General Information
The
conference took place in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain at
June 3 - June 7. At the weekend (June 3 and 4), it offered the opportunity to
attend several workshops or tutorials. I visited the following ones:
Tutorial 2: User Modeling in Adaptive Interfaces
Workshop 8: Intelligent Agents for
Computer Supported Co-Operative Work: Technology and Risks
Workshop 11: Deception, Fraud and
Trust in Agent Societies
Workshop 12: Communicative Agents
in Intelligent Virtual Environments
At the
workshop 8, I gave a talk:
Intelligent Traders For Communication in Cooperative Rooms
(Reinhold Kloos, Rolf Reinema, Michael
Schroeder).
Barcelona
is a fascinating town with a lot of action (Ramblas, Habour, Beach), museums,
and culture. Painters and artists like Miro and Picasso are to mention. The
buildings and parks of Gaudi are astonishing, especially if you compare his
architecture to later styles like Bauhaus, and you know that he lived already
in the beginning of the 20th century.
Workshop 8.
My talk
In my
talk on workshop 8, I presented ideas for my Ph.D.- thesis. After introducing
two projects of the research area COR of the German National Research Centre
for Information Technology (GMD) called Virtual Project Office (VPO) and
World Wide Facility Management (WWFM), I described the trading process to
find suitable communication facilities for persons willing to communicate.
The kind of communication is determined with a common working context (a
certain zone in the virtual environment). The idea is to learn as much as
possible about the preferences of the users for communication. However, the
world-wide distributed users have no common terminology, in order to describe
their wished facilities. Thus, our idea is to track a so-called trust-value,
which is determined by the cost of the communication method and the feedback
of the user. The frequency of using a certain communication method by one
user is seen as an automatic feedback.
I got lot
of positive reactions to my talk.
My talk.
Other talks being of
interest for my Ph.D.-thesis
At the conference, I found a lot of
interesting talks, which gave me some further ideas for my Ph.D.-thesis.
I try to give here a short list of
them:
 Workshop 11, "Deception,
Fraud and Trust in Agent Societies"
This Workshop was of interest for me, because here I found different kind of
approaches for building of a Trust-Value. The main difference between this
Trust-Value and our one was that our Trust-Value is used first of all in
connection with the found services, but this workshop was concerned with the
trust in another agent.
Nevertheless became many of these talks interesting, because they show even
some learning algorithms for trust.
For example:
Learning mutual trust
(Bikramjit Banerjeee, Rajatish Mukherjeee, Sandip Sen)
Learning to trust
(Andreas Birk)
Distributed Trust in Open Multi
Agent Systems
(Yosi Mass, Onn Shehory)
Workshop 8, "Intelligent
Agents for Computer Supported Co-Operative Work: Technology and Risks"
The Role of Dialogue in Cooperative
Problem Solving
(Barbara Dunin-Keplicz, Rineke Verbrugge)
This talk gave me an improved terminology for the different kind of dialogues
occurring in Cooperative Problem Solving (CPS). They even tried to assign
these different types of dialogues to the four levels of a model for CPS. CPS
can be seen as a kind of argumentation. Argumentation will occur in my
system, too, when the personal agents prefer different kind of communication
facilities. So there is further to mention the paper "An Efficient
Argumentation Framework for Negotiating Autonomous Agents" of Michael
Schroeder. It gives a solid background for argumentation. (There is a
realization, too.)
An Agent Based Approach to Managing
Collaborative Work within both a Virtual Environment and a Virtual Community
(Gregory O'Hare, Katherine Sewell, Aidan Murphy Thomas Delahunty)
This talk was of interest for me because it gave
some ideas of a virtual environment (2D and 3D). The Virtual Project Office
(VPO) will certainly have some comparable features.
Workshop 12: "Communicative Agents in Intelligent Virtual
Environments"
When I mentioned already in context of the last workshop that I liked to see
some virtual environments, then this workshop offered me some further
pleasure.
Rest of conference
At the
rest of the conference, different papers and poster were presented. I want to
mention here only a few papers and posters, which could be of interest for my
Ph.D.-thesis. (Only a few example here.)
Rough Traders and Intelligent
Clients (Poster)
(Michael Schroeder, Julie McCann, Dan Haynes)
The poster was based on a paper of the same name.
This paper was the origin of the ideas for trading with the use of the trust
value given in my talk. Naturally, I supported my supervisor with his
presentation of his poster.
Planning and Learning Together
(Poster)
(Gerhard Weiss)
This paper offers an interesting theoretical
approach for the combination of planning of activities and learning of their
usefulness. These processes are done in the community of several agents.
Whereby the environment in which the agents act can be described as a
feature-based state space, which can be sensed by the agents.
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