Userfriendly Orchestration of Web Services using the DigitalFriend multiagent system (MAS)

Steve Goschnick

Information Systems

University of Melbourne

Friday, 18th March 2005
9-30am - 11am

RMIT University Function Room (near Kaleide Theatre)
Building 8, level 2, RMIT,
Swanston Street, Melbourne.

Abstract:

The web services paradigm is an opportunity for a universal programmatic interface to the Internet, one that should parallel the web-browser, human user-centered interface, in scope and adoption; one that will allow the user to optimise broadband usage. However, to achieve such widespread acceptability, new user-friendly user-centred, intelligent tools are needed, to tie together atomic generic web services into new user-envisaged capabilities. Ie. The 'user' must drive this revolution, if it is to be a revolution.

This talk discusses the issues involved and the state of play, by presenting one such tool: the DigitalFriend an end-user oriented multiagent system, based on the ShadowBoard agent architecture. The DigitalFriend project is an open source project which won Telstra Broadband Fund support in the late 2003 second round of offers, completed in Jan'05 and is due for release general 'any day now'. It was one of 19 successful projects, drawn from over 300 submissions to the fund, which was designed to increase the uptake of broadband in Australia.

Biosketch:

Steve Goschnick has been a Senior Research Fellow with the Department of Information Systems at the University of Melbourne since 2000, lecturing in several subjects, with research interests in software agents, context-aware computing and the human computer interface (HCI). He managed the Interaction Design Evaluation and Analysis (IDEA) Lab there too, until Dec 2004. He developed the Shadowboard agent architecture during a research masters degree in 1998-2000 within the Computer Science Department, same uni/building. He has designed and project-managed several meduim-sized software development efforts (10-18 developers) including an online-learning system. In the early-mid 1990's he was a keen promoter of OOP concepts through popular-press articles and a weekly column in the Computer Age. He was a developer and publisher of packaged software from 1985 to 1995, and was the founding president of the Australian Software Publishers Association (ASPA Inc). In the early 1980's he was a keen adopter of the then new relational database systems and accompanying methodologies - something he still teaches at masters level. Throughout this time period he has been and continues to be a keen programmer, in the Fortran, PASCAL, C, C++ and of late (1997+) Java languages - an activity now applied to personal projects only, such as the recent DigitalFriend.

Papers:

Here are links to some recent papers regarding my Agent work with Web Services as sub-agents:

Goschnick, S.B. & Graham, C. (2004). Augmenting Interaction and Cognition using Agent Architectures and Technology inspired by Psychology and Social Worlds. in Proceedings, 8th ERCIM Workshop 2004 "User Interfaces for All", June, Vienna, Austria. The paper is available as a pdf file here: GoschnickAndGrahamERCIM-2004.pdf (728 Kbytes).

Goschnick, S.B. (2003). Enacting an Agent-based Digital Self in a 24x7 Web Services World. in Proceedings of ISMIS 2003, the 14th Symposium on Methodologies for Intelligent Systems, Maebashi, Japan. Springer LNAI vol. 2871, pp187-196. Version of this paper is available here as a pdf file: GoschnickISMIS-2003.pdf (2340 Kbytes).

Goschnick, S.B. & Sterling, L. (2003). Enacting and Interacting with an Agent-based Digital Self in a 24x7 Web Services World. in Proceedings, Workshop on Humans and Multi-Agent Systems, at the AAMAS-2003 conference, Melbourne, Australia. (PDF, 1582 Kbytes).

Tao Jin & Steve Goschnick (2003) Utilizing Web Services in an Agent-based Transaction Model (ABT). in Workshop on Web Services and Agent-based Engineering, at the AAMAS-2003 conference, Melbourne, Australia. Paper (in PDF format, 448 Kbytes).

Goschnick, S.B. (2001). Shadowboard: an agent architecture for enacting a sophisticated digital self, Thesis, The University of Melbourne (Department of Computer Science & Software Engineering), 199 pages, Sep. 2001.