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book coverReadings in Agents

Michael N. Huhns and Munindar P. Singh (editors)

 Foreword by Les Gasser

 Published by Morgan Kaufmann

Publisher's page for the book

Amazon.com page for the book

January 1998; xv + 523 pages; paper; ISBN 1-55860-495-2

Detailed Table of Contents

This book assembles some of the most important and useful papers on virtually all major aspects of agents. It features an extensive introduction plus 51 articles by over 140 leading authors.

Chapter 1 Agents and Multiagent Systems: Themes, Approaches, and Challenges

  1. Michael N. Huhns and Munindar P. Singh, (an extensive introduction by the editors) pages 1-23.

Chapter 2 Applications

Section 2.1 Enterprises

Five articles (on industrial applications, information management with ontologies, concurrent engineering, constraint reasoning, electronic commerce)

  1. Brahim Chaib-draa, Industrial Applications of Distributed Artificial Intelligence, pages 31-35. (Reprinted from Communications of the ACM, 1995.)
  2. Michael N. Huhns, Munindar P. Singh, and Tomasz Ksiezyk, Global Information Management via Local Autonomous Agents, pages 36-45. (Reprinted from Proceedings of the ICOT International Symposium on Fifth Generation Computer Systems: Workshop on Heterogeneous Cooperative Knowledge Bases, 1994.)
  3. Mark R. Cutkosky, Robert S. Englemore, Richard E. Fikes, Michael R. Genesereth, Thomas R. Gruber, William S. Mark, Jay M. Tenenbaum, and Jay C. Weber, PACT: An Experiment in Integrating Concurrent Engineering Systems, pages 46-55. (Reprinted from IEEE Computer, 1993.)
  4. Petrie, Jr., Charles J., The Redux' Server, pages 56-65. (Reprinted from Proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent and Cooperative Information Systems, 1993.)
  5. Tuomas Sandholm and Victor Lesser, Issues in Automated Negotiation and Electronic Commerce: Extending the Contract Net Framework, pages 66-73. (Reprinted from Proceedings of the International Conference on Multiagent Systems, 1995.)

Section 2.2 Internet and Information Access

Four articles (on softbots, query processing, matchmaking, digital libraries)

  1. Oren Etzioni and Daniel P. Weld, A Softbot-Based Interface to the Internet, pages 77-81. (Reprinted from Communications of the ACM, 1994.)
  2. Yigal Arens, Chun-Nan Hsu, and Craig A. Knoblock, Query Processing in the SIMS Information Mediator, pages 82-90. (Reprinted from Proceedings of the ARPA/Rome Laboratory Knowledge-Based Planning and Scheduling Initiative Workshop, 1996.)
  3. Daniel Kuokka and Larry Harada, Matchmaking for Information Agents, pages 91-97. (Reprinted from Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1995.)
  4. Edmund H. Durfee, Daniel L. Kiskis, and William P. Birmingham, The Agent Architecture of the University of Michigan Digital Library, pages 98-108. (Reprinted from Proceedings of the IEE: Software Engineering, 1997.)

Section 2.3 Personal Assistants

Four articles (on interface agents, collaboration with people, meeting scheduling, exploratory data analysis)

  1. Yezdi Lashkari, Max Metral, and Pattie Maes, Collaborative Interface Agents, pages 111-116. (Reprinted from Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1994.)
  2. Charles Rich and Candace L. Sidner, COLLAGEN: When Agents Collaborate with People, pages 117-124. (Reprinted from Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Autonomous Agents, 1994.)
  3. Henry A. Kautz, Bart Selman, Michael Coen, Steven Ketchpel, and Chris Ramming, An Experiment in the Design of Software Agents, pages 125-130. (Reprinted from Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1994.)
  4. Robert St. Amant and Paul R. Cohen, A Planner for Exploratory Data Analysis, pages 131-138. (Reprinted from Proceedings of the Third Annual Conference on AI Planning Systems, 1996.)

