CSE563 Multi-Agent Systems

Spring 2003

http://www.cse.ogi.edu/class/cse563
Class mailing list: cse563-l@cse.ogi.edu

Sanjeev Kumar
CSE Central Room #120
skumar@cse.ogi.edu
(503) 748-7803

Phil Cohen
CSE Central Room #104
pcohen@cse.ogi.edu,
(503) 748-1326

	Topics	Readings	Homework / Project	Slides
Week 1: Introduction	Introduction to Agents & Multi-agent systems - Characteristics of agents - Types of agents - Examples of agent-based systems - BDI, Decision Theoretic, Game Theoretic Agents	Lecture 1	Assignment 1	lecture 2.pdf (ppt)
	Programming Software Agents - Agents as generalization of objects - Abstract Agent Interpreter - Single Agent Architectures (Eg. PRS) - Agent Oriented Software Engineering / AUML	Lecture 2
Week 2: Modal Logic	Review of Propositional & First Order Logic	Lecture 3	Assignment 2 Solution to assignment 2	lecture 3.pdf (ppt) lecture 4.pdf (ppt)
	Modal Logic I	Lecture 4
Week 3: BDI Logic	Modal Logic II	Lecture 5	Assignment 3 pdf file Solution to assignment 3	lecture 5.pdf (ppt) lecture 6.pdf (ppt)
	BDI Logic I	Lecture 6
Week 4: BDI Logic to Agent Implementation	BDI Logic II	Lecture 7	Assignment 4	lecture 8.pdf (ppt)
	BDI Logic III	Lecture 8
Week 5: Multi-Agent Architectures	Agent Oriented Programming Issues in Multi-agent systems	Lecture 9	MIDTERM	lecture 9.ppt lecture 10.ppt
	Multi-agent architectures Cognitive Architectures (SOAR), Agent Middleware (CoABS Grid, FIPA OS)
Week 6: Misc.	No formal class. You are required to attend the faculty candidate lecture by Michael Bowling on Tuesday, May 6, 2003 at 9:00 a.m. in Room 110A of the 1600 building.	Multi-agent learning		lecture 11.ppt
	Game Theory & Argumentation in multiagent systems I	Lecture 11
Week 7: Misc / Teamwork & Communication I	Game Theory & Argumentation in multiagent systems II	Lecture 12	Assignment 5	lecutre 12.ppt lecture 13.ppt
	Teamwork (Joint Intention Theory) and Theories of communication (Speech Acts)	Lecture 13
Week 8: Communication II	Speech Act Theory, Semantics of Communicative Acts	Lecture 14		lecture 14.ppt Lecture 15.ppt
	Multi-agent Conversations: Contract-Net, Auction Protocols, Negotiation	Lecture 15
Week 9: Teamwork II	Agent Communication Languages: KQML, FIPA	Lecture 16		lecture 16.ppt lecture 17.ppt
	Case Studies on Teamwork & STAPLE	Lecture 17
Week 10:	Overview of other Teamwork Models (Shared Plans, POMDPs, etc.)			lecture 18.ppt
	Project Presentations

Online Resources

1) Agents Portal at AAAI (American Association of Artificial Intelligence) website
2) UMBC AgentWeb

Reference Books

[Wooldridge1] Reasoning About Rational Agents by Michael Wooldridge. 2000.
[Wooldridge2] An Introduction to Multi-agent Systems. Michael Wooldridge. 2002
[MAS1] Multiagent systems by Gerhard WeiB
[Parsons1] Game Theory and Decision Theory in Agent-Based Systems by Simon Parsons, Piotr J. Gmytrasiewicz, Michael Woolridge
[AI1] Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach by Stuart Russel & Peter Norvig
[AI2] Logical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence by Micahel R. Genesereth and Nils J. Nilsson

Project: One of the following

(1) Programming project to be done in groups of 2 or 3 three students. Select one of the proposals submitted as part of assignment 5, extend it, and then implement it. Express the behavior of your multi-agent system in logic.

