Table Of Content1
Proceedings of the
2nd Asia-Pacific
Conference on IAT
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Editors
Ning Zhong
Jiming Liu
Setsuo Ohsuga
Jeffrey Bradshaw
World Scientific
Intelligent
Agent
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Conference on W A eCnnOIOgy
Research and
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Intelligent
Agent
Proceedings erf the
2nd Asia-Pacific Technology
Conference on IAT
Research and
Development
Editors
Ning Zhong
Maebashi Institute of Technology, Japan
Jiming Liu
Hong Kong Baptist University
Setsuo Ohsuga
Waseda University, Japan
Jeffrey Bradshaw
University of West Florida, USA
^ Sj World Scientific
wB New Jersey * London • Singapore • Hong Kong
Published by
World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
P O Box 128, Farrer Road, Singapore 912805
USA office: Suite IB, 1060 Main Street, River Edge, NJ 07661
UK office: 57 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9HE
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
INTELLIGENT AGENT TECHNOLOGY
Research and Development
Copyright © 2001 by World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval
system now known or to be invented, without written permission from the Publisher.
For photocopying of material in this volume, please pay a copying fee through the Copyright
Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. In this case permission to
photocopy is not required from the publisher.
ISBN 981-02-4706-0
Printed in Singapore by World Scientific Printers (S) Pte Ltd
PREFACE
Intelligent Agent Technology is concerned with the development of autonomous
computational or physical entities capable of perceiving, reasoning, adapting,
learning, cooperating, and delegating in a dynamic environment. It is one of the
most promising areas of research and development in information technology,
computer science, and engineering today.
This book is an attempt to capture the essence of the current state of the art in
intelligent agent technology and to identify the new challenges and opportunities
that it is or will be facing. It contains the papers accepted for presentation at The
Second Asia-Pacific Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT '01), held in
Maebashi, Japan, October 23-26, 2001. The second meeting in the IAT conference
series follows the success of IAT '99 held in Hong Kong in 1999. IAT '01 brought
together researchers and practitioners to share their original research results and
practical development experiences in intelligent agent technology. The most
important feature of this conference was that it emphasized a multi-facet, holistic
view of this emerging technology, from its computational foundations, in terms of
models, methodologies, and tools for developing a variety of embodiments of agent-
based systems, to its practical impact on tackling real-world problems.
Much work has gone into the preparation of the IAT '01 technical program:
Original, high-quality papers were solicited for various aspects of theories,
applications, and case studies related to agent technologies. 134 full papers were
submitted from 32 countries and regions of all continents. Each submitted paper
was reviewed by at least three experts on the basis of technical soundness, relevance,
originality, significance, and clarity. Based on the review reports, 25 regular papers
(19%) and 40 short papers were accepted for presentation and publication.
This book is structured into six chapters according to the main conference sessions:
Chapter 1. Formal Agent Theories
Chapter 2. Computational Architecture and Infrastructure
Chapter 3. Learning and Adaptation
Chapter 4. Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Agents
Chapter 5. Distributed Intelligence
Chapter 6. Agent-Based Applications
In addition to the above chapters, this book also includes the abstract or papers for
the IAT '01 keynote/invited talks by Benjamin W. Wah, Toyoaki Nishida, Zbigniew
W. Ras, Andrzej Skowron, and Katia Sycara, which provide different perspectives
to Intelligent Agent Technology.
v
vi
We wish to express our gratitude to all members of the Conference Committee and
the International Advisory Board for their instrumental and unfailing support.
IAT '01 has a very exciting program with a number of features, ranging from
technical sessions, invited talks, agent demos, and social programs. All of this work
would not have been possible without the generous dedication of the Program
Committee members and the external reviewers in reviewing the papers submitted
to IAT '01, of our invited speakers, Benjamin W. Wah, Toyoaki Nishida, Zbigniew
W. Ras, Andrzej Skowron, and Katia Sycara, in preparing and presenting their very
stimulating talks, and of Jianchang Mao (Demos & Exhibits Chair) in soliciting
demo proposals and setting up the program. We thank them for their strong support.
