Agent communication language

In order to perform effective communication, agents must be able to foresee the effects of their utterances on the addressee's mental state. In this paper we study the consequences of an utterance on the mental state of a hearer. Given an agent communication language with a STRIPS-like semantics, we propose a set of criteria that allow the binding of the speaker's mental state to its uttering of a certain sentence. On the basis of these criteria, we give an abductive procedure that the hearer can adopt to partially recognize the speaker's mental state that led to a specific utterance.

AUUG2K-Enterprise Security, Enterprise Linux Content Based Routing with Elvin4 Bill Segall, David Arnold, Julian Boot, Michael Henderson and Ted Phelps CRC for Enterprise Distributed Systems Technology (DSTC) The University of Queensland, St Lucia, 4072, Australia ...

Different approaches have investigated the syntax and semantic of agent communication. However, all these approaches (including : agent communication languages, conversation policies and dialogue games) have not indicated how agents should dynamically use communications. In fact, most of these approaches have mainly focused on "structure" of dialogues even though developers are more interested in agents' capabilities of having "useful" conversations in respect to their goals rather than in their abilities to structure dialogues. This leads us to propose a theory of use of conversations between agents. This pragmatic theory extends and adapts the cognitive dissonance theory (a major theory of social psychology) to multi-agent systems. In this paper, we show how this theory allows us to provide generic conceptual tools for the automation of both agent communicational behavior and attitude change processes. The cognitive coherence that we propose is formulated in terms of constraints and elements of cognition and allows us to define cognitive incoherences and dialogue utility measures. We show how these measures could be used to solve common problems and answer some critical questions concerning agent communication frameworks use. Finally, the theory is illustrated with an example of dialogue games automatic use.

In this paper, we present the latest version of our dialogue games based agent communication language (DIAGAL) which allows the agents to manipulate the public layer of social commitments through dialogue. We show that DIAGAL is complete according to the sequential creation, cancellation, update and discharge of social commitments. We also extend and refine notions of success and satisfaction previously associated with speech-acts to this new dialogical setting. Finally, we explain why DIAGAL is a good candidate for open and heterogeneous MAS development. 1 This semantics verification should not be mistaken with the formal semantics checking: agents are implemented in accordance with the ACL mathematical or logical semantics.

Different approaches have investigated the syntax and semantics of agent communication languages. However, these approaches have not indicated how agents should dynamically use communications. Instead of filling this pragmatics gap, most approaches have mainly focused on the ÔstructureÕ of dialogues even though developers are more interested in agentsÕ capabilities of having ÔusefulÕ automated conversations with respect to their goals rather than in their abilities to structure dialogues. This led us to work on a theory of the use of conversations between agents. In this paper, we propose a pragmatics theory which extends and adapts the cognitive dissonance theory (a major theory of social psychology) to multi-agent systems by unifying it with the theory of coherence in thought and action that issues from computational philosophy of mind. Precisely, we show how this theory allows us to provide generic conceptual tools for the automation of both agent communicational behavior and attitude change processes. This new motivational model is formulated in terms of constraints and elements of cognition and allows us to define cognitive incoherences and dialogue utility measures. We show how these measures could be used to solve common problems and answer some critical questions concerning agent communication frameworks use. Finally, our exploration in applying the cognitive coherence pragmatics theory as a new communication layer over classical BDI agents is presented. It relies on our dialogue games based agent communication language (DIAGAL) and our dialogue games simulator toolbox (DGS). The resulting framework provides the necessary theoretical and practical elements for implementing our theory. In doing so, it brings in a general scheme for automatizing agentsÕ communicational behavior as it is exemplified in this article.