(2) Survey to be done individually: Select a topic that we have not covered in class in depth, find 6-8 papers on that topic, write a survey paper, and present your findings in class.

Readings

Lecture 1:

Required Readings	Chapters 1 & 2 from Wooldridge1 What is Intention ? M. E. Bratman
Suggested Readings	Is There an Intelligent Agent in Your Future? By James A. Hendler. Systems that know what they are doing by Ron Brachman Is it an Agent, or just a Program?: A Taxonomy for Autonomous Agents by Stan Franklin and Art Graesser

Lecture 2:

Required Readings

JAM: A BDI Theoretic Mobile Agent Architecture by Marcus Huber, Agents '99: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Autonomous Agents Seattle, WA, May 1998. M. Wooldridge, N. R. Jennings, and D. Kinny. A Methodology for Agent-Oriented Analysis and Design. In O. Etzioni, J. P. Muller, and J. Bradshaw, editors: Agents '99: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Autonomous Agents Seattle, WA, May 1998.

Suggested Readings

Agents and Objects: How do they differ ? by James Odell Agent-Oriented Software Engineering: The State of the Art by P. Ciancarini and M. Wooldridge, editors, Agent-Oriented Software Engineering. Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in AI Volume 1957, January 2001

Lecture 3:

Required Readings

Review Propositional, Predicate, and First Order Logic from any AI / Logic book. For those of you who have taken the AI course, just review these topics from your book/notes. For others, use the book AI1 (chapers 6,7,9 in the 1st edition of the book) - This is a very basic/introductory/easy reading book and is on the class reserve for cse563 in the library.

Lecture 4 & 5:

Required Readings

Chapter 9 from AI2

Lecture 6:

Required Readings

Intention is choice with commitment. Phil Cohen & Hector Levesque. Artificial Intelligence Journal 1990

Lecture 7

Suggested Readings

The Belief-Desire-Intention Model of Agency by Michael Georgeff, Barney Pell, Martha Pollack, Milind Tambe, Michael Wooldridge. Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Intelligent Agents V : Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL-98)

Lecture 8

Required Readings	Modeling Rational Agents within a BDI-Architecture by Anand S. Rao & Michael P. Georgeff. Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR'91) Agent Oriented Programming by Y. Shoham. Artificial Intelligence Journal, 1993.
Suggested Readings	Chapter 9 from Wooldridge1 Rao, A. S. 1996. AgentSpeak(L): BDI Agents speak out in a logical computable language. In Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Vol 1038, Springer-Verlag. Fisher, M. 1994. Representing and Executing Agent-Based Systems. In Proceedings of First International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages, Amsterdam, 307-323.

Lecture 9

Required Readings	Cohen, P. R., Cheyer, A., Wang, M., and Baeg, S. C. 1994. An open agent architecture. In Proceedings of AAAI Spring Symposium: Software Agents, Menlo Park, CA, 1-8. K. Sycara, K. Decker, and M. Williamson. Middle-Agents for the Internet. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-97), Japan, 1997.
Suggested Readings	We will briefly discuss these topics in the remaining time after the midterm on Thursday. SOAR CoABS Grid

Lecture 11

Required Readings	Chapter 6 in Wooldridge2
Suggested Readings	Distributed rational decision making by Tuomas Sandholm in MAS1

Lecture 12

Required Readings	Chapter 7 in Wooldridge2
Suggested Readings	Negotiation through argumentation: A preliminary report by Simon Parsons and N.R.Jennings. ICMAS-96

Lecture 13

Required Readings

Levesque, H. J., Cohen, P. R., and Nunes, J. H. T. 1990. On Acting Together. In Proceedings of Eighth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-90), Boston, MA, USA, 94-99. Cohen, P. R. and Levesque, H. J. 1991. Teamwork. Nous, 25(4): 487-512.

