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Department of Computer Science and Engineering

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CSCE 631: Programming Environments in AI: Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Systems

Instructor: Dr. Dylan Shell

Office:HRBB 333B
Phone:(979) 845-2369
Email:dshell_at_cs.tamu.edu
Web:http://robots.cs.tamu.edu/dshell/cs631
Office hours:Wednesdays, 4pm-5pm (except when there is a dept. seminar), and by appointment.

Spring 2013

Lecture Time:Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, 3pm-3:50pm.
Lecture Location:HRBB 126

Fundamental concepts and techniques of intelligent multi-agent systems: the course will balance Engineering and Science aspects of this distributed paradigm. It will address how to build software agents, how cooperation and communication is usefully employed, and how we can understand and model collectives that result from multiple of these agents.

Prerequisites

CSCE 420 (Artificial Intelligence) - or an equivalent AI course as an undergrad.

Textbook

Wooldridge, M. (2009). An Introduction to Multiagent Systems. Second Edition. Wiley.

Syllabus

Additional detailed description (including the grading policy) is available in the syllabus document. It is available here.

Supplemental Papers

First week:

  • "More Is Different", P. W. Anderson, Science, Vol. 177, No. 4047. (Aug. 4, 1972), pp. 393-396.
  • "Is it an Agent, or Just a Program?: A Taxonomy for Autonomous Agents", S. Franklin and A. Graesser, in Proceedings of the Workshop on Intelligent Agents III, Agent Theories, Architecvtures, and Languages (ECAI '96).

Second week:

  • "Action and planning in embedded agents", L. P. Kaelbling and S. J. Rosenschein, Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Vol. 6, No. 1-2. (June, 1990), pp. 35-48.

Third week:

  • "Agent-oriented programming", Y. Shoham Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 60,(June, 1993), pp. 51-91.

Fifth week:

  • "On Acting Together", H. J. Levesque, P. R. Cohen, and J. Nunes, In Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Menlo Park, California, AAAI Press. 1990
  • "Towards Flexible Teamwork", M. TambeJournal of Artificial Intelligence Research, Vol. 7,(1997), pp. 83-124.

Eighth week:

  • "Planning and Acting in Partially Observable Stochastic Domains", L. P. Kaelbling, M. L. Littman, A. R. Cassandra. Artificial Intelligence, Volume 101, pp. 99-134, 1995.

Paper presentations

The following are papers which will be read by the class, and presented by the student associated with the reading. It is recommended that the student prepare PPT slides for the paper; we will do two papers per class and since we need time for discussion, the time budget should be 15 minutes.

List of papers

  1. "The Contract Net Protocol: High-Level Communication and Control in a Distributed Problem Solver", R. G. Smith, IEEE Transactions on Computers, Vol C-29, No. 12, Dec 1980.
    Presenter: Marguis Taliaferro
  2. "An Implementation of the Contract Net Protocol Based on Marginal Cost Calculations", T. Sandholm, In Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Washington D.C, January 1993.
    Presenter: Sandesh Aryal
  3. "Modelling rational agents within a BDI-architecture" A. Rao and M. Georgeff, In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Cambridge, Massachussets, pages 473-484, 1991.
    Presenter: Jesus Suarez
  4. "Leveled-Commitment Contracting", T. Sandholm and V. Lesser, Artificial Intelligence Fall 2002.
    Presenter: Changjoo Nam
  5. "Using partial global plans to coordinate distributed problem solvers", E. H. Durfee and V.R. Lesser, In Proceedings of International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence 1987, (A longer version is: "Partial Global Planning: A Coordination Framework for Distributed Hypothesis Formation," IEEE Trans. Syst. Man and Cyber. SMC-21(5) pp 1167-1183.)
    Presenter: Reza Hosseini-Teshnizi
  6. "Divide and conquer in multiagent planning", E. Ephrati and J.S. Rosenschein, In Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Seattle Washington, August 1994.
    Presenter: Amey Parulkar
  7. "Communicative Actions for Artificial Agents", P.R. Cohen and H.J. Lecesque, In Software Agents, Pages 419-436, 1997.
    Presenter: Rob Goble
  8. "Predicting Your Own Effort", D.F. Bacon, Y. Chen, I. Kash, D. Parkes, M. Rao, M. Sridharan, In Proceedings of the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, 2012.
    Presenter: Anh Nguyen Tuan
  9. "Agent-based Micro-Storage Management for the Smart Grid" Perukrishnen Vytelingum, Thomas D. Voice, Sarvapali D. Ramchurn, Alex Rogers, Nicholas R. Jennings, In Proceedings of the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, 2010.
    Presenter: Purshottam Krishnanath Bhangui
  10. "The Distributed Constraint Satisfaction Problem: Formalization and Algorithms", M. Yokoo, E. H. Durfee, T. Ishida, and K. Kuwabara, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 10:673-685, 1998.
    Presenter: Taahir Ahmed
  11. "Distributed Breakout Algorithm for Solving Distributed Constraint Satisfaction Problems", M. Yokoo and K. Hirayama. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Multiagent Systems pp.401-408, 1996.
    Presenter: Ali Agha-Mohammadi
  12. "The clarke tax as a consensus mechanism among automated agents",E. Ephrati and J.S. Rosenschein, In Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, San Jose, California, July 1991.
    Presenter: Shena Hoffmann
  13. "Ant system: optimization by a colony of cooperating agents", M. Dorigo, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B: Cybernetics, Volume 26, Issue 1, Pages 29-41, 1996.
    Presenter: David Chawner
  14. "On the acceptability of arguments and its fundamental role in nonmonotonic reasoning, logic programming and n-person games", P. M. Dung, Artificial Intelligence 77:321-357, 1995.
    Presenter: Zack Henkel
  15. "Issues in Multiagent Resource Allocation", Y. Chevaleyre, P. E. Dunne, U. Endriss ,J. Lang , M. Lemaître, N. Maudet, J. Padget, S. Phelps, J. A. Rodríguez-aguilar, and P. Sousa, Informatica 30:3-31, 2006.
    Presenter: Sasin Janpuangtong
  16. "Plans and resource-bounded practical reasoning", M. E. Bratman, D. J. Israel and M. E. Pollack, Computational Intelligence 1988, 349-355, 1988.
    Presenter: Saurav Agarwal
  17. "Distributed Agent-Based Air Traffic Flow Management", K. Tumer and A. Agogino, In Proceedings of International Conference on Agents and MultiAgent Systems 2007.
    Presenter: Michael Jablonski
  18. "A Market-Oriented Programming Environment and its Application to Distributed Multicommodity Flow Problems", M.P. Wellman, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research Volume 1, Issue 1, August 1993.
    Presenter: Shigiang Guo

Projects

Details of the class projects are here.

The presentation schedule is posted here.

Students with Disabilities

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is a federal anti-discrimination statute that provides comprehensive civil rights protection for persons with disabilities. Among other things, this legislation requires that all students with disabilities be guaranteed a learning environment that provides for reasonable accommodation of their disabilities. If you believe you have a disability requiring an accommodation, please contact Disability Services, in Cain Hall, Room B118, or call 979-845-1637. For additional information visit http://disability.tamu.edu.

Academic Integrity

For additional information please visit: http://www.tamu.edu/aggiehonor
"An Aggie does not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do."

Policy on Missed Work

Material missed due to recognized absences (illness with doctor's excuse, death in the family) can be made up for full credit. Late material is accepted solely at the discretion of the instructor, at least 1 class period's prior notice must be given for consideration of acceptance of late material.

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