In recent years, social commitment based approaches have been proposed to solve problems issuing from previous mentalistic based semantics for agent communication languages. This paper follows the same line of thought since it presents the latest version of our dialogue game based agent communication language -DIAlogue-Game based Agent Language (DIAGAL) -which allows agents to manipulate the public layer of social commitments through dialogue, by creating, canceling and updating their social commitments. To make apparent such commitments, we consider here Agent Communication Language (ACL) from the dialectic point of view, where agents "play a game" based on commitments. Such games based on commitments are incorporated in the DIAGAL language, which has been developed having in mind the following questions: (a) What kind of structure does the game have? How are rules specified within the game? (b) What kind of games compositions are allowed? (c) How do participants in conversations reach agreement on the current game? How are games opened or closed? Using such games we show how we can study the commitments dynamic to model agent dialogue and we present metrics that can be used to evaluate the quality of a dialogue between agents. Next, we use an example (summer festival organization) to show how DIAGAL can be used in analyzing and modeling automated conversations in offices. Finally, we present the results and analysis of the summer festival simulations that we realized through our dialogue game simulator (DGS).

The success of contract-based multiagent systems relies on agents complying with their commitments. When something goes wrong, the key to diagnosis lies within the commitments' mutual relations as well as their individual states. Accordingly, we explore how commitments are related through the three-agent commitment delegation operation. We then propose exception diagnosis based on such a relation.

An important challenge posed by the design of open information systems concerns the choice of suitable methods to harness their complexity and to guarantee the correctness of their behaviour. In recent times, logic programming has been proposed as a powerful technology, formal and declarative, for the specification and verification of agent based and open systems. In this work, we focus on the interaction design. We base our approach on a logic-based formalism, which can be used to define the semantics of agent communication languages and interaction protocols. We advocate its use within a more general framework, drawing a design methodology which encompasses the specification of the interaction space and of its desired properties, and their verification.

In most proposals for multi-agent systems, an Agent Communication Language (ACL) is the formalism designed to express knowledge exchange among agents. However, a universally accepted standard for ACLs is still missing. Among the different approaches to the definition of ACL semantics, the social approach seems the most appropriate to express semantics of communication in open societies of autonomous and heterogeneous agents. In this paper we propose a formalism (deontic constraints) to express social ACL semantics, which can be grounded on a computational logic framework, thus allowing automatic verification of compliance by means of appropriate proof procedures. We also show how several common communication performatives can be defined by means of deontic constraints.

Abstract. Computees are computational entities interacting in the context of global and open computing environments. The focus of this preliminary report is on the interactions among computees that form a society, and on the definition of a computational logic-based architecture for computee interactions. We propose a layered architecture where the society defines the allowed interaction protocols, which on their turn are defined by means of constraints. The semantics of communicative acts is given in terms of commitments. In ...

Abstract. Agent communication is one of the key issues in multi-agent systems. Traditional interprocess communication formalisms are usually considered insufficient for this purpose because of their lack of expressiveness; thus, in most proposals for multi-agent architectures, an Agent Communication Language (ACL) is designed to provide for agent communication. However, a universally accepted standard for ACLs is still missing. Agent communication in open societies of heterogeneous agents poses requirements on ACLs ...

Structured negotiation is proposed as a new method through which collaborating agents can seek consensus on the apportionment of tasks and resources. The approach draws on research in collaborative planning and human dialog understanding: agent i n teractions are organized in a manner that re ects the structure of a shared plan. Negotiations are incremental and interleaved with the shared planning process while communications supporting negotiations are made e cient b y d r a wing on knowledge of a prevailing context. Agent proposals to team members are annotated with causal information that compactly expresses relationships between new proposals and the current c o n text. Normative guidelines for proposal generation further restrict communications of ancillary information to only those fragments that represent departures from the norm. Finally, a set of interpretation rules allows agents to infer information not explicitly communicated. Categories and Subject Descriptors I.2.11 Computing Methodologies]: Arti cial Intelligence|

In this paper we propose an approach to 3D agent-based virtual communities, in which autonomous agents are participants in VRML-based virtual worlds to enhance the interaction with users or serve as intelligent navigation assistants. In addition, an agent communication language (ACL) is designed as a high level communication facility, in particular for the realization of shared objects in virtual communities. As a typical example of 3D agent-based virtual communities, a VRML-based multi-user soccer game has been developed and implemented in the distributed logic programming language DLP. We discuss how DLP can be used for the implementation of 3D agent-based virtual communities.

