Keynote Speakers
We are very pleased to have acquired the services of an excellent selection of keynote speakers for AMSTA-09. The speakers and the titles of their talks are shown below.
Rune Gustavsson
Blekinge Institute of Technology, SwedenService Oriented Agents - From DAI to SOKU
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Chenqi Zhang
University of Technology, Sydney, AustraliaAgent & Data Mining Interaction: mutual benefits for both communities
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Giovanni Caire
Telecom Italia, ItalyCreating real world applications leveraging agents and workflows
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Rune Gustavsson
Blekinge Institute of Technology, SwedenService Oriented Agents - From DAI to SOKU
Abstract:
R&D on Agents and Multi-Agent systems (MAS) emerged in the late 1980īs as a natural convergence of Distributed AI and Distributed computing. That is, a model supporting design and implementation of distributed intelligent applications!
The powerful new and exciting computational model caught, from the beginning, both interest and expectations! Several international R&D efforts were launched, notably in the US (e.g., by DARPA) and in the EU, implementing several EU FP programmes including the Network of Excellence AgentLink). Also several dedicated conferences and journals appeared rather quickly. Their focus was on different aspects of theoretical models, tools and practical use of multi agent technologies.
During the 1990īs other powerful technologies supporting networking and distributed resource sharing appeared, notably the World Wide Web (WWW) (sharing structured content) and GRID (sharing computational resources). Sharing computations, i.e., web-services and Grid-services appeared at the beginning of the 21st century.
But services are essentially components without own control, that is, objects! So, what have happened to agents, that is, objects with own control during those evolutions? Why have distributed objects been far more successful on the market than the more powerful agent technologies during 1995 - 2005?
In my talk I will provide some lessons learned from those experiences from an agent perspective, followed by identifying new challenges and opportunities for the agent society in addressing challenges related to efforts by ongoing EU R&D Programmes on The New Internet and Service Oriented Knowledge Utilities (SOKU).
In short, the real impacts and success of those efforts is critically dependant on context aware agent-based solutions!
Our argent society has here a clear advantage of past and present R&D efforts.
Biography:
Rune Gustavsson is a full professor in computer science at Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH) since 1995, formely University College of Karlskrona/Ronneby (HK/R). He is also visiting professor at Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble (INPGrenoble) in France. Gustavsson has also a Ph.D. degree in mathematics at Uppsala University since 1974. He received his PhD degree in mathematics at Uppsala University 1974. At Uppsala University he had different teaching positions in mathematics during 1966-80. He was Assistant Professor in Computer Science 1980-83. He was also Director of Studies in Mathematics 1976-80, and in Computer Science 1980-83. During 1983-86 he was professor and senior researcher at UPMAIL (Uppsala Programming Methodology and AI laboratory) at Uppsala University. During 1984 he was active in the establishment of Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS). He then become Manager of Knowledge Based Systems Laboratory at SICS, 1986-94, Adjunct Professor in Computer Science and AI at Lund University, 1988-91, and Manager Research Contacts and senior researcher at SICS, 1994-95
Gustavsson has been supervisor or assistant supervisor for more then 40 Ph.D. student at Uppsala University, Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS)/Stockholm University/KTH, Lind University, and BTH.
Gustavsson was a member of The Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning (FORMAS) committee on Complex systems and as such is a contact person to The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria. Gustavsson was also instrumental in the forming of the Centre of Electronic Security (CES) at BTH and related education and research programmes in Security Engineering.
Gustavsson has been appointed as international evaluator of several international and national research programmes among them the Danish PIFT programmes, the Italian FIRP programme and EC IST or FET programmes within the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Frame Programmes. The assignments for EC have been as expert evaluator, scientific advisor, reviewer, or as observer. Gustavsson also planned and presented A Topical Day on Interdependencies of Critical Infrastructures at IFIP World Computer Congress (WCC 04). Gustavsson was also a member of the International Advisory Board to the Swedish Armed Forces (SwAF) on Network-Based Defense (NBD) and is also a member of the Steering Committee of the VINNOVA program on Innovative Technologies in Home Health Care. Recently, Gustavsson has been invited by EC to several preparation WS related to the European Research Programme FP7. Gustavsson is at present member of the Swedish Strategic Foundation (SSF) steering committee on Software intensive systems. During 1986-92 Gustavsson was member of the steering committee for the national Computer Science program of the Swedish National Board for Industrial and Technical Development (STU).
Gustavsson has during the last decade published over 50 refereed international journal papers, book chapters, and conference papers in various fields of sustainable distributed systems, distributed intelligence, knowledge sharing, agent methodologies, and issuesrelated to trust and security based on projects with industry and society. He is also an active member of several international scientific communities in his fields.