The conference Web support team at the Knowledge Information Systems
Laboratory, Maebashi Institute of Technology did a terrific job of putting together
and maintaining the home page for the conference as well as building a software,
namely, cyber-chair, which is an intelligent agent and interface among organizers,
program committee members, and authors/attendees. We would like to thank Juzhen
Dong, Muneaki Ohsima, Norichika Hayazaki of the conference Web support team
for their dedication and hard work.
IAT '01 could not have taken place without the great team effort of the Local
Organizing Committee and the support of Maebashi Institute of Technology and
Maebashi Convention Bureau. Our special thanks go to Nobuo Otani (Local
Organizing Chair), Sean M. Reedy, Masaaki Sakurai, Kanehisa Sekine, and
Yoshitsugu Kakemoto (the Local Organizing Committee members) for their
enormous efforts in planning and arranging the logistics of the conference from
registration/payment handling, venue preparation, accommodation booking, to
banquet/social program organization. We are very grateful to the IAT '01 sponsors:
ACM SIGART, Maebashi Institute of Technology, Maebashi Convention Bureau,
Maebashi City Government, Gunma Prefecture Government, The Japan Research
Institute, Limited, United States Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Asian
Office of Aerospace Research and Development, and United States Army Research
Office in Far East, and Web Intelligence Laboratory, Inc. for their generous support.
We thank ACM SIGWEB, SIGCHI, Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence,
JSAI SIGFAI, SIGKBS, and IEICE SIGKBSE for being in cooperation with
IAT '01. Last but not the least, we thank Ms. Lakshmi Narayanan of World
Scientific for her help in coordinating the publication of this book.
October 2001
Ning Zhong and Jiming Liu
Program Committee Chairs
Setsuo Ohsuga and Jeffrey Bradshaw
General Conference Chairs
CONFERENCE ORGANIZATION
General Chairs: Setsuo Ohsuga (Waseda U., Japan)
Jeffrey Bradshaw (Inst. H&M Cognition, USA)
Program Chairs: Ning Zhong (Maebashi Inst. Technology, Japan)
Jiming Liu (Hong Kong Baptist U.)
Demos and Exhibits Chair: Jianchang Mao (Verity Inc., USA)
Local Organizing Chair: Nobuo Otani (Mabashi Inst. Technology, Japan)
International Advisory Board
Jeffrey M. Bradshaw (Inst. H&M Cognition, USA) Setsuo Ohsuga (Waseda U., Japan)
Michele L. D. Gaudreault (US AOARD) Patrick S. P. Wang (Northeastern U., USA)
Daniel T. Ling (Microsoft Corp., USA) Yiyu Yao (U. Regina, Cadada)
Jiming Liu (Hong Kong Baptist U.) Jie Yang (U. Science & Technology of China)
Jianchang Mao (Verity Inc., USA) Ning Zhong (Maebashi Inst. Technology, Japan)
Hiroshi Motoda (Osaka U., Japan) Jan Zytkow (U. North Carolina, USA)
Local Organizing Committee
Masahiko Satori (Maebashi Inst. Tech., Japan) Toshio Kawamura (Maebashi Convention B.)
