Agents-VIC Research Roundup

Friday, 27th april 2006
9-30am - 11am

Swinburne University of Technology
AGSG Building - 2st Floor, Room 211
John Street, Hawthorn
Victoria 3122

Speakers & Abstract:

- Kuldar Taveter -- (slides) -- Intelligent agents have the potential to play an important role in meeting the challenge to provide tools and interfaces
for people to productively interact with the Internet 24 hours a day and seven days a week. The DigitalFriend is such an individual-centred MAS
which monitors, filters for, notifies and alerts the user. It has an all-GUI interface and is user-programmed. The DigitalFriend is capable of orchestrating
Web Services and becomes a multi-user MAS in social contexts. Personal agents of the DigitalFriend type can be equipped with another tool developed at the
University of Melbourne - AReXSII - which helps the user to make sense of the information retrieved from the Internet. This tool is capable of reconciling
ontologies based on example data returned by Web Services. The application interprets the data returned by a Web Service by mapping the data
elements returned by an unfamiliar Web Service to the data elements returned by another Web Service the tags of which the user understands. Finally, we have
developed algorithms which enable personal agents to choose between different Web Services based on the Quality of Service (QoS), specifically performance.
In measuring performance, we address heterogeneity of the user's environment as different users can report different performance even when using the same
Web Service.

- Bao Quoc Vo  -- (slides) -- We look at a mechanism for specifying the external interface to composite and component services, and then deriving an appropriate internal
model to realise a functioning composition. We aim to investigate the issue of  synchronous and asynchronous communication between the composite service and the
component services. It's important to be able to compute a valid orchestration of components, given the interface specification of the desired composite
service, interface specifications of available components, and some mapping rules between parameters to deal with ontological issues.

- Boris Wu -- (slides) -- Service enactment is one of service management components, coordinating component service invocations according to a composed service
specification. Usually the execution of service enactment is done by a single coordinator node, referred as centralized service enactment.
Decentralized service enactment provides a different coordinating mode, such that the coordination of service invocations is distributed over a
set of network nodes. These nodes execute a portion of the original composed service specification based on control and data dependency
analysis and partition. This presentation reports the latest research development of the decentralized service enactment for the ASAPM
project at CIAMAS. It will presents the algorithms of the analysis and partition of a composed service specification, targeting at using a multi-agents system. 

- Jian Ying Zhang -- (slides) -- We report our current works for the large  collaborative projects ``Adaptive Service Agreement and Process
Management in Service Grid (ASAPM)" and "Adaptive Service Grid" (ASG).  The ASAPM project involves six Australian partners, including "Defense
Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO)", "Everyday Interactive Networks (EIN)" and "Telstra Corporation". This project is also a central
component of the EU FP6 integrated ASG project for which Swinburne, as the only non-EU organization, collaborates with twenty international
partners. The ASAPM project aims at developing new intelligent agent-based techniques and software tools for the adaptive service agreement and process
management in order to ensure collective functionality, end-to-end quality of service (QoS) and effective coordination of complex services. The overall goal
of the ASG project is to develop an open service-oriented development platform for service discovery, creation, composition and enactment in order to support
Automation of complex service application construction and their QoS delivery).  We focus our effort on explain the mechanism for distribution and re-distribution
of end-to-end quality of service in ASAPM/ASG.



How do you get there?

Get off at Glenferrie station if you take train (take any of  the Alamein,Belgrave or Lilydale trains). From the station,
walk along 'Swinburne walk', turn left into John St. You'll  see the AGSE building after 50m on the right side. Park your
car on Swinburne's public car park building or on SAFEWAY car park if you drive a car. You can drive through Glenferrie Rd
and enter to Wakefield St at McDonald's. For Swinburne public cap park, it is $2 for 0-2hours (or part of thereof).
For SAFEWAY car park, it is first hour free, and 25cent per 15 minutes from 1 hour to 2 hours. Please visit
http://www.swin.edu.au/agse/contact/map.htm to see the ASSG Building location.