Chengqi Zhang
University of Technology, Sydney, AustraliaAgent & Data Mining Interaction: mutual benefits for both communities
Abstract:
Two originally separated areas, agents (includes autonomous agent and multi-agent systems) and data mining (includes knowledge discovery) are getting increasingly interrelated in the need of both parties. Such interaction and integration features a bilateral complementation and synergetic enhancement of intelligence and infrastructure for information processing and systems. This keynote speech draws an overall picture of this new area in the scientific family. It covers key contents including the driving forces for the interaction, field structure, state-of-the-art, typical techniques, and case studies. It features both theoretical and practical innovation and applications of this new area. Case studies on data mining driven trading agents and agent-based financial data mining system will be illustrated. Finally, we discuss the challenges, open issues and prospects of agent-mining interaction.
Biography:
Biography: Chengqi Zhang is a Research Professor of Information Technology at University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) since December 2001. He is currently the Director of UTS Research Centre for Quantum Computation and Intelligent Systems. In addition, he is the Leader of Data Mining program of Australian Capital Market Cooperative Research Centre and he is the Chairperson of Australian Computer Society's National Committee for Artificial Intelligence. Chengqi Zhang had obtained his PhD degree from Queensland University in 1991 and Doctor of Science (DSc) which is the Higher Doctorate in 2002.
Prof. Zhang's research interests include "Multi-Agent Systems", "Data Mining", and their integrations. He has published more than 200 research papers. The most notable paper is the one which was published in "Artificial Intelligence" in 1992 which was the most prestigious Journal in Artificial Intelligence field. Furthermore, he has published many papers in the first class international journals, such as IEEE ad ACM Transactions. Prof. Zhang has supervised several PhD students in the area of agent and mining interactions. He has presented the invited talk in AIS-ADM 2005 and he was one of the organizers for ADMI 2006, AIS-ADM 2007. Homepage: http://www-staff.it.uts.edu.au/~chengqi/
Giovanni Caire
Telecom Italia, ItalyCreating real world applications leveraging agents and workflows
Abstract:
Since a number of years agent technology is considered one of the most innovative and promising approaches for the development of distributed software systems and a lot of research has been done in this field. Nevertheless it is still far from being a mainstream technology in software engineering at large and relatively a few agent-based tools and applications exist in the real world. Software industry is still more concerned about basic requirements such as scalability, fault tolerance, administration and control than on more advanced aspects like proactivity, reasoning ability and more in general "intelligence".
In parallel Web Service technology and SOA architectures are becoming more and more a de-facto standard for Enterprise Application Integration and business process orchestration.
Taking into account these considerations the talk will present the last developments of the JADE platform and in particular the WADE extension that allows agents to execute tasks defined according to the workflow metaphor. The challenge in WADE is to combine the expressiveness of workflows with the power and performances of a programming language such as Java so that to bring the advantages of the workflow approach from the BPM level down to the level of system logics definition. In order to achieve that WADE provides a workflow representation over a Java class and comes with a graphical development environment called WOLF that allows developers creating workflows by means of both a graphical view suitable to define the process flow and a code view suitable to manipulate the low level operations to be performed in each step. Furthermore WADE embeds a powerful built-in support for invoking Web Services. This feature makes it very easy to create workflows that compose building blocks exposing a Web Service interface.
WADE is at the basis of two mission critical applications deployed by Telecom Italia in the Operations Support System domains. The first one called "Network Neutral Element Manager" implements a mediation layer between network elements and OSS systems. The second one, known as "Wizard", provides step-by-step guidance to technicians performing maintenance operations in the fields.
At the end of the talk the future evolutions of JADE and WADE will be presented and some conclusions will be drawn about how agents fit within SOA evolutions and how future applications can be provided with enough flexibility to respond to evolving requirements by means of a combination of artificial intelligence and collective intelligence.
Biography:
Giovanni Caire graduated summa cum laude from the Politecnico di Torino in 1992 and, after that, joined the Research Labs of Telecom Italia (formerly CSELT) where he is now a senior project manager. He started working in the Multimedia and Video Services department where he was involved in several international collaborative projects. In 1995 he leaded the ATMAN ACTS European Project dealing with advanced techniques of audio-visual content trading. Since 1998 his interest is in the field of distributed applications with particular focus on the Java technology. He started working in the JADE Project in 2000 when he leaded the working group that ported the platform on the Java Micro Edition within the scope of the LEAP IST European Project. In 2004 he represented Telecom Italia in the Java Workstream of the OMTP international initiative whose goal was to define an open platform on mobile terminals enabling service providers to develop a uniform and simplified customer experience. In 2005 he actively participated in the Expert Group of the JSR 232 Mobile Operational Management which addressed the customization of the OSGi specification for hand held devices. Currently he works in the OSS Innovation department of Telecom Italia where he leads the software development of an important project employing agent technology and in particular the JADE platform in the field of network management.