Section 2.4 Other Applications

Five articles (on drama, animation, pedagogy, scheduling, dynamic design)

  1. Barbara Hayes-Roth, Lee Brownston, and Robert van Gent, Multiagent Collaboration in Directed Improvisation, pages 141-147. (Reprinted from Proceedings of the International Conference on Multiagent Systems, 1995.)
  2. Justine Cassell, Catherine Pelachaud, Norman Badler, Mark Steedman, Brett Achorn, Tripp Becket, Brett Douville, Scott Prevost, and Matthew Stone, Animated Conversation: Rule-based Generation of Facial Expressions, Gesture, and Spoken Intonation for Multiple Conversational Agents, pages 148-155. (Reprinted from Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH Conference, 1994.)
  3. Brian A. Stone and James C. Lester, Dynamically Sequencing an Animated Pedagogical Agent, pages 156-163. (Reprinted from Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1996.)
  4. Jyi-Shane Liu and Katia Sycara, Multiagent Coordination in Tightly Coupled Real-Time Environments, pages 164-171. (Reprinted from Proceedings of the International Conference on Multiagent Systems, 1996.)
  5. Suguru Ishizaki, Multiagent Model of Dynamic Design: Visualization as an Emergent Behavior of Active Design Agents, pages 172-179. (Reprinted from Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Human Interaction, 1996.)

Chapter 3 Architectures and Infrastructure

Section 3.1 Architectures

Five articles (on architectures for multiagent systems--mediators, agent systems (two articles), architectures for individual agents--rational and emotional)

  1. Gio Wiederhold, Mediators in the Architecture of Future Information Systems, pages 185-196. (Reprinted from IEEE Computer, 1992.)
  2. Philip R. Cohen, Adam Cheyer, Michelle Wang and Soon Cheol Baeg, An Open Agent Architecture, pages 197-204. (Reprinted from Proceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposium on Software Agents, 1994.)
  3. R. Bayardo, W. Bohrer, R. Brice, A. Chichocki, G. Fowler, A. Helal, V. Kashyap, T. Ksiezyk, G. Martin, M. Nodine, M. Rashid, M. Rusinkiewicz, R. Shea, C. Unnikrishnan, A. Unruh and D. Woelk, InfoSleuth: Semantic Integration of Information in Open and Dynamic Environments, pages 205-216. (Reprinted from Proceedings of the ACM SIGMOD Conference, 1997.)
  4. Klaus Fischer, Joerg Mueller, and Markus Pischel, A Pragmatic BDI Architecture, pages 217-224. (Reprinted from Intelligent Agents II: Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages, 1996.)
  5. Joseph Bates, A. Bryan Loyall, and W. Scott Reilly, An Architecture for Action, Emotion, and Social Behavior, pages 225-231. (Reprinted from Artificial Social Systems: Proceedings of the 4th European Workshop on Modeling Autonomous Agents in a Multi-Agent World, 1994.)

Section 3.2 Communications and Knowledge Sharing

Three articles (on agent communication, knowledge sharing, application of ontologies)

  1. Yannis Labrou and Tim Finin, Semantics and Conversations for an Agent Communication Language, pages 235-242. (Reprinted from Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1997.)
  2. Ramesh S. Patil, Richard E. Fikes, Peter F. Patel-Schneider, Don McKay, Tim Finin, Thomas Gruber, and Robert Neches, The DARPA Knowledge Sharing Effort: Progress Report, pages 243-254. (Reprinted from Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, 1992.)
  3. Michael L. Dowell, Larry M. Stephens, and Ronald D. Bonnell, Using a Domain-Knowledge Ontology as a Semantic Gateway among Information Resources, pages 255-260. (Reprinted from Proceedings of the IJCAI Workshop on Basic Ontological Issues in Knowledge Sharing, 1995.)

Section 3.3 Distributed Computing Aspects

Six articles (on operating system aspects, mobile or itinerant agents, enabled email, digital cash and credit, security and trust)

  1. Dag Johansen, Robbert van Renesse, and Fred B. Schneider, Operating System Support for Mobile Agents, pages 263-266. (Reprinted from Proceedings of the 5th IEEE Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems, 1995.)
  2. David Chess, Benjamin Grosof, Colin Harrison, David Levine, Colin Parris, and Gene Tsudik, Itinerant Agents for Mobile Computing, pages 267-282. (Reprinted from IEEE Personal Communications, 1995.)
  3. Daniela Rus, Robert Gray, and David Kotz, Transportable Information Agents, pages 283-291. (Reprinted from Proceedings of the International Conference on Autonomous Agents, 1997.)
  4. Nathaniel S. Borenstein, Email with a Mind of its Own: The Safe-Tcl Language for Enabled Email, pages 292-298. (Reprinted from Proceedings of the IFIP International Working Conference on Upper Layer Protocols and Architectures, 1994.)
  5. Marvin A. Sirbu, Credits and Debits on the Internet, pages 299-305. (Reprinted from IEEE Spectrum, 1997.)
  6. Michael K. Reiter, Distributing Trust with the Rampart Toolkit, pages 306-309. (Reprinted from Communications of the ACM, 1996.)