Tadaomi Miyazaki (Maebashi Inst. Tech., Japan) Masaaki Sakurai (Maebashi Convention Bureau)
Nobuo Otani (Mabashi Inst. Technology, Japan) Kanehisa Sekine (Maebashi Convention Bureau)
Sean M. Reedy (Mabashi Inst. Technology, Japan) Midori Asaka (IPA, Japan)
Ning Zhong (Maebashi Inst. Technology, Japan) Yoshitsugu Kakemoto (JRI, Limited, Japan)
Program Committee
K. Suzanne Barber (U. Texas-Austin, USA) Hideyuki Nakashima (ETL, Japan)
Guy Boy (EURISCO, France) Wee-Keong Ng (Nanyang Tech. U., Singapore)
Cristiano Castelfranchi (CNR, Italy) Katsumi Nitta (Tokyo Inst. Technology, Japan)
Kerstin Dautenhahn (U. Hertfordshire, UK) Yoshikuni Onozato (Gunma U., Japan)
Edmund H. Durfee (U. Michigan, USA) Tuncer Oren (Marmara Research Center, Turkey)
E. A. Edmonds (Loughborough U., UK) Ichiro Osawa (ETL, Japan)
Tim Finin (UMBC, USA) Sun Park (Rutgers U., USA)
Adam Maria Gadomski (ENEA, Italy) Van Parunak (ERIM, USA)
Scott Goodwin (U. Regina, Canada) Zbigniew W. Ras (U. North Carolina, USA)
Vladimir Gorodetsky (Russian Academy of Sci.) Eugene Santos (U. Connecticut, USA)
Mark Greaves (The Boeing Company, USA) Zhongzhi Shi (Chinese Academy of Sciences)
Barbara Hayes-Roth (Stanford U., USA) Carles Sierra (Scientific Research Council, Spain)
Michael Huhns (U. South Carolina, USA) Kwang M. Sim (Chinese U. Hong Kong)
Keniti Ida (Maebashi Inst. Technology, Japan) Andrzej Skowron (Warsaw U., Poland)
Tom Ishida (Kyoka oto U., Japan) Ron Sun (U. Misouri-Columbia, USA)
Lakhmi Jain (U. South Australia) Niranjan Suri (U. West Florida, USA)
Stefan J. Johansson (U. Karlskrona, Sweden) Takao Terano (U. Tsukuba, Japan)
Qun Jin (U. Aizu, Jaoan) Demetri Terzopoulos (U. Toronto, Canada)
Juntae Kim (Dongguk U., Korea) Huaglory Tianfield (Glasgow Caledonian U., UK)
David Kinny (U. Melbourne, Australia) David Wolpert (NASA Ames Research Center)
Matthias Klusch (German Research Center for AI) Jinglong Wu (Kagawa U., Japan)
Sarit Kraus (U. Maryland, USA) Takahira Yamaguchi (Shizuoka U., Japan)
Danny B. Lange (General Magic, INC., USA) Kazumasa Yokota (Okayama Prefectural U., Japan)
Jimmy Ho Man Lee (Chinese U. Hong Kong) Eric Yu (U. Toronto, Canada)
Jiming Liu (Hong Kong Baptist U.) P. C. Yuen (Hong Kong Baptist U.)
Mike Luck (U. Southampton, UK) Chengqi Zhang (Deakin U., Australia)
Helen Meng (Chinese U. Hong Kong) Ning Zhong (Maebashi Inst. Technology, Japan)
Joerg Mueller (Siemens, Germany)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface v
Conference Organization vii
Invited Talks
Intelligent Agents for Market-Trend Prediction 2
Benjamin W. Wah
Social Intelligence Design for Knowledge Creating Communities 3
Toyoaki Nishida
Query Answering Based on Distributed Knowledge Mining 17
Zbigniew W. Ras
Approximate Reasoning by Agents in Distributed Environments 28
Andrzej Skowron
Multi-Agent Infrastructure for Agent Interoperation in Open
Computational Environments 40
Katia Sycara
Chapter 1. Formal Agent Theories
SPY: A Multi-Agent Model Yielding Semantic Properties 44
F. Buccafurri, D. Rosaci, G. M. L. Same, L. Palopoli
ABT with Asynchronous Reordering 54
Marius-Calin Silaghi, Djamila Sam-Haroud, Boi Faltlngs
Social Rationality and Cooperation 64
Guido Boella
Belief Revision in Type Theory 69
Tijn Borghuis, Fairouz Kamareddine, Rob Nederpelt
Heterogeneous BDI Agents II: Circumspect Agents 74
Maria Fash
A Preference-Driven Approach to Designing Agent Systems 80
Stefan J. Johansson, Johan Kummeneje
Agent Consumer Reports: of the Agents, by the Agents,
and for the Agents 86
Xiaocheng Luan, Yun Peng, Timothy Finin
Logical Formalizations Built on Game-Theoretic Argument
about Commitments 92
Lamber Royakkers, Vincent Buskens
Asynchronous Consistency Maintenance 98
Marius-Calin Silaghi, Djamila Sam-Haroud, Boi Faltings
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