From: Jean-Pierre Georgé (george@irit.fr)
Date: Tue 04 Mar 2003 - 10:15:31 GMT
Dear colleagues
During the ALAD meeting in Barcelona, we mentioned Ambient
Intelligence as being an interesting challenge for MAS. Having said that
there was an interesting description in the AgentLink book distributed at
the meeting (Agent Technology : Enabling Next Generation Computing – A
Roadmap for Agent Based Computing), I was asked to do a small abstract. Here
is an extract from the book illustrating quite well, in my opinion, the
notion of Ambient Intelligence. I have also added at the end a point which
was not explicitly tackled in the text, and which is very important in my
opinion.
Jean-Pierre Georgé
"Ambient Intelligence
The notion of Ambient Intelligence has largely arisen through the efforts of
the European Commission in identifying challenges for European research and
development in Information Society Technologies. Aimed at seamless delivery
of services and applications, it relies on three identified pillars of
ubiquitous computing, ubiquitous communication and intelligent user
interfaces, yet it offers perhaps the strongest motivation for, and
justification of, agent technologies. The Ambient Intelligence (AmI) vision
describes an environment of potentially thousands of embedded and mobile
devices (or software artefacts) interacting to support user-centred goals
and activity. This suggests a component-oriented view of the world in which
the artefacts are independent and distributed. The consensus is that
autonomy, distribution, adaptation, responsiveness, and so on, are the key
characterising features of these Ambient Intelligent artefacts, and in this
sense they share the same characteristics as agents.
In particular, these Ambient Intelligence artefacts are likely to be
function-specific (though possibly configurable to tasks) and will, of
necessity, need to interact with numerous other AmI artefacts in the
environment around them in order to achieve their goals. Interactions will
take place between pairs of artefacts (in one-to-one cooperation or
competition), between groups of artefacts (in reaching consensus decisions),
and between artefacts and the infrastructure resources that comprise their
environments (such as large-scale information repositories, or other
supporting resources, possibly through agent encapsulation). Interactions
like these enable the establishment of electronic institutions or virtual
organisations, in which groups of agents come together to form coherent
groups able to achieve some overarching goals.
Importantly, interactions will also occur between artefacts and users,
potentially requiring greater sophistication in interface issues, and in
user understanding (and modelling). Also, the openness of the system, and
its heterogeneity, will require the employment of learning and adaptation
techniques, since many properties of the environment and other agents cannot
be known at design time."
The collective goal
Adding to the last paragraph, I would say that not only do the agents
individually have to learn some properties of the environment and of the
other agents, but as a whole, they will have to learn the goal of the
collective, that which is expected from them. Indeed, I think that, in the
general case of AmI, we cannot code the global goal in each agent because we
don't know exactly what the global goal is. Or maybe we could describe the
global goal but not split it between the agents in a classic top-down
approach. So it is primordial to make it possible for the agents to work
together by following some kind of global goal independent behaviour rules
which enable the collective to achieve the right global goal (to be judged
by the persons which are confronted with the AmI).
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Jean-Pierre Georgé <george@irit.fr>
Equipe SMAC - IRIT(www.irit.fr) –
Université paul Sabatier, 118, route de Narbonne
F-31062 Toulouse Cédex - FRANCE
Tél : 33 (0)5 61 55 82 94 - Fax : 33 (0)5 61 55 62 58
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