Electronically Querying for the Provenance of Entities

The provenance of entities, whether electronic data or physical artefacts, is crucial information in practically all domains, including science, business and art. The increased use of software in automating activities provides the opportunity to add greatly to the amount we can know about an entityâ??s history and the process by which it came to be as it is. However, it also presents difficulties: querying for the provenance of an entity could potentially return detailed information stretching back to the beginning of time, and most of it possibly irrelevant to the querier. In this paper, we define the concept of provenance query and describe techniques that allow us to perform scoped provenance queries.

Information Flow for ALGOL-like Languages

In this paper we present an approach to information flow analysis for a family of languages. We start with a simple imperative language. We present an information flow analysis using a flow logic. The paper contains detailed correctness proofs for this analysis. We next extend the analysis to a restricted form of Idealised Algol, a call-by-value higher-order extension of the simple imperative language (the key restriction being the lack of recursion). The paper concludes with a discussion of further extensions, including a probabilistic extension of Idealised Algol.

Extending Agent Languages for Autonomy

BDI agent languages provide a useful abstraction for complex systems comprised of interactive autonomous entities, but they have been used mostly in the context of single agents with a static plan library of behaviours invoked reactively. These languages provide a theoretically sound basis for agent design but are very limited in providing direct support for autonomy and societal cooperation needed for large scale systems. Some techniques for autonomy and cooperation have been explored in the past in ad hoc implementations, but not incorporated in any agent language. In order to address these shortcomings we extend the well known AgentSpeak(L) BDI agent language to include behaviour generation through planning, declarative goals and motivated goal adoption. We also develop a language-specific multiagent cooperation scheme and, to address potential problems arising from autonomy in a multiagent system, we extend our agents with a mechanism for norm processing leveraging existing theoretical work. These extensions allow for greater autonomy in the resulting systems, enabling them to synthesise new behaviours at runtime and to cooperate in non-scripted patterns.