he operation of a human organization requires dozens of everyday tasks
to ensure coherence in organizational activities, to monitor the status
of such activities, to gather information relevant to the organization,
to keep everyone in the organization informed, etc. Teams of software
agents can aid humans in accomplishing these tasks, facilitating the
organization's coherent functioning and rapid response to crises, while
reducing the burden on humans. Based on this vision,
Electric Elves has been in operation 24/7 at ISI since June 1, 2000.
Tied to individual user workstations, fax machines, voice, mobile
devices such as cell phones and palm pilots, Electric Elves has assisted
us in routine tasks, such as rescheduling meetings, selecting presenters
for research meetings, tracking people's locations, organizing lunch
meetings, etc. There are a number of underlying AI technologies that
support the Electric Elves, including technologies devoted to
agent-human
interactions, agent coordination, accessing multiple heterogeneous
information sources, dynamic assignment of organizational tasks, and
deriving information about organization members.
This project was funded by the Defense Research Advanced Project
Agency (DARPA), Control of Agent-based Systems (COABS) program. Prof.
Jim Hendler is the program manager for this program.
This project unites all existing COABS agent projects at the
Information Sciences Institute Intelligent systems Division. These
constituent projects include:
Teamcore - Milind Tambe, David Pynadath
Rapid integration of such distributed, heterogeneous agents via a
novel teamwork-based agent integration framework. In this framework,
software developers first specify an agent organization through
team-oriented programming. To recruit agents for this organization, an
agent resources manager (an analogue of a "human resources
manager") searches for agents of interest to this organization, and
monitors their performance over time. Agents in this organization are
wrapped with TEAMCORE wrappers, that make them team ready, and thus
ensure robust, flexible teamwork among the members of the newly
formed organization. This implemented framework promises to reduce
the software development effort in agent integration while providing
robustness due to its teamwork-based foundations. We have successfully
demonstrated this framework in a NEO TIE as part of the DARPA Control
of Agent-based Systems (COABS) program.
ARIADNE - Craig Knoblock, Kristina Lerman, Jean Oh
To address the problems of accessing and verifying information from
heterogeneous soures, we developed a set of techniques for learning to
recognize the content of the required information. The capability
makes it possible to automatically access and maintain wrappers to
extract data from online sources. It also provides semantic
interoperability among software agents: to verify information from
other agents, identify semantic mismatches in data, as well as
automatically determine the type of information being communicated by
an agent.
Ontology-Based Agent Matching and
Communication - Yolanda Gil, Hans Chalupsky, Tom Russ
The main goal of this effort is to investigate how ontologies help
in agent coordination and communication. We are developing ontology-based agent matchmakers (Phosphorus) and ontology-based
translation (Rosetta). This work is a joint effort of the EXPECT and Loom
projects at ISI.
This project was funded by the Defense Research Advanced Project
Agency (DARPA), Control of Agent-based Systems (COABS) program.
Prof. Jim Hendler is the program manager for this program.
|