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

On Wed, 26 May 2021 at 22:27, Andrei Ciortea <andrei.ciortea@unisg.ch>
wrote:

> Hi Melvin,
>
> Great and yes — this is certainly an area being researched. In fact, back
> in February we organized a Dagstuhl Seminar on "Autonomous Agents on the
> Web" and I think your vision is well aligned with several of the
> discussions we had during the seminar: https://www.dagstuhl.de/21072
>
> In terms of research, I think many of the pieces of the puzzle are already
> there as contributions in different communities (and some piece of the
> puzzle are certainly missing), but what we need is a concerted effort of
> these communities to align and integrate the various research threads — and
> this was the main motivation for organizing this seminar. We've just
> submitted the seminar report to Schloss Dagstuhl a couple of weeks back, it
> should be published soon.
>
> In terms of available technologies, I think we still have some way to go
> to get to the vision you are describing — multi-agent systems that are
> Web-scale, open, and long-lived. I think we’ll get there, but of course we
> first need to start somewhere.
>
> This is where Tobias’ initiative for the agent challenge comes in, and
> this is also where the 2 robots I’ve shared with you come in: one idea that
> came up during the seminar is to set up a shared "live" demonstrator space
> — a deployed, open, long-lived, and geographically distributed hypermedia
> environment that could provide a testbed for trying out ideas and
> identifying challenges. It’s an ambitious task, but we’ve already started
> to work towards it. :-)
>
> We intend to organize a follow-up online event in July, I’m happy to keep
> you in the loop if interested. I'll get back to you soon with the
> additional materials and documentation.
>
> Melvin, thanks for your enthusiasm and we look forward to receive your
> submission for ATAC! :-)
>

The Autonomous Agents on the Web seminar looked really great.  1-2 familiar
faces there too :)

So the thing I'd like to do with an autonomous agent is to have a full
robust life cycle and history.  The famous example of this was the
so-called "crypto kitties" which were cats that had lives, could breed, be
bought and sold etc.  This system struggled to scale, but a web version
could work better

If someone goes to the work of making a bot, it would be nice if it could
live on, pass a certain conference, or competition.  If it could come back
every year.  I dont mean a bot with the same name.  But the actual bot, the
entity

So I thought of the use case of a bot that plays chess, and keeps a history
of it's game.  I wonder if this could be a topic of research.  So it's not
"just" a chess bot.  It's an autonomous agent that happens to play chess.
Another thing it could do is move the robot arms, or solve a maze.  With
all the code, history and state, part of its own identity

In this way the bots can interact with the web, interact with the real
world, interact with humans, but in a long-lived way.  After all, URIs are
things that gain reputation over time.  Should we think about doing the
same for agents, and indeed, giving each agent it's own unique URI, with
its own life cycle?


>
> Cheers,
> Andrei
>
>
> On 25 May 2021, at 22:11, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Tue, 25 May 2021 at 18:52, Andrei Ciortea <andrei.ciortea@unisg.ch>
> wrote:
>
>> 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
>>
>> 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
>>
>> [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
>>
>
> Hi Andrei!
>
> Thanks so much for sharing this, I've read a bit of it, and from what I
> can gather it's a java platform with:
>
> Jason -- AgentSpeak command and programming language -- Agents
>
> Cartago -- Like a virtual machine for funning agents -- Environment
>
> Moise -- OO style way of organizing agents -- Organization
>
> Thanks alot this is very interesting, and a whole new area for me to look
> at, with a bit of a learning curve.  There seems lots of useful things in
> there that it's possible to reuse
>
> My interest is along the lines of multi agent systems, that scale to the
> web, and are programming language agnostic, but communicate with each other
> over, for example, http requests, and link to each other e.g. with JSON(-LD)
>
> I'd love your input on this.  My experience of programming web based
> agents is that they have a maintenance overhead, such the autonomy is not
> really practical, I may call the ones I've made semi-autonomous.  This is
> akin to the desktop paradigm, where you might start an app, use it for a
> while and then shut it down (agent lifecycle).  I am quite interested in
> another style of app, where it runs as a daemon, e.g. in the system tray.
> So you run it, and it keeps going in the background.  When you shut your
> machine down it'll stop, and reboot the machine it runs on startup, so it's
> kind of always there, you don thave to worry about it, like a daemon
>
> Multi agent systems that run more or less as daemons against the web as a
> (read-write) state machine have the advantage of much lower maintenance,
> and interesting emergent features as they become more autonomous and
> interact with each other.  The system itself would be modular, with
> reusable components that could be composed together either into a composite
> agent, or different parts running remotely.  They would also adapt to
> change, and be backwards compatible with the existing web (of data)
>
> So they may not even need a JaCaMo type environment to run in, but could
> reuse the organizational and agent speak features
>
> Would love to know your thoughts on this, if it's an area people research,
> or a direction researchers in the field might want to look at
>
>
>>
>> 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/cam2/live-stream
>>
>
> I'd love to find out how to control a robotic arm with a robot, yes! :)
>
>
>>
>> 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
>>
>>
>