Agent Causation: Before and After the Ontological Turn

Imagine Ludwig has a cup of tea for breakfast. He\ud pours it; he eats his egg until it seems to him that the tea\ud should have the right temperature; he moves his hand to\ud the cup, puts his fingers at the handle, and then, careful\ud not to spill anything, he does something with his arm;\ud namely, he raises it, and if all goes well he then drinks the\ud tea without burning his lips.\ud The rising of Ludwig"s arm surely has a cause. But\ud what is the cause? Defenders of agent causation, such as\ud Thomas Reid (1788), Richard Taylor (1966), Roderick\ud Chisholm (1976a), and many more recent authors (see\ud Swinburne 1997, ch. 5; Thorp 1980; Meixner 1999; Clarke\ud 1996; O'Connor 2000) have argued that the rising of\ud Ludwig"s arm is caused by Ludwig himself. Some events\ud are caused, not by other events, but by concrete things, by\ud substances, more specifically by intentional agents

Evaluating Competing Agent Strategies for a Voice Email Agent

This paper reports experimental results comparing a mixed-initiative to a system-initiative dialog strategy in the context of a personal voice email agent. To independently test the effects of dialog strategy and user expertise, users interact with either the system-initiative or the mixed-initiative agent to perform three successive tasks which are identical for both agents. We report performance comparisons across agent strategies as well as over tasks. This evaluation utilizes and tests the PARADISE evaluation framework, and discusses the performance function derivable from the experimental data.Comment: 6 pages latex, uses icassp91.sty, psfi

A Factory-based Approach to Support E-commerce Agent Fabrication

With the development of Internet computing and software agent technologies, agent-based e-commerce is emerging. How to create agents for e-commerce applications has become an important issue along the way to success. We propose a factory-based approach to support agent fabrication in e-commerce and elaborate a design based on the SAFER (Secure Agent Fabrication, Evolution & Roaming) framework. The details of agent fabrication, modular agent structure, agent life cycle, as well as advantages of agent fabrication are presented. Product-brokering agent is employed as a practical agent type to demonstrate our design and Java-based implementation

A trustworthy mobile agent infrastructure for network management

Despite several advantages inherent in mobile-agent-based approaches to network management as compared to traditional SNMP-based approaches, industry is reluctant to adopt the mobile agent paradigm as a replacement for the existing manager-agent model; the management community requires an evolutionary, rather than a revolutionary, use of mobile agents. Furthermore, security for distributed management is a major concern; agent-based management systems inherit the security risks of mobile agents. We have developed a Java-based mobile agent infrastructure for network management that enables the safe integration of mobile agents with the SNMP protocol. The security of the system has been evaluated under agent to agent-platform and agent to agent attacks and has proved trustworthy in the performance of network management tasks

Integrity protection for code-on-demand mobile agents in e-commerce

The mobile agent paradigm has been proposed as a promising solution to facilitate distributed computing over open and heterogeneous networks. Mobility, autonomy, and intelligence are identified as key features of mobile agent systems and enabling characteristics for the next-generation smart electronic commerce on the Internet. However, security-related issues, especially integrity protection in mobile agent technology, still hinder the widespread use of software agents: from the agent’s perspective, mobile agent integrity should be protected against attacks from malicious hosts and other agents. In this paper, we present Code-on-Demand(CoD) mobile agents and a corresponding agent integrity protection scheme. Compared to the traditional assumption that mobile agents consist of invariant code parts, we propose the use of dynamically upgradeable agent code, in which new agent function modules can be added and redundant ones can be deleted at runtime. This approach will reduce the weight of agent programs, equip mobile agents with more flexibility, enhance code privacy and help the recoverability of agents after attack. In order to meet the security challenges for agent integrity protection, we propose agent code change authorization protocols and a double integrity verification scheme. Finally, we discuss the Java implementation of CoD mobile agents and integrity protection

Context Aware Multisensor Image Fusion for Military Sensor Networks using Multi Agent System

This paper proposes a Context Aware Agent based Military Sensor Network (CAMSN) to form an improved infrastructure for multi-sensor image fusion. It considers contexts driven by a node and sink. The contexts such as general and critical object detection are node driven where as sensing time (such as day or night) is sink driven. The agencies used in the scheme are categorized as node and sink agency. Each agency employs a set of static and mobile agents to perform dedicated tasks. Node agency performs context sensing and context interpretation based on the sensed image and sensing time. Node agency comprises of node manager agent, context agent and node blackboard (NBB). Context agent gathers the context from the target and updates the NBB, Node manager agent interprets the context and passes the context information to sink node by using flooding mechanism. Sink agency mainly comprises of sink manager agent, fusing agent, and sink black board. A context at the sensor node triggers the fusion process at the sink. Based on the context, sink manager agent triggers the fusing agent. Fusing agent roams around the network, visits active sensor node, fuses the relevant images and sends the fused image to sink. The fusing agent uses wavelet transform for fusion. The scheme is simulated for testing its operation effectiveness in terms of fusion time, mean square error, throughput, dropping rate, bandwidth requirement, node battery usage and agent overhead