Resumo - Este artigo apresenta a definição de uma arquitetura de agentes cognitivos independentes para o pré-atendimento hospitalar. Neste contexto, a escolha de uma arquitetura distribuída e aberta baseou-se nos seguintes critérios: a) Trata-se de um problema cuja decomposição em subproblemas é natural, à medida que cada subproblema (Central Regulação, Unidade Móvel, etc) pode ser representado e implementado como um agente autônomo e independente; b) a interação entre os agentes pode tornar o sistema de pré-atendimento mais confiável, ã medida que as trocas de informações entre os agentes podem resolver situações difíceis pelo numero de especialistas e recursos exigidos de forma dinâmica (ou sobre demanda); c) o paralelismo natural dos sistema multi-agente podem contribuir de forma considerável na implementação de um sistema de alta performance. Deve-se enfatizar que tais critérios, no contexto do pré- atendimento hospitalar, facilitam a decomposição do problema em entidades fracam...

With the rapid technological development particularly in the computer industry, many computer programming languages are being developed with many computer programs written in these languages. Writing good programs takes time and effort. It is therefore necessary that programs once written should be able to work together (interoperate) with each other so that a program written in one language can benefit from the advantages that may be associated with another program written in another language. One of the problems with interoperation of programs is the heterogeneity of the programs. This is because programs are written by different people, at different times, in different languages and with different interfaces. Agent-base Software Engineering is an attempt to facilitate the creation of software products that can easily interoperate in such settings. In Agent-base Software Engineering, programs are written as software agents (software components) that communicate with each other by exchanging messages through a communication language. For a successful communication in such heterogeneous environments, the agents have to share knowledge with each other. The aim of this tutorial is to discuss agent communication and knowledge sharing. A discussion about agent communication, methods of agent communication, agent communication languages, content languages and knowledge sharing between agents is presented together with constraints that may inhibit successful knowledge sharing and agent communication.

The Connectionist Model Transfer (CMT) framework was proposed to allow an agent the ability to instantiate and execute neural networks received from other agents in order to maintain its learning or classi cation performance in a dynamic environment. One limitation of the CMT framework was that it assumed the existence of at least one network in the system that embodied the classication mappings required to exhibit satisfactory classi cation performance for each situation that an agent might encounter. In some cases, however, an agent required a single network that embodied classi cation mappings of several existing networks in order to maintain its performance. In such cases, a new network was manually trained and submitted to the system. In this paper, we extend the CMT framework for facilitating the dynamic merging of distributed networks. This extension allows agents to utilize new, automatically trained networks that embody the classi cation mappings of several distributed, and...

Intelligent search agent is popularly used for searching relative information in the Internet and there are a lot of tools that are used to satisfy the needs of the users. These intelligent agents are independent to each other and there is insufficient cooperation to make an efficient search of information in the distributed environment. Therefore, a typical search agent is difficult to use in the distributed environment and can contain irrelevant information for the users. In this paper, we report on our work on developing distributed collections of intelligent software agents that cooperate asynchronously to perform goal-directed information retrieval and information integration in support of performing a variety of decision making tasks.

Agent interaction takes place at several levels. Current work in the ARPA Knowledge Sharing Effort has addressed the information content level by the KIF language and the intentional level by the KQML language. In this paper we address the coordination level by means of our Coordination Language (COOL) that relies on speech act based communication, but integrates it in a structured conversmion framework that captures the ~nation mechanisms agents use when working together. We are currently using this language (i) to represent coordination mechanisms for the supply chain of manufacturing enterprises modeled as intelligent agents and (ii) as an environment for designing and validating coordination protocols for multi-agent systems. This paper describes the basic elements of this language: conversation objects, conversation rules, error recovery rules, continuation rules, conversation nesting. The actual COOL source code and a running trace for the n-queeus problem are presented in the Appendix.

The paper presents architecture of a personalized distance learning system based on multiagent technology and ontological modelling of students' profiles. Delocalization of a student data in the system is achieved by software agents, which assumed to be distributed at different platforms. These platforms operate as separate Web services and use the ACL (Agent Communication Language) for the data transfer. In this paper the algorithm is proposed, according to which the Multiagent Ontological System for Personalized Distance Learning (MOSPDL) solves the tasks of distant learning process automation, which assume utilization of the ontological models of students' and learning resources' profiles.

