This project aims to design and build the infrastructure that makes customised information available to intermittently connected users. For that purpose, we will investigate the use of mobile agents as autonomous intermediaries between nomadic users and fixed infrastructure services. Application specific mobile agents, spawned from users' PDAs, will migrate to the infrastructure in order to autonomously undertake their task. These mobile agents will be used to provide users with the means to access and exchange information, in an ad-hoc and secure manner, while on the move. Multi-agent interaction protocols, such as negotiation and cooperation, will help preserve the security of the environment. Open hypermedia techniques, and in particular link services, will be investigated in order to deal with information management in this context; in particular, these techniques will be used to filter and present information according to the users' needs. Funded by EPSRC (under the DIM programme) and DERA.
A three year project comprising Rolls Royce and BAE Systems with researchers from 3 research groups. The goal of the research activities can be split into 3 phases each led by one of the groups. These can be summarised as
The HyStream project addresses the application of open hypermedia to temporal media streams, which are set to become a significant part of the multimedia information space as exemplified by Internet telephony, radio and TV, and interactive TV. The models used have been applied successfully to stored multimedia documents, but little work has been done on streams. In the HyStream project, we consider streams in live and near-live scenarios. We address the link storage, transmission and resolution architecture for both point-to-point streams and multicast, and explore the quality of service issues associated with branching media.
We have also taken a longer-term view by considering connectionless networks, by addressing navigation in the context of a 'pervasive computing' environment. This is generic research towards a new open hypermedia model and we aim to provide formal models that will support further research.
The project is innovating new techniques for integrated information management in the manufacturing environment, in particular to ease maintenance and fault-diagnosis problems. This involves the creation of a large factory-wide database of multimedia information, potentially available to other site in an organisation through the use of appropriate communication technology. The initial research was funded by the EPSRC in collaboration with Pirelli Cables. The current contract is also funded by Eurotherm Drives. Additional research is being undertaken with Ford's engine plant at Bridgend in associationwith School of Manufacturing Science at Cranfield.
The central goal of the Equator IRC is to promote the integration of the physical with the digital. In particular, we are concerned with uncovering and supporting the variety of possible relationships between physical and digital worlds. Our objective in doing this is to improve the quality of everyday life by building and adapting technologies for a range of user groups and application domains. Examples include:
The aim of this project is to research into methods to improve significantly the quality, consistency and breadth of linking of WWW documents at retrieval time (as readers browse the documents) and authoring time (as authors create the documents). It plans to produce a COHSE (Conceptual Open Hypermedia Services Environment) using three leading-edge technologies:
The result of the integration will be evaluated and refined with two real case study applications drawn from commercial collaborators.
CogPrints is an electronic archive for papers in any area of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Linguistics, and many areas of Computer Science (e.g., artificial intelligence, robotics, vison, learning, speech, neural networks), Philosophy (e.g., mind, language, knowledge, science, logic), Biology (e.g., ethology, behavioral ecology, sociobiology, behaviour genetics, evolutionary theory), Medicine (e.g., Psychiatry, Neurology, human genetics, Imaging), Anthropology (e.g., primatology, cognitive ethnology, archeology, paleontology), as well as any other portions of the physical, social and mathematical sciences that are pertinent to the study of cognition.
AIMS (Academic Information Management System) is designed to store and make available on the Web documents that are to be printed or published without the author having to convert the document to HTML. The system is designed to provide a service to a University Department or Faculty for storing and displaying on the Web finished versions of published material. The design of the system is based upon causing the minimum of impact to existing working practices.
Distinguishing features include:
The project is funded by the JISC Technologies Application Programme (JTAP) and has been running since January 1997.
Contact: Gareth Hughes gvh@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Coalition formation in multi-agent systems (MAS) is becoming increasingly important as it increases the ability of agents to execute tasks and maximize their payoffs. This is especially true in virtual enterprises, where dynamic coalitions of small, agile enterprises can provide more services and make more profits than an individual can. Moreover, such coalitions can disband when they are no longer effective. Thus the automation of coalition formation will not only save considerable labour time, but also may be more effective at finding beneficial coalitions than human in complex settings.
Coalition formation has been addressed in game theory for some time. However, game theoric approaches are typically centralized and computationally infeasible. MAS researchers, using game theory concepts, have developed algorithms for coalition formation in MAS environments. However, many of them suffer from a number of important drawbacks, for example:
Thus, our research will do a thorough literature review of existing coalition formation algorithms, and evaluate them both theoretically and empirically. Based on our findings, we will develop a more efficient algorithm for coalition formation, applicable for virtual enterprises environment.