GS/COSC 6390A Knowledge Representation
Fall 2002

This Year's Theme: Intelligent Agents.

One of the central concerns of Artificial Intelligence is the design and implementation of intelligent/autonomous agents - active entities that perceive their environment, reason, plan and execute appropriate actions to achieve their goals (in service of their users), react to external changes, and have social abilities that allow them to communicate and interact with other agents and users. These may be robots or intelligent software agents that "live" on the Internet. Agent-based approaches are good for building open systems where components can come and go, and work together in flexible ways. This course covers agent programming languages (such as our own, IndiGolog, and others such as 3APL), issues in agent architecture (such as reasoning about action and planning, how to balance reactivity and pro-activeness, etc.), logical models of agency, agent communication languages, multiagent coordination infrastructures and protocols, and applications of intelligent agents.

Instructor

Prof. Yves Lespérance
Office: CSB-3052A
Tel: 736-2100 ext. 70146
Email: lesperan@cs.yorku.ca

Lectures

MW, 11:30 - 13:00, R S-125.

Instructor Office Hours

Monday and Wednesday 16:00 - 17:00,
Friday 10:00 - 11:00,
or by appointment.

Prerequisites

You should have a solid background in first-order logic. You must know either Prolog or Java, preferably both.

Evaluation

In-class tests (2 @ 20% each)	40%
Project Proposal	5%
Project Presentation	15%
Project Report	40%
Total	100%

Tentative Outline

• Introduction to Intelligent/Autonomous Agents and their Applications.

  Part I: Intelligent Agent Design

• Introduction to the Situation Calculus and Reasoning About Action.
• The Situation Calculus: Foundations, Reasoning Methods (Regression), and Logic Programming Implementation.
• Complex Actions/Procedures, and Golog.
• Concurrent Processes and ConGolog.
• Integrating Sensing, Planning, and Action; IndiGolog.
• Other Agent Programming Languages (e.g. Agent0, 3APL, AgentSpeak(L)).

  Part II: Multiagent System Design

• Multiagent Infrastructures (e.g. OAA, JADE; FIPA standards) and Agent Communication Languages (e.g. FIPA-ACL, KQML, OAA-ICL).
• Multiagent Coordination: Ontologies and Protocols.
• Modeling Agents' Knowledge and Goals, Communication.
• Agent-Oriented Software Engineering.
• Semantic Web and Web Services.

  Part III:

• Project Presentations.

References and Links

General References

Reiter, R., Knowledge in Action: Logical Foundations for Specifying and Implementing Dynamical Systems, MIT Press, 2001.

Wooldridge M., An Introduction to Multiagent Systems, Wiley, 2002.

Weiss, Gerhard (Ed.), Multiagent Systems, A Modern Approach to Distributed Artificial Intelligence, MIT Press, 1999.

Huhns, M.N. and Singh, M.P. (Eds.), Readings in Agents, Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco, CA, 1997.

Wooldridge M. and Jennings, N.R., Intelligent Agents: Theory and Practice, Knowledge Engineering Review, 10 (2), 115-152, 1995; Postscript version, HTML version.

Bradshaw, J. (Ed.), Software Agents, AAAI Press/MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1997.

Jennings, N.R. and Wooldridge, M. (Eds.), Agent Technology: Foundations, Applications, and Markets, Springer Verlag, Berlin, 1998.

Wooldridge, M. and Rao, A. (Eds.), Foundations of Rational Agency, Applied Logic Series, Vol. 14, Kluwer, Dordrecht, 1999.

Clocksin, W.F. and Mellish, C.S., Programming in Prolog, Springer Verlag, New York, 1987. Third edition.

Russell, S.J. and Norvig, P., Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, Prentice Hall, 1995.

Lecture Transparencies and Readings

• Week 1: Introduction to Intelligent/Autonomous Agents and their Applications.
  Lecture transparencies.
  Required readings:
  either Wooldridge M., Introduction to Multiagent Systems, Ch. 1, Ch. 2 Sec. 1 to 5, and optionally Ch. 7,
  or Wooldridge M. and Jennings, N.R., Intelligent Agents: Theory and Practice, Postscript version, HTML version.
  References(optional readings):
  On SRI Automated Office Application: P. R. Cohen, A. J. Cheyer, M. Wang, and S. C. Baeg, "An open agent architecture," in Working Notes of AAAI Spring Symposium, pp. 1--8, March 1994, HTML version, GNU-Compressed (gz) PostScript version.
  On ConGolog Robotics Application: Y. Lespérance, K. Tam, and M. Jenkin. Reactivity in a Logic-Based Robot Programming Framework. to appear in Jennings, N.R. and Lespérance, Y., editors, Intelligent Agents Volume VI - Proceedings of the 1999 Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL-99), LNAI, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2000.

• Week 2: Introduction to the Situation Calculus and Reasoning About Action.
  Required readings: Reiter, R., Knowledge in Action, Ch. 1 and 3 (optionally, you can also review your logic by reading Ch. 2).
  

