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

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
>
>
>