[Alta-Logic] Next Seminar: NOTE THE NEW TIME

[ggpayett at ucalgary.ca]

Title: Social commitment logics for multi agent communication

Place: ICT 616

Time: Tuesday, Jan 27th, 12:00

Speaker: Rob Kremer

Title: Multi-Agent System Communication Paradigms

Abstract:

Multi-Agent Systems seem like a good idea -- solve problems be using
several different specialized agents who cooperate to reach a
solution.  Aside from obvious problems (such as disagreements,
inconsistencies, and composition), communication is significant
impediment.  Agents may be written by different people in different
styles, with different objectives.  Simple communication protocols
tend to be brittle, and fail because not all agents may behave
identically, and may respond in unanticipated ways.  Attempts to
formalize and standardize communication, such as the one the
Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) developed using BDI
(Belief, Desire, Intension) semantics, encountered difficulties that
made implementation and conformance difficult.  Some of these problems
stem from the FIPA standard's requirement that all agents model the
beliefs, desires, and intentions of all other agents, which makes for
a rather unnaturally omniscient society of agents.  One way to address
this issue is to neglect the modeling of the "minds" of other agents,
and model only the /social commitments/ agents undertake (or fulfill)
in the course of their conversations.  To achieve this, conversations
are modeled as sequences of /speech acts/, where rules or
/policies/ (which may be considered /social norms/) translate from the
speech acts to the instantiation or deletion of social commitments
among the participant agents.



-- 
Gillman Payette
Department of Philosophy
University of Calgary
2500 University Drive NW
Calgary, AB T2N 1N4, Canada
Ph 403.220.7518
Fax 403.289.5698