PAPER for an Educational Digital Library

GeogDL is a digital library of geography examination resources designed to assist students in revising for a national geography examination in Singapore. As part of an iterative design process, we carried out participatory design and brainstorming with student and teacher design partners. The first study involved prospective student design partners. In response to the first study, we describe in this paper an implementation of PAPER - Personalised Adaptive Pathways for Exam Resources - a new bundle of personalized, interactive services containing a mock exam and a personal coach. The “mock exam” provides a simulation of the actual geography examination while the “personal coach” provides recommendations of exam questions tailored to suit individual ability levels. This paper concludes with findings from a second study involving teacher design partners to further refine GeogDL.Accepted versio

Context-Aware Services Provisioning on Top of Active Technologies

Abstract. With respect to the pervasive computing vision, the paper deals with the efficient provisioning of context-aware services making use of Active Networks (ANs) on top of fixed and mobile infrastructure. This represents a starting point for studying on the utilization of Active Technologies in order to provide context-aware services. In these terms, Mobile Agent (MA) Technology comprises a type of Active Technology and the exploitation of its utilization in the field of context-awareness is analyzed. Following, an evaluation comparison of ANs and MAs paradigms is given, identifying the drawbacks and the advantages of each paradigm. Finally, some concluding remarks regarding the combined usage of them are presented.

Producing Enactable Protocols in Artificial Agent Societies

This paper draws upon our previous work [7, 16] in which we proposed the organisation of services around the concept of artificial agent societies and presented a framework for representing roles and protocols using LTSs. The agent would apply for a role in the society, which would result in its participation in a number of protocols. We advocated the use of the games-based metaphor for describing the protocols and presented a framework for assessing the admission of the agent to the society on the basis of its competence. In this work we look at the subsequent question: what information should the agent receive upon entry?. We can not provide it with the full protocol because of security and overload issues. Therefore, we choose to only provide the actions pertinent to the protocols that the role the agent applied for participates in the society. We employ branching bisimulation for producing a protocol equivalent to the original one with all actions not involving the role translated into silent (τ) actions. However, this approach sometimes results in non-enactable protocols. In this case, we need to repair the protocol by adding the role in question as a recipient to certain protocol messages that were causing the problems. We present three different approaches for repairing protocols, depending on the number of messages from the original protocol they modify. The modified protocol is adopted as the final one and the agent is given the role automaton that is derived from the branching bisimulation process

On the emergent Semantic Web and overlooked issues

The emergent Semantic Web, despite being in its infancy, has already received a lotof attention from academia and industry. This resulted in an abundance of prototype systems and discussion most of which are centred around the underlying infrastructure. However, when we critically review the work done to date we realise that there is little discussion with respect to the vision of the Semantic Web. In particular, there is an observed dearth of discussion on how to deliver knowledge sharing in an environment such as the Semantic Web in effective and efficient manners. There are a lot of overlooked issues, associated with agents and trust to hidden assumptions made with respect to knowledge representation and robust reasoning in a distributed environment. These issues could potentially hinder further development if not considered at the early stages of designing Semantic Web systems. In this perspectives paper, we aim to help engineers and practitioners of the Semantic Web by raising awareness of these issues

The stability, scalability and performance of multi-agent systems

Much has been published on the functional properties of multi-agent systems (MASs) including their co-ordination, rationality and knowledge modelling. However, an important research area which has so far received only scant attention covers the non-functional properties of MASs which include performance, scalability and stability issues - clearly these become increasingly important as the MAS field matures, and as more practical MASs become operational. An understanding of how to evaluate and assess such non-functional properties, and hence how to improve on them by altering the underlying MAS design, is gradually emerging as a pressing concern. This paper presents preliminary work to address such concerns; particularly, it investigates the performance and scalability of a multi-agent model we have developed. Firstly, this paper defines performance, scalability and stability within the context of multi-agent applications. Following, we describe a multi-agent model that we later use to illustrate our first attempts at evolving a procedure for analysing such non-functional properties of MASs. Next, we report on our initial attempts to investigate the performance and scalability of the multi-agent model. Finally, the significance of these results in particular and of such investigations in general is discussed