• Week 3: The Situation Calculus: Foundations, Reasoning Methods (Regression), and Logic Programming Implementation.
  Required readings: Reiter, R., Knowledge in Action, Ch. 4 and 5.
  

• Week 4: Complex Actions/Procedures and Golog.
  Yale shooting example transparencies.
  Required readings: Reiter, R., Knowledge in Action, Ch. 6.
  Reiter's Golog Interpreter for Quintus Prolog and Elevator E.G., accessible from York CS research hosts.

• Week 5: Concurrent Processes and ConGolog.
  Required readings: G. De Giacomo, Y. Lespérance, and H.J. Levesque. ConGolog, a concurrent programming language based on the situation calculus. Artificial Intelligence, 121, 109-169, 2000.
  Published version from Artificial Intelligence avaliable from York and other Elsevier subscriber hosts; Submitted version.
  Lecture transparencies.

  The first test will be on Monday October 28. It covers everything seen so far, i.e. up to and including ConGolog.

  Information on the course project is now available; the project proposal is due November 11.

• Week 8: Embedded Agents and IndiGolog.
  Required readings: G. De Giacomo and H.J. Levesque. An Incremental Interpreter for High-Level Programs with Sensing. In Logical Foundation for Cognitive Agents: Contributions in Honor of Ray Reiter, Hector J. Levesque and Fiora Pirri, editors, pages 86-102, Springer 1999.
  Lecture transparencies.
  See also the IndiGolog interpreter and examples.
  If you want practice using IndiGolog, try to do the following robot control assignment from a previous year (this is not required this year). The assignment asks for ConGolog programs, but it is recommended you write IndiGolog programs instead; for this, you have to modify the specification to use only functional fluents and translate the given axioms and interpreter calls into IndiGolog notation. This application can also be a starting point for a course project.

• Week 9: Multiagent Infrastructures.
  Required readings: D. L. Martin, A. J. Cheyer, and D. B. Moran, The open agent architecture: A framework for building distributed software systems, Applied Artificial Intelligence, 13, 91-128, January-March 1999. Gnu-compressed PostScript version, HTML version.
  F. Bellifemine, A. Poggi, G. Rimassa. JADE - A FIPA-Compliant Agent Framework. In Proc. of PAAM'99, 97-108, London, April, 1999.
  Optional readings: Chapter 6 of Wooldridge's Intro. to Multiagent Systems.
  Additional references: The OAA home page, the IgOAAlib home page, the JADE home page, and R. Bayardo, et al., InfoSleuth: Agent-Based Semantic Integration of Information in Open and Dynamic Environments Proc. of SIGMOD'97, 195-206, 1997, which also appears in the collection Readings in Agents (see the general references).

• Week 10: Agent Communication Languages.
  Required readings: Wooldridge's Intro. to Multiagent Systems, Ch. 8 Sec. 1 and 2.

• Week 11: Agents and the Semantic Web, Ontologies, and Coordination Protocols.
  Required readings:
  J. Hendler. Agents and the Semantic Web. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 16(2), 30-37, March-April, 2001 [this link lets you print the paper for free from York hosts only].
  D. Fensel, F. van Harmelen, I. Horrocks, D.L. McGuiness, and P.F. Patel-Schneider. OIL: An Ontology Infrastructure for the Semantic Web. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 16(2), 38-457, March-April, 2001 [free from York hosts only].
  Wooldridge's Intro. to Multiagent Systems, Ch. 9 Sec. 1 and 2 (the rest of the chapter is optional).
  Additional references:
  The OIL web page (see the White Paper there for more details on the OIL language).
  Randall Davis and Reid G. Smith. Negociation as a Metaphor for Distributed Problem Solving, Artificial Intelligence, 20:63-109,1983.
  T. Sandholm and V. Lesser. Issues in Automated Negotiation and Electronic Commerce: Extending the Contract Net Framework. In Proc. of the International Conference on Multiagent Systems, 328-335, 1995. Also appears in Huhns and Singh's Readings in Agents.
  J. Rosenschein and G. Zlotkin. Designing Conventions for Automated Negotiation. AI Magazine, 15(3), 29-46, 1994. Also appears in Huhns and Singh's Readings in Agents.

  The second test will be on Wednesday November 27. It covers everything seen since week 8 inclusive.

• Week 12: Rule-Based Agent Programming Languages.
  Optional readings:
  Koen V. Hindriks, Frank S. de Boer, W. van der Hoek and J.-J.Ch. Meyer. Agent Programming in 3APL, Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 2(4):357-401, 1999; an earlier shorter version of this appeared as Koen V. Hindriks, Frank S. de Boer, W. van der Hoek and J.-J.Ch. Meyer. A formal semantics for an abstract programming language. Intelligent Agents IV - Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL'97). 215-229, LNAI 1365, Springer Verlag, Berlin, 1998.
  Wooldridge's Intro. to Multiagent Systems, Ch. 4.

• Week 13: Project Presentations. Click here to access presentation slides (on York CS research hosts).