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

On Fri, 21 May 2021 at 18:46, Tobias Käfer <tobias.kaefer@kit.edu> wrote:

> Dear RWW list,
>
> coincidentally before you started the discussion about Read-Write Web
> and agents, we proposed a challenge for the ISWC Conference about, well,
> agents and (Read-Write) Linked Data.
>
> Below we quote parts from our website [1], which contains more details.
>
> Looking forward to your submissions,
>
> Tobias Käfer, Andreas Harth, Andrei Ciortea, Victor Charpenay
>
> [1] http://purl.org/atac/2021
>
>
> # All the Agents Challenge (ATAC) at ISWC 2021
>
> Agents on the Web have been a part of the vision for the Semantic Web.
> While it has been noted that the original Semantic Web vision has not
> yet fully materialised, recent progress seems to indicate that we may
> now be at a stage where:
>
> * developments such as the Web of Things may unlock new practical use
> cases for agents on the Web, and
> * the substrate provided by recent Semantic Web technologies (e.g.,
> Linked Data Platform, Linked Data Notifications, SoLiD PODs) may open
> new perspectives on the integration of Semantic Web with agent
> technologies.
>
> This bridging of technologies and communities has also been the topic of
> the Dagstuhl seminar “Autonomous Agents on the Web” held in Feburary
> 2021. Therefore, for the 20th edition of the ISWC conference and in
> spirit of Jim Hendler’s op-ed that asked “Where are all the agents?”, we
> want to pose the All-the-Agents-Challenge (ATAC) to the Semantic Web
> community:
>
> -->  The challenge to build agents that do things on Linked Data  <--
>
> ## Environments
> Submissions to the challenge can make use of one of those environments –
> or bring their own.
>
> * The Autonomous Maze Environment Explorer Project (AMEE) provides an
> environment for agents that have to escape a maze by following
> hypermedia affordances. AMEE can simulate mazes of different sizes. We
> provide a RDF version of AMEE at
> https://github.com/all-agents-challenge/maze-server
>
> * The Building on Linked Data (BOLD) environment is a description of a
> large real-world building (2 floors, over 250 rooms) with simulated
> occupancy and sunlight. Web agents can read occupancy and light level in
> rooms values through sensors. Agents can also actuate light switches
> located in the rooms. On this basis, participants to the challenge could
> implement several energy saving scenarios by interacting with the
> building’s lighting system. The building and all sensors and actuators
> are modeled using the Brick and Semantic Sensor Network (SSN)
> ontologies. Participants can experiment with BOLD and program their
> agents against it by running the BOLD server from
> https://github.com/bold-benchmark/bold-server
>
> * Your amazing agent environment. If you have a cool agent environment
> that provides Linked Data and maybe Web of Things Thing Descriptions,
> like your SoLiD POD, or your semantic IoT deployment, why not submit an
> agent that uses it?
>

Hi Tobias

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

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

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/


>
> ## Important Dates
> Submission deadline:            July 22, 2021
> Notifications:                August 27, 2021
> Challenge presentations:  October 24-28, 2021
>
>