Speech act examples ζ Informing that the door is shut: ψ performative= inform ψ content=“(shut door)” or “shut (door)” ψ speech act=“The door is shut!” ζ Inquiring if the door is shut: ψ performative= inquire ψ Content=“(shut door)” ψ speech act=“Is the door shut?” ζ Order ψ Performative=“request”, content=“(shut door)”

is one of seven departments that make up the School of Business at the University of Otago. The department offers courses of study leading to a major in Information Science within the BCom, BA and BSc degrees. In addition to undergraduate teaching, the department is also strongly involved in postgraduate research programmes leading to MCom, MA, MSc and PhD degrees. Research projects in spatial information processing, connectionist-based information systems, software engineering and software development, information engineering and database, software metrics, distributed information systems, multimedia information systems and information systems security are particularly well supported. The views expressed in this paper are not necessarily those of the department as a whole. The accuracy of the information presented in this paper is the sole responsibility of the authors. Copyright Copyright remains with the authors. Permission to copy for research or teaching purposes is granted on the condition that the authors and the Series are given due acknowledgment. Reproduction in any form for purposes other than research or teaching is forbidden unless prior written permission has been obtained from the authors.

In this paper we investigate the complexity of temporal defeasible logic, and we propose an efficient algorithm to compute the extension of a temporalised defeasible theory. We motivate the logic showing how it can be used to model deadlines.

In this paper we propose a temporal extension of Defeasible Logic to model legal modifications, such as abrogation and annulment. Hence, this framework overcomes the difficulty, discussed elsewhere [7], of capturing these modification types using belief and base revision.

We argue that burden of proof (BoP) of the kind present in persuasion does not apply to deliberation. We analyze existing computational models showing that in deliberation agents may answer a critique but there is no violation of the protocol if they choose not to. We propose a norm-governed dialogue where BoP in persuasion is modeled as an obligation to respond, and permissions capture the different types of constraint observed in deliberation.

This paper outlines a vision for using conceptual graphs to build active knowledge systems that have the capability to solve practical and complex problems. A key ingredient in an active knowledge system is its ability to interact (not just interface) with the real world. Basic features of such systems go beyond logic to include support for data mining, intelligent agents, temporal actors, active sensors, a system for knowledge interchange and finally, support for knowledge-in-the-large.

This paper develops two agent knowledge bases in conceptual graph form, one using the KD45 underlying logical model for belief and one without any underlying logical model for belief. Action-attitudes in the knowledge bases provide contexts that represent the agents' mental attitude towards, and willingness to act upon information in the knowledge bases. Preconditions for communication acts are also represented in the knowledge bases as well as mental attitude changes following communications. Conceptual graphs are a flexible and extendable form of knowledge representation that is used to capture and represent semantic constituents of communications in a form that may be used by software agents. The knowledge base representations in this paper provide software agents a perspective from which they may reason about the communicating agent's beliefs and communication actions.

Agent communication languages such as KQML and the FIPA ACL serve as metalanguages to define software agent message-passing protocols. These metalanguages are incompatible with each other, preventing intercommunication between agents employing different agent communication languages. The primary hindrance to agent intercommunication is the different underlying semantics of the message passing protocols. Conceptual graphs provide a mechanism to bridge this agent communication barrier by representing the semantics of message-passing protocols in the formal representation of conceptual graphs. Semantic content of the KQML tell performative is contrasted with that of the FIPA ACL inform performative and represented in conceptual graphs. The intent is that software agents conversant in CGIF may intelligently translate messages between agents employing different agent communication languages.

This paper outlines a vision for using conceptual graphs to build active knowledge systems that have the capability to solve practical and complex problems. A key ingredient in an active knowledge system is its ability to interact (not just interface) with the real world. Basic features of such systems go beyond logic to include support for data mining, intelligent agents, temporal actors, active sensors, a system for knowledge interchange and finally, support for knowledge-in-the-large.

