From Agent Game Protocols to Implementable Roles

kostas.stathis-at-cs.rhul.ac.uk Abstract. We present a formal framework for decomposing agent interaction protocols to the roles their participants should play. The framework allows an Authority Agent that knows a protocol to compute the protocol’s roles so that it can allocate them to interested parties. We show how the Authority Agent can use the role descriptions to identify problems with the protocol and repair it on the fly, to ensure that participants will be able to implement their role requirements without compromising the protocol’s interactions. Our representation of agent interaction protocols is a game-based one and the decomposition of a game protocol into its constituent roles is based upon the branching bisimulation equivalence reduction of the game. The work extends our previous work on using games to admit agents in an artificial society by checking their competence according to the society rules. The applicability of the overall approach is illustrated by showing how to decompose the NetBill protocol into its roles. We also show how to automatically repair the interactions of a protocol that cannot be implemented in its original form.

Challenging the evolutionary strategy for synthesis of analogue computational circuits

There are very few reports in the past on applications of Evolutionary Strategy (ES) towards the synthesis of analogue circuits. Moreover, even fewer reports are on the synthesis of computational circuits. Last fact is mainly due to the dif-ficulty in designing of the complex nonlinear functions that these circuits perform. In this paper, the evolving power of the ES is challenged to design four computational circuits: cube root, cubing, square root and squaring functions. The synthesis succeeded due to the usage of oscillating length genotype strategy and the substructure reuse. The approach is characterized by its simplicity and represents one of the first attempts of application of ES towards the synthesis of “QR” circuits. The obtained experimental results significantly exceed the results published before in terms of the circuit quality, economy in components and computing resources utilized, revealing the great potential of the technique pro-posed to design large scale analog circuits

Creating Singing Vocal Expressions by means of Interactive Evolutionary Computation

Today, researches for singing by computer have attracted attention. VOCALOID is an application to realize that aim. By inputing lyrics and melody, users can make songs sung by the computer. In order to make the singing voice more "human", users must control frequency curve very carefully. Comparing with inputing lyrics or melody, this controlling presents heavy overhead for users. In this research, we propose a system for easily optimizing frequency curves. This system searches for parameters with a type of GA called Interactive Evolutionary Computation (IEC). On the other hand, the system using IEC has a phase for users to evaluate, we need to consider the tiredness of users. This tiredness is connected to the effectiveness of the search with GA. In this research, for the analysis of the tiredness of users, we evaluated the convergence performance of GA to fit the goal which is known in advance. As a result, we found that our method has better convergence performance than a previous method

Applying Formal Methods to Networking: Theory, Techniques and Applications

Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet which began as a research experiment was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited abstractions and modularity, especially for the control and management planes, thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at formal verification, and an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of clean slate Internet design---especially, the software defined networking (SDN) paradigm---offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence in interest of applying formal methods to specification, verification, and synthesis of networking protocols and applications. In this paper, we present a self-contained tutorial of the formidable amount of work that has been done in formal methods, and present a survey of its applications to networking.Comment: 30 pages, submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial

Search based software engineering: Trends, techniques and applications

© ACM, 2012. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version is available from the link below.In the past five years there has been a dramatic increase in work on Search-Based Software Engineering (SBSE), an approach to Software Engineering (SE) in which Search-Based Optimization (SBO) algorithms are used to address problems in SE. SBSE has been applied to problems throughout the SE lifecycle, from requirements and project planning to maintenance and reengineering. The approach is attractive because it offers a suite of adaptive automated and semiautomated solutions in situations typified by large complex problem spaces with multiple competing and conflicting objectives. This article provides a review and classification of literature on SBSE. The work identifies research trends and relationships between the techniques applied and the applications to which they have been applied and highlights gaps in the literature and avenues for further research.EPSRC and E

AI Methods in Algorithmic Composition: A Comprehensive Survey

Algorithmic composition is the partial or total automation of the process of music composition by using computers. Since the 1950s, different computational techniques related to Artificial Intelligence have been used for algorithmic composition, including grammatical representations, probabilistic methods, neural networks, symbolic rule-based systems, constraint programming and evolutionary algorithms. This survey aims to be a comprehensive account of research on algorithmic composition, presenting a thorough view of the field for researchers in Artificial Intelligence.This study was partially supported by a grant for the MELOMICS project (IPT-300000-2010-010) from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, and a grant for the CAUCE project (TSI-090302-2011-8) from the Spanish Ministerio de Industria, Turismo y Comercio. The first author was supported by a grant for the GENEX project (P09-TIC- 5123) from the Consejería de Innovación y Ciencia de Andalucía

On the development of evolutionary artificial artists

The creation and the evaluation of aesthetic artifacts are tasks related to design, music and art, which are highly interesting from the computational point of view. Nowadays, Artificial Intelligence systems face the challenge of performing tasks that are typically human, highly subjective, and eventually social. The present paper introduces an architecture which is capable of evaluating aesthetic characteristics of artifacts and of creating artifacts that obey certain aesthetic properties. The development methodology and motivation, as well as the results achieved by the various components of the architecture, are described. The potential contributions of this type of systems in the context of digital art are also considered.http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6TYG-4PTMXVB-1/1/265a0f6c8e478822e6de32b87bc2fb1

Integration of model-based systems engineering and virtual engineering tools for detailed design

Design and development of a system can be viewed as a process of transferring and transforming data using a set of tools that form the system\u27s development environment. Conversion of the systems engineering data into useful information is one of the prime objectives of the tools used in the process. With complex systems, the objective is further augmented with a need to represent the information in an accessible and comprehensible manner. The importance of representation is easily understood in light of the fact that the stakeholder\u27s ability to make prompt and appropriate decisions is directly related to his understanding of the available information. Systems Modeling Language (SysML), a graphical modeling language developed by Object Management Group is one such tool used to capture and convey information about a system under development. This work proposes a methodology for integrating the models developed using SysML with virtual engineering software to create an executable, interactive, and user-centered platform for engineering systems. The framework provides an opportunity to combine the benefits offered by both model-based systems engineering and virtual engineering for detail design. This research demonstrates how this framework can be implemented using a biotech fermentor to illustrate the coupling of information between SysML and virtual engineering --Abstract, page iii