns, Wei-Min Shen Dec 1991

Resource Integration Using A Large Knowledge Base In Carnot, Christine Collet, Michael N. Huhns, Wei-Min Shen

Faculty Publications

A method for integrating separately developed information resources that overcomes incompatibilities in syntax and semantics and permits the resources to be accessed and modified coherently is described. The method provides logical connectivity among the information resources via a semantic service layer that automates the maintenance of data integrity and provides an approximation of global data integration across systems. This layer is a fundamental part of the Carnot architecture, which provides tools for interoperability across global enterprises.

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