In this paper, we describe several interesting design decisions we have taken (with respect to inter-agent messaging) in the reengineered CASA architecture for agent communication and services. CASA is a new architecture designed from the ground up; it is influenced by the major agent architectures such as FIPA, CORBA, and KQML but is intended to be independent (which doesn't imply incompatible). The primary goals are flexibility, extendibility, simplicity, and ease of use. The lessons learned in the earlier implementation have fed the current design of the system. Among the most interesting of the design issues are the use of performatives that form a type lattice, which allows for observers, who do not necessarily understand all the performatives, to nonetheless understand a conversation at an appropriate semantic level. Furthermore, we found it difficult to arrange a portion of the FIPA performatives in a lattice without duplication and complexity. We solved this problem by diverging from FIPA performatives by separating a lot of the performatives into a separate lattice of acts, which work with the performatives, but greatly simplify and enhance the semantic interpretation of the messages. Yet another innovation is the addition of several new fields within a KQML-style message header that allow for further semantic interpretation of the message by an observer who does not necessarily understand the content language. The traditional FIPA fields to, from, sender, and receiver have been extended to include agent (the requester of a service), and actor (the party designated responsible for performing the action specified in the performative/act). These new design considerations add a great deal of flexibility and integrity to an agent communications architecture.

Persuasive negotiation involves negotiating using rhetorical arguments (such as threats, rewards, and appeals), which act as persuasive elements that aim to force or convince an opponent to accept a given proposal. In the case of rewards, these have a positive nature as they use the argument that something positive will happen to the opponent if he accepts to do the requirement sent by the proponent. A proponent agent can generate more than one reward depending on the information he has modeled of his opponent. The problem appears when the agent has to choose a reward, to send to his opponent, among a set of rewards. One measure that could help him in his choice is the strength each reward has. Thus, the goal of this work is to analyze the rewards components and to propose a model for calculating their strength. We propose two ways for calculating the strength of rewards depending on the kind of negotiation the agent is participating. The first proposal is to be used when the agent ...

Applications such as military training simulations, and electronic commerce can benefit from the flexible and responsive nature of multi-agent systems. These applications have inherent timing constraints on the operations and interactions that the agents might perform. This paper presents a real-time agent architecture in which agents communicate, cooperate, coordinate and negotiate to meet the goals of a particular application under specified timing constraints. The architecture provides a real-time CORBA layer to handle underlying real-time communication. It also has a real-time agent communication layer in which agents interact via a real-time extension of a well-known agent communication language.

Deontic Defeasible Logic (DDL) is a simple and computationally efficient approach for the representation of normative reasoning. Traditionally defeasible logics are defined proof theoretically based on the proof conditions for the logic. In this paper we present an argumentation system that corresponds to a variant of DDL. The resulting machinery is able to grasp in a natural way intuitions behind deontic reasoning with conditional norms featuring obligations, prohibitions, and (strong or weak) permissions.

The manufacturing product life cycle in its conception and designing phases congregates knowledge coming from diverse domains. This knowledge is spread throughout individuals that most of time are not aware of each other vocabulary. In this case opportunities can be lost either because the potential around them is underestimated or correlating themes is burdensome. The work presented here is a tool intended to organize the informal vocabulary used by communities of practice in formal domain categories in order to establish a correlation between them and advice the user of the potential skills net he/she belongs to. Ontologies are used to relate domains and user's profile while agents capture user's preferences and provide useful information. The tool updates general information unburdening the user from tasks she/he is unfamiliar to. Experiments demonstrate the potential of this kind of tool envisaging its broader use and application in other domains.