Lecture 14

Required Readings	Chapter 8 in Wooldridge2 Class handout Cohen, P. R. and Levesque, H. J. 1995. Communicative Actions for Artificial Agents. In Proceedings of First International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS-95), V. Lesser, Ed. San Francisco, USA, AAAI Press, 65-72.
Suggested Readings	Clark, H. H. and Carlson, T. B. 1982. Speech Acts and Hearers' Beliefs. In N. V. Smith, Ed. Mutual Knowledge, Academic Press, London, 1-36.

Lecture 15

Required Readings	Class handout Designing Conversation Policies using Joint Intention Theory by Smith et. al. ICMAS-98 What is a Conversation Policy ? by Greavers, Holmback, and Bradshaw
Suggested Readings	The Role of Conversation Policy in Carrying Out Agent Conversations by Laurance Phillips and Hamilton Link (Autonomous Agents-99) Toward a Formalism for Conversation Protocols Using Joint Intention Theory by Kumar et.. al. 2002

Lecture 16

Required Readings	Labrou, Y. and Finin, T. 1997. Semantics and Conversations for an Agent Communication Language. In Proceedings of Fifteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-97), Nagoya, Japan.
Suggested Readings	FIPA 2000 ACL specs at http://www.fipa.org

Lecture 17

Required Readings

A prototype infrastructure for distributed robot, agent, person teams by Scerri, P., Johnson, L., Pynadath, D., Rosenbloom, P. Si, M., Schurr, N. and Tambe, M. (AAMAS-03) Agent Architectures for Flexible Practical Teamwork by Milind Tambe (AAAI-97) Electric Elves : Applying Agent Technology to Support Human Organizations. Chalupsky, H., Gil, Y., Knoblock, C. A., Lerman, K., Oh, J., Pynadath, D., Russ, T. A., and Tambe, M. International Conference of Innovative Application of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI'01)

Lecture 18

Required Readings	Integrating BDI approaches with POMDPs: The case of team-oriented programs by Nair, R., Tambe, M., and Marsella, S. (AAAI Spring Symposium 2003) The Evolution of Shared Plans. Grosz, B.J. and Kraus, S. In: Rao, A. and Wooldridge, M. (eds.) Foundations and Theories of Rational Agency, p. 227-262. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999.
Suggested Readings

Assignments

All assignments are to be done individually, and are due on the Tuesday of the following week. You can either email a text file (where possible), or bring a printout in class.

Week 1:	Submit any one of the following two assignments: Visit the online resources (AAAI agents portal, and the UMBC agents web), and select an introductory paper (such as one on what agents are, or one describing an application of agents, or an agent-based project) that you find interesting, and write a short (2 pages) summary and critique of that paper. The critique should include YOUR views such as whether or not you agree with the authors and why, whether it was appropriate to use agent-oriented framework for that application, etc. OR This assignment has two parts: Write a list of 5 characteristics that you find are important for agent based systems, and briefly argue why you think that they are important. You are encouraged to use suggested readings as well as web search to come up with this list. Pick your favorite object-oriented language and suggest modifications (in the language constructs and/or in its compiler/interpreter) to incorporate your list of characteristics in that programming language.
Week 2:	This assignment is a collection of short problems intended to give you enough practice with logic basics needed for the next week's lectures. Download assignment sheet (pdf file).
Week 3:	This assignment consists of a collection of problems based on the required readings for this week. Download the assignment sheet (pdf file)
Week 4	1) What are the main differences between the two BDI models studied in class ? 2) How is the agent programming language Agent0 different from agent architectures such as JAM ?
Week 7:	(Assignment #5) Read the AAA documentation and comment on it with respect to what you know about programming multi-agent systems. Is it a BDI framework ? Submit proposal for a simple multi-agent system consisting of 2 or 3 agents. Write two simple AAA agents that communicate with each other.
Week 8
Week 9 Week 10 Week 11