Search

Global session types are behavioral types designed for specifying in a compact way multiparty interactions between distributed components, and verifying their correctness. We take advantage of the fact that global session types can be naturally represented as cyclic Prolog terms - which are directly supported by the Jason implementation of AgentSpeak - to allow simple automatic generation of self-monitoring MASs: given a global session type specifying an interaction protocol, and the implementation of a MAS where agents are expected to be compliant with it, we define a procedure for automatically deriving a self-monitoring MAS. Such a generated MAS ensures that agents conform to the protocol at run-time, by adding a monitor agent that checks that the ongoing conversation is correct w.r.t. the global session type.

This paper presents the first results achieved within the Indiana MAS project funded by Italian Ministry for Education, University and Research, MIUR. We discuss how the AgentSketch holon belonging to the Indiana MAS has been extended to cope with images, besides hand drawn sketches, and has been tested in the domain of Mount Bego's prehistoric rock art (southern French Alps). The way Indiana MAS holons cooperate in order to provide correct interpretations of ambiguous shapes is discussed by means of an example based on hypotheses recently advanced by archaeologists.

Digital Libraries represent the commitment of research communities to preserve authoritative and well structured sources of knowledge, and to share archival organisations, methods and resources thanks to systems relying on standard metadata formats. This chapter describes some natural language processing techniques exploited for automatically extracting structural information from documents stored in Digital Libraries, based on the exposed metadata. The most prominent results achieved in this area are surveyed and discussed. As an example of an infrastructure for integrating, structuring and searching Digital Libraries based on natural language processing and semantic web techniques, we discuss the MANENT system. MANENT is a working prototype offering services of Digital Library content management and record classification and retrieval. It is hosted on a server at the Computer Science Department of Genova University and, starting from 2011, it will become publicly available. 475,000 records drawn from 138 repositories that all over the world expose OAI-PMH services have been downloaded, stored, and their automatic classification is under way. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.

The aim of the work is to develop formal models of interaction and of the related support infrastructures, that overcome the limits of the current approaches. We propose to represent explicitly not only the agents but also the computational environment in terms of rules, conventions, resources, tools, and services, that are functional to the coordination and cooperation of the agents. These models will enable the verification of the interaction in the MAS, thanks to the introduction of a novel social semantics of interaction based on commitments and on an explicit account of the regulative rules.

Engineering systems of heterogeneous agents is a difficult task; one of the ways for achieving the successful industrial deployment of agent technology is the development of engineering tools that support the developer in all the steps of design and implementation. In this work we focus on the problem of supporting the design of agent interaction protocols by carrying out a methodological integration of the MAS prototyping environment DCaseLP with the agent programming language DyLOG for reasoning about action and change.

The amount of news delivered by newspapers, television news broadcasts and web sites is increasing every day. Users looking for interesting news spend a lot of time in retrieving and filtering the right news from this massive amount of available information. For this reason, delivering highly personalized news is becoming more and more important for information providers which want to add value to their services. If the personalized news comes along with video, images and sound besides the basic text description and if it can be delivered to a large number of different hardware devices the added value is definitely increased. In this paper we discuss the architecture and preliminary development of a multimedia, multichannel and personalized news provider built on top of an existing prototypical system, ClickNews. The main contribution of our work lies in the analysis and experiments carried out to understand how well-established and emerging technologies can be integrated to boost news providers.