Em primeiro lugar, gostaria de agradecer ao meu supervisor, o Professor Pedro Henriques, pela supervisão omnipresente e, mais importante ainda, a constante disponibilidade em discutir, analisar e reler resultados, permitindo um desfecho mais rápido e rico em termos de ideias. Ao meu colega, José João, pelas discussões e parcerias donde resultaram ideias inovadoras, algumas delas concretizadas em ferramentas e publicações. Aos meus co-autores, durante os últimos quatro anos, que colaboraram comigo na publicação de vários artigos e outras monografias: Pedro Henriques, José João, Jorge Rocha, Alda Lopes. À Alda Lopes e ao Pedro Sousa o terem aceite fazer as suas teses de mestrado comigo. O seu trabalho deu um empurrão precioso na parte prática desta tese. Aos alunos finalistas que comigo colaboraram na realização de vários projectos reais, dando-me o contacto com a realidade que tão necessário foi para a elaboração de algumas ideias:

This paper overviews our currently in progress agent communication language simulator, called DIAGAL, by describing its use in analyzing and modelling automated conversations in offices. Offices are modelled here as systems of communicative action based on dialogue games. Through such games, people in office engage in actions by making promises, stating facts, asking for information, and so on. And through these actions they create, modify, discharge, cancel, release, assign, delegate commitments that bind their current and future behaviors. To make apparent such commitments, we consider here Agent Communication Language (ACL) from the dialectic point of view, where agents "play a game" based on commitments. Such games based on commitments are incorporated in DIAGAL tool, which has been developed having in mind the following questions: (1) What kind of structure has the game? How are rules specified within the game?; (2) What kind of games' compositions are allowed?; (3) How participants in conversation reach agreement on the current game? How are games opened or closed?

This article investigates the intensional programming paradigm for agent communication by introducing context as a first class object in the intensional programming language Lucid. For the language thus extended, a calculus of contexts and a logic of contexts are provided. The paper gives definitions, syntax, and operators for context, and introduces an operational semantics for evaluating expressions in extended Lucid. It is shown that the extended Lucid language, called Agent Intensional Programming Language(AIPL), has the generality and the expressiveness for being an Agent Communication Language(ACL).

The idea of a software entity that performs tasks on behalf of a user across the Internet is now well established. We introduce in this paper a new approach to service discovery and QoS negotiation over the Internet. Our approach presents a framework for service discovery and QoS negotiation at the network level that rely on two concepts: multiagent systems and agent communication languages (ACL). In this framework, a user and service agents engage in a structured communication through the m ediation of a QoS Broker Agent and a Facilitator Agent. Here, the Facilitator Agent acts on behalf of several service agents. It acquires information from these service agents and acts as a single point of contact to supply this information to the User Agent via the QoS Broker Agent. A number of service discovery protocols like the Service Location Protocol (SLP), and Sun Microsystem's Jini has been designed for restricted environments and do not scale to the entire Internet. In order to pro vide an infrastructure for large scale Internet applications, we designed a prototype multi-agent system that is able to discover resources and negotiate QoS at the network level.

This paper presents a multi-agent system called ISAME and designed for intelligent information retrieval from heterogeneous distributed sources. ISAME constitutes a virtual library that supplies a set of software agents with a simplified access to a set of dynamic information sources available under electronic formats, as well as services for facilitating and optimizing information retrieval. The system also uses TCP/IP communication protocols, and proposes a series of garbage-collection mechanisms to avoid the preservation and propagation of information among agents, or messages that become inaccessible or outdated as well as the use of the resources that become undesirable. The originality of this system rests on the fact that it simplifies the information retrieval from distributed heterogeneous sources by making these sources transparent to the user.

The implementation of higher-order functions on tagged-dataflow machines has always been a problematic issue. This paper presents and formalizes an algorithm for transforming a significant class of higher-order programs into a form that can be executed on a dataflow machine. The meaning of the resulting code is described in terms of Intensional Logic, a mathematical formalism which allows expressions whose values depend on hidden contexts.

Speculative Computation is an effective means for solving problems with incomplete information in an open and distributed environment, such as peer-to-peer environment. It allows such a system to compute tentative (and possibly final) solutions using default knowledge about the current environment, or the agent's perception, even if the communications between peers are delayed or broken. However, previous work in speculative reasoning assumed that agents are hierarchically structured, which may not be the case in reality. We propose a more general multi-agents system with no centralized control. Agents in the framework have equivalent functionalities and can collaborate with each other to achieve their common goals. We characterize the framework using the argumentation semantics of defeasible logic, which provides support of speculative reasoning in the presence of conflicting information. We provide an operational model for the framework and present a prototype implementation of the model.

