Re: All the Agents Challenge (ATAC) at ISWC 2021

Hi Melvin,

>> Thanks for sharing this fascinating topic.  I'm very much interested in autonomous agents on the read-write web.  I have built a few of these in the past, and they seem to lack teeth.  The phrase "where are all the agents" resonates with me, and motivates me to try and look for something more robust
>> Browsing the links you provided, lead me to this: Introduction to Multi-Agent systems
>> https://cw.fel.cvut.cz/b191/_media/courses/be4m36mas/mas2016-l01-introduction.pdf
>> Would you say this is a good start for understanding where the research on this topic is at?
>> Would love to read if you could share any links


I think the above course is already a nice introduction to autonomous agents and multi-agent systems (MAS), another course with hands-on exercises & tutorials: https://www.emse.fr/~boissier/enseignement/maop20-fall/index.html <https://www.emse.fr/~boissier/enseignement/maop20-fall/index.html>

This course is focused on multi-agent oriented programming [1] and the JaCaMo platform, which is one of the main platforms for MAS (additional documentation and tutorials on GitHub): https://github.com/jacamo-lang/jacamo <https://github.com/jacamo-lang/jacamo>

[1] Olivier Boissier, Rafael H. Bordini, Jomi F. Hübner, Alessandro Ricci, Andrea Santi, Multi-agent oriented programming with JaCaMo, Science of Computer Programming, Volume 78, Issue 6, 2013, Pages 747-761, ISSN 0167-6423, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scico.2011.10.004. Link to PDF: https://www.sciencedirect.com/sdfe/reader/pii/S016764231100181X/pdf <https://www.sciencedirect.com/sdfe/reader/pii/S016764231100181X/pdf>

>> Also looking forward to the environments being released on 22 May.  Not being an academic myself, Im hesitant to try and submit an agent to solve the maze, or turn the lights off in the building


If you are interested to hack away with some Web-enabled devices, we also have a couple of robotic arms that we are happy to share. :-)

You can access these robots via HTTP and we have a live video feed for each:
https://interactions.ics.unisg.ch/61-102/cam1/live-stream <https://interactions.ics.unisg.ch/61-102/cam1/live-stream>
https://interactions.ics.unisg.ch/61-102/cam2/live-stream <https://interactions.ics.unisg.ch/61-102/cam2/live-stream>

One of the robots is hooked up to a lamp that turns on when you activate the robot, so you can use it regardless of your time zone (our lab is in St.Gallen, Switzerland).

Let me know if you are interested to use these robots and I am happy to send you additional details & documentation.

Best wishes,
Andrei

--
Dr. Andrei Ciortea
Interaction- and Communication-based Systems
Institute of Computer Science
University of St.Gallen
https://interactions.ics.unisg.ch/



> On 21 May 2021, at 23:56, Tobias Käfer <tobias.kaefer@kit.edu> wrote:
> 
> Hi Melvin,
> 
> Am 21.05.21 um 19:51 schrieb Melvin Carvalho:
>> Thanks for sharing this fascinating topic.  I'm very much interested in autonomous agents on the read-write web.  I have built a few of these in the past, and they seem to lack teeth.  The phrase "where are all the agents" resonates with me, and motivates me to try and look for something more robust
>> Browsing the links you provided, lead me to this: Introduction to Multi-Agent systems
>> https://cw.fel.cvut.cz/b191/_media/courses/be4m36mas/mas2016-l01-introduction.pdf
>> Would you say this is a good start for understanding where the research on this topic is at?
>> Would love to read if you could share any links
> 
> That's a general introduction to MAS, and probably does not reflect so much the web part.  Some would maybe think that already single agents doing useful things on the web would be a step forward.  A more webby rough introduction in which I was involved could be a tutorial at the IoT conference [1].  In my echo chamber, we often use Linked Data-Fu [2] for rule-based simple reflex agents.  I have CC'ed Andrei who may give you some more pointers from his perspective.
> 
> [1] http://people.aifb.kit.edu/co1683/2020/iot-tutorial/
> [2] http://linked-data-fu.github.io/
> 
>> Also looking forward to the environments being released on 22 May.  Not being an academic myself, Im hesitant to try and submit an agent to solve the maze, or turn the lights off in the building
> 
> No need to be afraid. We love practical things. The environments released are the maze and the building.
> 
>> I'm also interested in any submissions to this challenge, including evolutionary agents.  This little demo of fish as agents in an evolutionary environment with finite resources I really like because it has emergent properties:
>> http://caza.la/shoal/
> 
> Cool stuff!
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Tobias