Using Agents and Autonomic Computing to Build Next Generation Seamless Mobility Services

Dr. John Strassner

Motorola Fellow and Vice President

Autonomic Research Motorola Labs

Abstract

Next generation networks seek to integrate wide-area and local-area wireless and wired systems in order to provide seamless services to the end user, providing freedom of movement between metropolitan/enterprise and indoor/outdoor coverage while maintaining continuity of applications experience. Seamless Mobility, and its vision of seamless service delivery, requires significant changes to existing wired and wireless network management systems. Seamless Mobility is an experiential architecture, predicated on providing mechanisms that enable a user to accomplish his or her tasks without regard to technology. This talk will describe a novel autonomic architecture that uses a variety of different types of agents to synthesize knowledge about the environment, the context of users and their service and resource needs, and the capabilities and constraints placed on the network at any given time.

Agents act according to a unique context-aware policy governance approach, and work autonomously to orchestrate system behavior according to business goals. This talk will conclude with a summary of research directions at Motorola Labs and future work to be undertaken.

John Strassner is a Motorola Fellow and Vice President, where he directs Autonomic Networking and Communications at Motorola Research Labs. He is also responsible for directing policy management and knowledge engineering. Previously, John was the Chief Strategy Officer for Intelliden and a former Cisco Fellow. John invented DEN (Directory Enabled Networks) and DEN-ng as a new paradigm for managing and provisioning networks and networked applications. Currently, he is the Chairman of the Autonomic Communications Forum, the Vice-Chair of the Autonomics and Reconfigurability working group of the WWRF, and the past chair of the TMF's NGOSS metamodel, policy, and Shared Information and Data modeling work groups. He is also active in the ITU, OMG, and OASIS.

He has also authored two books (Directory Enabled Networks and Policy Based Network Management), contributed chapters for three other books, and has over 147 refereed conference and journal publications. John is a TMF Distinguished Fellow, a member of the TMF Advisory Board, and a member of the Industry Advisory Board of the University of California Davis. John is also an associate professor for the Waterford Institute of Technology, Waterford, Ireland.

Multiagent Systems for Autonomic Computing

Dr. Jeffrey O. Kephart

IBM Research

Abstract

Autonomic computing is a grand-challenge vision in which computing systems manage themselves in accordance with high-level objectives from humans. There is widespread acceptance within the IT industry that building autonomic computing systems is the only way to avert a looming systems management complexity crisis. At IBM Research, we are exploiting agent concepts and principles to achieve autonomic behavior in small datacenter prototypes involving a few dozen servers. Marketplace realities lead us ineluctably to a multi-agent approach to self-management, in which individual resources and management products are cast as intercommunicating adaptive agents. Utility functions play a key role in defining the high-level objectives, and novel machine learning algorithms are used to help satisfy those objectives. Even in settings with just two or three agents, emergent behaviors can be a challenge, with adaptive agents sometimes working at cross purposes, each trying independently to address the same underlying problem. After describing our experience with agents in the service of autonomic computing, I will outline several research challenges that are likely to be of interest to the agents community. Quite broadly, agent architectures and algorithms have a vital role to play in meeting the grand challenge of autonomic computing. Conversely, autonomic computing is a rich and inspiring application domain for the AAMAS community, raising many new and interesting research problems -- solutions to which may have enormous economic benefit.

Biography

Jeffrey O. Kephart manages the Agents and Emergent Phenomena group and the Tivoli and Autonomic Computing Joint Program at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. He co-founded the International Conference on Autonomic Computing, and co-authored the most frequently cited reference on autonomic computing (according to Google Scholar).

His research focuses on the application of analogies from biology and economics to massively distributed computing systems, particularly in the domains of autonomic computing, e-commerce and antivirus technology. His research efforts on the design of a digital immune system and on economic software agents have been publicized in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Forbes, Wired, Harvard Business Review, IEEE Spectrum, and Scientific American.

Dr. Kephart received a B.S. from Princeton University and a Ph.D. from Stanford University, both in electrical engineering with a concentration in physics.

Robots Are Agents, Too!

Dr. Gal Kaminka

Bar Ilan University

Abstract

Recent years are seeing dramatically growing interest in robots, side-by-side, paradoxically, with a worrisome decline in robotics work within the autonomous agent community. This, despite the significant opportunities enabled by viewing robots as agents.  In this talk, I will argue for such an inclusive view, by examining multi-robot teams.  From an agent perspective, challenges in building such teams are many: Some are related to a particular task (taskwork), and some are related to the interactions between agents (teamwork).

For close to 15 years, researchers in agents have provided a growing body of evidence that taskwork and teamwork are separable, and have repeatedly demonstrated the benefits of such separation.  I will survey my group's role in investigating this hypothesis with physical robots, the lessons learned, and the challenges and opportunities provided by viewing robots as agents, too.

Biography

Gal Kaminka is a senior lecturer at the computer science department at Bar Ilan University (Israel). His research expertise includes teamwork and coordination, multiagent and multi-robot systems, behavior and plan recognition, and modeling social behavior. He received his PhD from the University of Southern California, and spent two years as a post-doctorate fellow at Carnegie Mellon University. Today, Dr. Kaminka leads the MAVERICK research group at Bar Ilan, supervising 15 MSc and PhD students.  He was awarded an IBM faculty award and earned top places at international robotics competitions.

Automated Negotiation in Open Environments

Dr. Sarit Kraus

Bar Ilan University

Abstract

Agents in open environments lack a central mechanism for controlling their behavior, and they may encounter human decision-makers whose behavior is affected by social and psychological factors. Examples include online markets, patient care-delivery systems; virtual reality and simulation systems used for training and IT systems administration. As open environments increase in number and complexity, they pose significant challenges for agent designers. In this talk, I will discuss several research thrusts that address some of the challenges of automated agent design and evaluation in open environments. These agents are self-interested in the sense that they aim to fulfill their own goals as efficiently as possible. However, they may still cooperate if such behavior can serve either their short- or long-term interests or goals. I will present algorithms for representing and learning agents' goals and capabilities that have been evaluated under diverse settings varying in the extent to which agents are cooperative or competitive. Lastly, I will describe Color Trails, a game infrastructure for investigating negotiation strategies in open environments. Color Trails provides a realistic but modeling-tractable setting that facilitates the design and evaluation of automated decision making by agents.

Biography

Sarit Kraus is a Professor of Computer Science at Bar-Ilan University and an adjunct Professor at the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research interests include multi-agent systems, especially negotiation and cooperation among agents, open agent environments, learning and information agents, ecommerce, formal models for agency, personalization and optimization of complex systems. In 1995 Kraus was awarded the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award (the premier award for a young AI scientist). In 2001 she was awarded the IBM Faculty Partnership Award and in 2002 she was elected as a AAAI fellow. In 2007 she was awarded the ACM SIGART Agents Research award and her paper with Prof. Barbara Grosz won the IFAAMAS influential paper award.

She has published over 200 papers in leading journals and major conferences and is an author of the book Strategic Negotiation in Multiagent Environments(2001)  and a co-author of a book on Heterogeneous Active Agents (2000); both published by MIT Press. Kraus was a program co-chair of the Fourth International Conference on Multiagent Systems (ICMAS), 2000 and was the general co-chair of the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) 2005.   Kraus is a member of the board of directors of the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS). She is an associate editor of the Artificial Intelligence Journal and the Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence Journal, and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, the Journal of Applied Logic, and the Journal of Web Semantics. She is currently conducting joint projects with researchers from the University of Maryland at College Park, Harvard University, Stanford Research Institute, Tel-Aviv University, Hebrew University, University of Southern California, and University of Liverpool.