Agent communication languages such as ACL and KQML provide a standard for agent communication. These languages enable an agent to specify the intention and the content of a message as well as the protocol, the language, and the ontology that are used. For the protocol and the language some standards are available and should be known by the communicating agents. The ontology used in a communication depends on the subject of the communication. Since the number of subjects is almost infinite and since the concepts used for a subject can be described by different ontologies, the development of generally accepted standards will take a long time. This lack of standardization, which hampers communication and collaboration between agents, is known as the interoperability problem. To overcome the interoperability problem, agents must be able to establish a mapping between their ontologies. This paper investigates a new approach to the interoperability problem. The proposed approach requires neither a correspondence between concepts used in the ontologies nor a correspondence between the structure of the ontologies. It only requires that some instances of the subject about which the agents try to communicate are known by both agents.

Agent communication languages such as ACL and KQML provide a standard for agent communication. For the protocol and the language used in the communication, several standards are available. This not the case for the ontology used in the communication. The ontology depends on the subject of the communication. Since the number of subjects is almost infinite and since the concepts used for a subject can be described by different ontologies, the development of generally accepted standards will take a long time. This lack of standardization, which hampers communication and collaboration between agents, is known as the interoperability problem. To overcome the interoperability problem, an approach that enables agents to learn a mapping between their ontologies will be proposed.

Spontaneous, informal gatherings among colleagues often spur greater exchanges of ideas than formal meetings. The K22 project aims to support these spontaneous collaborative interactions by embedding intelligent kiosks, small networked Intelligent Environments (IEs), in hallways, break rooms, and other informal meeting spaces. These kiosks will enable private capture and indexing of casual meetings, and permit access to relevant, context-sensitive information and agents in other IEs. This paper describes the K22 platform, and discusses challenges and design criteria associated with designing K22 applications.

Affective characteristics are crucial factors that influence human behavior, and often the prevalence of either emotions or reason varies on each individual. We aim to facilitate the development of agents that simulate humans' reasoning in equilibrium with their affective characteristics. We first identify core processes in an affective BDI agent, and we integrate them into an agent architecture (GenIA 3). These tasks include the extension of the BDI agent reasoning cycle to be compliant with the architecture, and the extension of the agent language (Jason) to support affection-based reasoning, as well as the parametrization of the affectionrationality equilibrium.

Affective characteristics are crucial factors that influence human behavior, and often the prevalence of either emotions or reason varies on each individual. We aim to facilitate the development of agents that simulate humans' reasoning in equilibrium with their affective characteristics. We first identify core processes in an affective BDI agent, and we integrate them into an agent architecture (GenIA 3). These tasks include the extension of the BDI agent reasoning cycle to be compliant with the architecture, and the extension of the agent language (Jason) to support affection-based reasoning, as well as the parametrization of the affectionrationality equilibrium.

This paper presents the design and implementation details of an information retrieval system. A multi-agent architecture has been adopted to allow for extended flexibilities over similar traditional systems. Since the system is consisted of various types of agents a short agent information will be given first. It will also explained that how these agents communicate with each other in order to accomplish information gathering through an agent messaging router which is a part of a software package called JATlite (Java Agent Template). JATLite provides the basic infrastructure for creation of agents and their communication.

Robots sharing a common working space with humans and interacting with them to accomplish some task should not only optimise task efficiency, but also consider the safety and comfort of their human collaborators. This requires the recognition of human intentions in order for the robot to anticipate behaviour and act accordingly. In this paper we propose a robot behavioural controller that incorporates both human behaviour and environment information as the basis of reasoning over the appropriate responses. Applied to Human-Robot Interaction in an agricultural context, we demonstrate in a series of simulations how this proposed method leads to the production of appropriate robot behaviour in a range of interaction scenarios. This work lays the foundation for the wider consideration of contextual intention recognition for the generation of interactive robot behaviour.