Increasing autonomy transparency through capability communication in multiple heterogeneous UAV management

Interest in the area of collaborative Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in a Multi-Agent System is growing to compliment the strengths and weaknesses of the human-machine relationship. To achieve effective management of multiple heterogeneous UAVs, the status model of the agents must be communicated to each other. This paper presents the effects on operator Cognitive Workload (CW), Situation Awareness (SA), trust and performance by increasing the autonomy capability transparency through text-based communication of the UAVs to the human agents. The results revealed a reduction in CW, increase in SA, increase in the Competence, Predictability and Reliability dimensions of trust, and the operator performance.

A distributed services based conference planner application using software agents, grid services and web services

This demonstration highlights the applications of our research work i.e. second generation (Scalable Fault Tolerant Agent Grooming Environment - SAGE) Multi Agent System, Integration of Software Agents and Grid Computing and Autonomous Agent Architecture in the Agent Platform. It is a conference planner application that uses collaborative effort of services deployed geographically wide in different technologies i.e. Software Agents, Grid computing and Web services to perform useful tasks as required. Copyright 2005 ACM.

Ontology-based specific and exhaustive user profiles for constraint information fusion for multi-agents

Intelligent agents are an advanced technology utilized in Web Intelligence. When searching information from a distributed Web environment, information is retrieved by multi-agents on the client site and fused on the broker site. The current information fusion techniques rely on cooperation of agents to provide statistics. Such techniques are computationally expensive and unrealistic in the real world. In this paper, we introduce a model that uses a world ontology constructed from the Dewey Decimal Classification to acquire user profiles. By search using specific and exhaustive user profiles, information fusion techniques no longer rely on the statistics provided by agents. The model has been successfully evaluated using the large INEX data set simulating the distributed Web environment.

Multi-level knowledge transfer in software development outsourcing projects : the agency theory view

In recent years, software development outsourcing has become even more complex. Outsourcing partner have begun‘re- outsourcing’ components of their projects to other outsourcing companies to minimize cost and gain efficiencies, creating a multi-level hierarchy of outsourcing. This research in progress paper presents preliminary findings of a study designed to understand knowledge transfer effectiveness of multi-level software development outsourcing projects. We conceptualize the SD-outsourcing entities using the Agency Theory. This study conceptualizes, operationalises and validates the concept of Knowledge Transfer as a three-phase multidimensional formative index of 1) Domain knowledge, 2) Communication behaviors, and 3) Clarity of requirements. Data analysis identified substantial, significant differences between the Principal and the Agent on two of the three constructs. Using Agency Theory, supported by preliminary findings, the paper also provides prescriptive guidelines of reducing the friction between the Principal and the Agent in multi-level software outsourcing.

The IKBALS project: multi-modal reasoning in legal knowledge based systems

In attempting to build intelligent litigation support tools, we have moved beyond first generation, production rule legal expert systems. Our work integrates rule based and case based reasoning with intelligent information retrieval. When using the case based reasoning methodology, or in our case the specialisation of case based retrieval, we need to be aware of how to retrieve relevant experience. Our research, in the legal domain, specifies an approach to the retrieval problem which relies heavily on an extended object oriented/rule based system architecture that is supplemented with causal background information. We use a distributed agent architecture to help support the reasoning process of lawyers. Our approach to integrating rule based reasoning, case based reasoning and case based retrieval is contrasted to the CABARET and PROLEXS architectures which rely on a centralised blackboard architecture. We discuss in detail how our various cooperating agents interact, and provide examples of the system at work. The IKBALS system uses a specialised induction algorithm to induce rules from cases. These rules are then used as indices during the case based retrieval process. Because we aim to build legal support tools which can be modified to suit various domains rather than single purpose legal expert systems, we focus on principles behind developing legal knowledge based systems. The original domain chosen was theAccident Compensation Act 1989 (Victoria, Australia), which relates to the provision of benefits for employees injured at work. For various reasons, which are indicated in the paper, we changed our domain to that ofCredit Act 1984 (Victoria, Australia). This Act regulates the provision of loans by financial institutions. The rule based part of our system which provides advice on the Credit Act has been commercially developed in conjunction with a legal firm. We indicate how this work has lead to the development of a methodology for constructing rule based legal knowledge based systems. We explain the process of integrating this existing commercial rule based system with the case base reasoning and retrieval architecture.

Reliable, cloud-based communication for multi-robot systems

In contrast to single robotic agent, multi-robot systems are highly dependent on reliable communication. Robots have to synchronize tasks or to share poses and sensor readings with other agents, especially for co-operative mapping task where local sensor readings are incorporated into a global map. The drawback of existing communication frameworks is that most are based on a central component which has to be constantly within reach. Additionally, they do not prevent data loss between robots if a failure occurs in the communication link. During a distributed mapping task, loss of data is critical because it will corrupt the global map. In this work, we propose a cloud-based publish/subscribe mechanism which enables reliable communication between agents during a cooperative mission using the Data Distribution Service (DDS) as a transport layer. The usability of our approach is verified by several experiments taking into account complete temporary communication loss.

Mining topical relevant patterns for multi-document summarization

Multi-document summarization addressing the problem of information overload has been widely utilized in the various real-world applications. Most of existing approaches adopt term-based representation for documents which limit the performance of multi-document summarization systems. In this paper, we proposed a novel pattern-based topic model (PBTMSum) for the task of the multi-document summarization. PBTMSum combining pattern mining techniques with LDA topic modelling could generate discriminative and semantic rich representations for topics and documents so that the most representative and non-redundant sentences can be selected to form a succinct and informative summary. Extensive experiments are conducted on the data of document understanding conference (DUC) 2007. The results prove the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed approach.

Experiences with an Object-Oriented, Multi-Stage Language

Metaphor is a multi-stage programming language extension to an imperative, object-oriented language in the style of C# or Java. This paper discusses some issues we faced when applying multi-stage language design concepts to an imperative base language and run-time environment. The issues range from dealing with pervasive references and open code to garbage collection and implementing cross-stage persistence.