1,721,032 research outputs found
Architecting for reuse: A software framework for automated negotiation
No full textIf agents are to negotiate automatically with one another they must share a negotiation mechanism, specifying what possible actions each party can take at any given time, when negotiation terminates and what the resulting agreements could be. The current state-of-the-art represents this as a negotiation protocol specifying the flow of messages. However, they omit other aspects of the rules of negotiation (such as obliging a participant to improve on a previous offer), requiring these to be represented implicitly in an agent's design, potentially resulting in compatibility, maintenance and re-usability problems. In this paper we propose an alternative approach, allowing all of the mechanism to be formal and explicit. We present (i) A taxonomy of declarative rules which can be used to capture a wide variety of negotiation mechanisms in a principled and well-structured way. (ii) A simple interaction protocol, which is able to support any mechanism which can be captured using the declarative rules. (iii) A software framework for negotiation, implemented in JADE [2] that allows agents to effectively participate in negotiations defined using our rule taxonomy and protocol
Agent Technology: Enabling Next Generation Computing (A Roadmap for Agent Based Computing)
No full textA Manifesto for Agent Technology: Towards Next Generation Computing
No full textThe European Commission's eEurope initiative aims to bring every citizen, home, school, business and administration online to create a digitally literate Europe. The value lies not in the objective itself, but in its ability to facilitate the advance of Europe into new ways of living and working. Just as in the first literacy revolution, our lives will change in ways never imagined. The vision of eEurope is underpinned by a technological infrastructure that is now taken for granted. Yet it provides us with the ability to pioneer radical new ways of doing business, of undertaking science, and, of managing our everyday activities. Key to this step change is the development of appropriate mechanisms to automate and improve existing tasks, to anticipate desired actions on our behalf (as human users) and to undertake them, while at the same time enabling us to stay involved and retain as much control as required. For many, these mechanisms are now being realised by agent technologies, which are already providing dramatic and sustained benefits in several business and industry domains, including B2B exchanges, supply chain management, car manufacturing, and so on. While there are many real successes of agent technologies to report, there is still much to be done in research and development for the full benefits to be achieved. This is especially true in the context of environments of pervasive computing devices that are envisaged in coming years. This paper describes the current state-of-the-art of agent technologies and identifies trends and challenges that will need to be addressed over the next 10 years to progress the field and realise the benefits. It offers a roadmap that is the result of discussions among participants from over 150 organisations including universities, research institutions, large multinational corporations and smaller IT start-up companies. The roadmap identifies successes and challenges, and points to future possibilities and demands; agent technologies are fundamental to the realisation of next generation computing
Progress in Multi-Agent Systems Research
No full textContinuing the series of workshops begun in 1996 (Luck, 1997; Doran et al., 1997; d'Inverno et al., 1997; Fisher et al., 1997) and held in each of the two years since (Luck et al., 1998; Aylett et al., 1998; Binmore et al., 1998; Decker et al., 1999; Beer et al., 1999), the 1999 workshop of the UK Special Interest Group on Multi-Agent Systems (UKMAS'99) took place in Bristol in December. Chaired and organised by Chris Preist of Hewlett Packard Laboratories, with support from both HP and BT Laboratories, the workshop brought together a diverse range of participants, from the agent community in both the UK and abroad, to discuss and present work spanning all areas of agent research. Although dominated by computer scientists, also present at the meeting were electronic engineers, computational biologists, philosophers, sociologists, statisticians, game-theorists, economists and behavioural scientists, with both academia and industry well represented. Indeed, numbers attending these workshops continue to grow, reflecting the continued and rising interest in agent-based systems. The meeting truly demonstrated the wider view of what the term “agency” implied to research in other disciplines and the questions raised at the end of presentations were a pertinent reminder of the diversity of the audience
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Negotiation in Multi-Agent Systems
No full textIn systems composed of multiple autonomous agents, negotiation is a key form of interaction that enables groups of agents to arrive at a mutual agreement regarding some belief, goal or plan, for example. Particularly because the agents are autonomous and cannot be assumed to be benevolent, agents must influence others to convince them to act in certain ways, and negotiation is thus critical for managing such inter-agent dependencies. The process of negotiation may be of many different forms, such as auctions, protocols in the style of the contract net, and argumentation, but it is unclear just how sophisticated the agents or the protocols for interaction must be for successful negotiation in different contexts. All these issues were raised in the panel session on negotiation
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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