Chapter 4 Models of Agency

Section 4.1 Rational Agency: Logical

Two articles (on BDI models and agent-oriented programming)

  1. Anand S. Rao and Michael P. Georgeff, Modeling Rational Agents Within a BDI-Architecture, pages 317-328. (Reprinted from Proceedings of the International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, 1991.)
  2. Yoav Shoham, Agent-Oriented Programming, pages 329-349. (Reprinted from Artificial Intelligence, 1993.)

Section 4.2 Rational Agency: Economic

Three articles (on game theory and negotiation, market-oriented programming, focal point techniques)

  1. Jeffrey S. Rosenschein and Gilad Zlotkin, Designing Conventions for Automated Negotiation, pages 353-370. (Reprinted from AI Magazine, 1994.)
  2. Michael P. Wellman, A Computational Market Model for Distributed Configuration Design, pages 371-379. (Reprinted from AI EDAM, 1995.)
  3. Maier Fenster, Sarit Kraus, and Jeffrey Rosenschein, Coordination without Communication: Experimental Validation of Focal Point Techniques, pages 380-386. (Reprinted from Proceedings of the International Conference on Multiagent Systems, 1995.)

Section 4.3 Social Agency

Five articles (on social knowledge and action, open systems science, dependence networks, society of objects, cooperative problem solving)

  1. Les Gasser, Social Conceptions of Knowledge and Action: DAI Foundations and Open Systems Semantics, pages 389-404. (Reprinted from Artificial Intelligence, 1991.)
  2. Carl Hewitt and Jeff Inman, DAI Betwixt and Between: From ``Intelligent Agents'' to Open Systems Science, pages 405-415. (Reprinted from IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, 1991.)
  3. Jaime Simao Sichman, Rosaria Conte, Yves Demazeau, and Cristiano Castelfranchi, A Social Reasoning Mechanism Based on Dependence Networks, pages 416-420. (Reprinted from Proceedings of the 11th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1994.)
  4. Mario Tokoro, The Society of Objects, pages 421-429. (Reprinted from Addendum to the Proceedings of the International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications, 1993.)
  5. Michael Wooldridge and Nick Jennings, Formalizing the Cooperative Problem Solving Process, pages 430-440. (Reprinted from Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Distributed Artificial Intelligence, 1994.)

Section 4.4 Interactive Agency

Four articles (on pragmatics of interactions, coordination algorithms, communication semantics, cooperation)

  1. Afsaneh Haddadi, Towards a Pragmatic Theory of Interactions, pages 443-449. (Reprinted from Proceedings of the International Conference on Multiagent Systems, 1995.)
  2. Keith S. Decker and Victor R. Lesser, Designing a Family of Coordination Algorithms, pages 450-457. (Reprinted from Proceedings of the International Conference on Multiagent Systems, 1995.)
  3. Munindar P. Singh, A Semantics for Speech Acts, pages 458-470. (Reprinted from Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, 1993.)
  4. Andreas Lux and Donald Steiner, Understanding Cooperation: An Agent's Perspective, pages 471-477. (Reprinted from Proceedings of the International Conference on Multiagent Systems, 1995.)

Section 4.5 Adaptive Agency

Five articles (on learning to coordinate (two articles), multiagent reinforcement learning, Markov processes, agent tracking)

  1. Gerhard Weiss, Learning to Coordinate Actions in Multi-Agent Systems, pages 481-486. (Reprinted from Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1993.)
  2. Ming Tan, Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning: Independent vs. Cooperative Learning, pages 487-494. (Reprinted from Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Machine Learning, 1993.)
  3. Michael L. Littman, Anthony R. Cassandra, and Leslie Pack Kaelbling, Learning Policies for Partially Observable Environments: Scaling Up, pages 495-503. (Reprinted from Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Machine Learning, 1995.)
  4. Milind Tambe, Lewis Johnson, and Wei-Min Shen, Adaptive Agent Tracking in Real-world Multi-Agent Domains: A Preliminary Report, pages 504-508. (Reprinted from AAAI Spring Symposium on Adaptation, Coevolution and Learning in Multiagent Systems, 1996.)
  5. Sandip Sen, Mahendra Sekaran, and John Hale, Learning to Coordinate Without Sharing Information, pages 509-514. (Reprinted from Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1994.)