GS/COSC 6390A Knowledge Representation
Fall 2003

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

Changed! Since Sept. 22, lectures are Monday and Wednesday from 13:00 to 14:30 in BC-327.

Instructor Office Hours

Monday and Wednesday 16:30 - 17:30 and 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.

Tentative Evaluation

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

Tentative Schedule

Part I: Introduction
• Week 1 (Sept. 8): Introduction to Intelligent/Autonomous Agents and Multi Agent Systems.
• Week 2 (Sept. 15): Multiagent Platforms and Infrastructures.

  Part II: Intelligent Agent Modeling and Design

• Week 3 (Sept. 22): Introduction to the Situation Calculus and Reasoning About Action.
• Week 4 (Sept. 29): The Situation Calculus: Foundations, Reasoning Methods (Regression), and Logic Programming Implementation.
• Week 5 (Oct. 6): Complex Actions/Procedures and Golog.
• Week 6 (Oct. 13): Concurrent Processes and ConGolog.
• Week 7 (Oct. 20): Integrating Sensing, Planning, and Action; IndiGolog. Project Proposal.
• Week 8 (Oct. 27): Other Agent Programming Languages (e.g. Agent0, 3APL, AgentSpeak(L)). Test 1.

  Part III: Multiagent System Modeling and Design

• Week 9 (Nov. 3): Agent Communication Languages (e.g. FIPA-ACL, KQML, OAA-ICL) and Interaction Protocols.
• Week 10 (Nov. 10): Ontologies and Content Languages; Agents and Web Services.
• Week 11 (Nov. 17): Modeling Agents' Mental States and Communication.
• Week 12 (Nov. 24): Probability, Decision Theory, and Game Theory. Test2.

  Part IV: Project Presentations

• Week 13 (Dec. 1): 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.

Readings and Lecture Transparencies

• Week 1 (Sept. 8): Introduction to Intelligent/Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems.
  Lecture transparencies.
  Required readings:
  Wooldridge M., Introduction to Multiagent Systems, Ch. 1, Ch. 2 Sec. 1 to 5, and optionally Ch. 7.
  References (optional readings):
  A good overview/survey: Wooldridge M. and Jennings, N.R., Intelligent Agents: Theory and Practice, Postscript version, HTML version.
  On ConGolog Robotics Application: Y. Lespérance, K. Tam, and M. Jenkin. Reactivity in a Logic-Based Robot Programming Framework. In Jennings, N.R. and Lespérance, Y., editors, Intelligent Agents Volume VI - Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages, 6th International Workshop, ATAL'99, Orlando, FL, USA, July 15-17, 1999, Proceedings, 173-187, LNAI 1757, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2000.

• Week 2 (Sept. 15): Multiagent Platforms and Infrastructures.
  Note: there is no class on Sept 16.
  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 JADE home page,
  the IgOAAlib home page,
  the IndiGolog+JADE 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 3 (Sept. 22): 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 4 (Sept. 29): The Situation Calculus: Foundations, Reasoning Methods (Regression), and Logic Programming Implementation.
  Required readings: Reiter, R., Knowledge in Action, Ch. 4 and 5.

• Week 5 (Oct. 6): The Situation Calculus: Foundations, Reasoning Methods (Regression), and Logic Programming Implementation (continued).
  Note: there is no class on Oct. 6.
  

• Week 6 (Oct. 13): Complex Actions/Procedures and Golog.
  Required readings: Reiter, R., Knowledge in Action, Ch. 6.
  Note: there is no class on Oct. 13.

• Week 7 (Oct. 20): Complex Actions/Procedures and Golog (continued).
  

• Week 8 (Oct. 27): 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 Oct. 29. It is "open book" and covers everything we have seen up to and including week 7.

• Week 9 (Nov. 3): Integrating Sensing, Planning, and Action; 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.
  An IndiGolog interpreter and some examples are available here; there is also an exercise if you want to learn to use this implementation.

  Information on the course project is now available; the project proposal is due November 10.

• Week 10 (Nov. 10): Other Agent Programming Languages.
  Required readings: Wooldridge's Intro. to Multiagent Systems, Ch. 4.
  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.
  

• Week 11 (Nov. 17): Agent Communication Languages and Coordination Protocols.
  Required readings: Wooldridge's Intro. to Multiagent Systems, Ch. 8, Sec 1 and 2, and Ch. 9 Sec. 1 and 2 (the rest of the chapters is optional).
  Additional references:
  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.

• Week 12 (Nov. 24): Agents and the Semantic Web.
  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].
  Additional references:
  McIlraith, S., Son, T.C. and Zeng, H. Semantic Web Services. IEEE Intelligent Systems, Special Issue on the Semantic Web, 16(2):46--53, March/April, 2001. Copyright IEEE, 2001.
  McIlraith, S. and Son, T. Adapting Golog for Composition of Semantic Web Services. In Proc. of the 8th Int. Conference on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR2002), Toulouse, April, 2002.

  The second test will be on Nov. 26. It is "open book" and covers everything we have seen up to and including week 11.

• Week 13 (Dec. 1): Ontologies.
  Required readings: 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].
  Additional references:
  The OIL web page (see the White Paper there for more details on the OIL language).
  

  Project presentations will take place on Dec. 2.