Architecting and Deploying Multiagent Systems
Besides being an Artificial Intelligence area of research, multi-agent systems represent a new paradigm in software engineering. In this session, we will present methods for developing multi-agent systems. We will present characteristics of multi-agent systems that engender various architectural requirements. Then, we will present ways of architecting agent systems with emphasis on agent operations in open information environments. We will give examples of multi-agent deployment, with particular focus on our own RETSINA multi-agent infrastructure.
Agent-based Web Services
Web services are the new wave of software development. Web services are programs that transact on the Web in a distributed fashion. There is a great number of proposed industry standards, the most prominent of those being SOAP, WSDL, UDDI and BPEL. These standards apply to the development of Web services with pre-programmed interfaces and interactions. We claim that research and deployment results from multi agent systems will allow Web services to be more autonomous and flexible. For this to happen an evolution of Web service semantics must take place. In this session, we will discuss the characteristics of Web services, survey current industry standards, present development requirements, and a roadmap that takes Web services from the current state to the future evolution of agent-based Web services.
Biography
Prof. Katia Sycara is a Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. She is also the Director of the Laboratory for Semantic Web and Agents Technology. She holds a B.S in Applied Mathematics from Brown University, M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin and PhD in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology. She has given numerous invited talks, and has authored or co-authored more than 200 technical papers dealing with Multiagent Systems, Software Agents, Agent Teams, Web Services, the Semantic Web, Human-Agent Interaction, Negotiation, Case-Based Reasoning and the application of these techniques to e-commerce, crisis action planning, scheduling, manufacturing and financial planning. Prof. Sycara.s group has developed the RETSINA multi-agent infrastructure, a toolkit that enables the development of software agents that can dynamically coordinate in open information environments (e.g. battlefield, internet). In addition, Prof. Sycara is one of the contributors to the development of DAML-S/OWL-S, the Darpa-sponsored language for Semantic Web services, as well as matchmaking and brokering software for agent discovery, service integration and semantic interoperation. From 2001-2003 she served as Invited Expert of the W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium) Working Group on Web Services Architecture. She is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of France Telecom, 2003-2006;
Prof. Sycara is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and the recipient of the 2002 ACM/SIGART Agents Research Award. She has served as the Program Chair of the Second International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2003), as General Chair of the Second International Conference on Autonomous Agents (Agents 98), as the Chair of the Steering Committee of the Agents Conference (1999-2001), as the Scholarship chair of AAAI (1993-1999) and as a member of the AAAI Executive Council (1996-99). She is a founding member and member of the Board of Directors of the International Foundation of Multiagent Systems (IFMAS). She is a founding member of the Semantic Web Science Association, and the US co-chair of the Semantic Web Services Initiative. She is a founding Editor-in-Chief of the journal .Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems.; an Editor-in-Chief of the Springer Series on Agents; on the Editorial Board of the Kluwer book series on .Multiagent Systems, Artificial Societies and Simulated Organizations.; the Area Editor for AI and Management Science of the journal .Group Decision and Negotiation.. She also serves on the editorial board of the journal .Concurrent Engineering: Research and Applications.. She has served on the editorial board of the .ETAI journal on the Semantic Web. (1998-2001), on the Editorial Board of .IEEE Intelligent Systems and their Applications. (1992-1996), and .AI in Engineering. (1990-1996). She is a member of AAAI, the ACM, and Senior Member of IEEE.
