This project proposes a new paradigm for next generation distributed systems. The new paradigm will be structured around the concept of agreement between computational agents. These agreements must be consistent with the normative context where they are established and will permit, once accepted, that the agents call for mutual services and honour them.

An entity, by the fact of being autonomous, may choose whether to fulfil an agreement or not, and it should fulfil them when there is an obligation to do so derived from the standing agreements. Autonomy, interaction, mobility and openness are the characteristics that the paradigm will cover from a theoretical and practical perspective. Semantic alignment, negotiation, argumentation, virtual organizations, learning, real time, and several other technologies will be in the sandbox to define, specify and verify such systems. Both functional and non-functional properties will be studied. Security on execution will be based on trust and reputation measures. These measures will help in the decision making of the agents to determine with whom to interact and what terms and conditions to accept. Virtual worlds technology will be explored to give high usability to the tools. Scalability will be guaranteed by the design of new algorithms for semantic alignment and through the use of electronic institutions.

The project will also build algorithms, software platforms and three demonstrators on electronic procurement, mobile health and water conflict resolution.

There is a need for trustful business environments that will open up the emarkets to a greater population of traders. This project looks at the development of believable emarkets that address this need. Proposed 3D electronic institution technology is expected to facilitate the establishment of robust business structures as the believability of the business activities and interactions in such emarkets will ensure the principles of trust and reputation in the electronic markets of tomorrow.
Administering organisation: University of Technology, Sydney
Participants: Prof SJ Simoff; Prof JK Debenham; Prof C Sierra; Prof IF Wilkinson

Reputation is a social knowledge on which a number of social decisions are accomplished. Regulating society from the morning of mankind (Dunbar, 1998), it becomes more crucial with the pace of development of ICT technologies, dramatically enlarging the range of interaction and generating new types of aggregation.

Despite its critical role, reputation generation, transmission and use are unclear.The project aims to an interdisciplinary theory of reputation and to modelling the interplay between direct evaluations and meta-evaluations in three types of decisions, epistemic (whether to form a given evaluation), strategic (whether and how interact with target), and memetic (whether and which evaluation to transmit).

Finally, current technological developments of reputation are dusting off traditional remedies like word of mouth and chatty talk. The theory in question will be shown to help design reputation technology. The proposed project will benefit from a synergy between experts in an innovative methodology, i.e. agent-based social simulation, and in computational modelling and software development, all good representatives of the European community in these fields of science.

Electronic institutions (EIs) allow to establish interaction conventions among agents --persons and/or programs--on the basis of a distributed, open and computationally dynamic environment.

This project has as a main goal the study of techniques which allow to provide EIs with autonomic capabilities that allow them to offer a dynamic response under changing circumstances by adopting interaction conventions, producing a high-level development environment for autonomous electronic institutions (AEI).

From all those features characterizing an autonomous system, we will focus mainly on the study of auto configuration and reconfiguration. Besides, the development environment will provide us with tools for specification and analysis of AEI which will allow us to reduce the time and complexity of their development. In order to validate the resulting framework, we will carry out experiments based on real-world problems modelled by means of AEIs.

More information: http://e-institutions.iiia.csic.es

We shall provide a unifying framework based on interaction models that are mobile in the sense that they may be transferred to other components, this being a mechanism for Web service composition and for coalition formation.

A key contribution of OpenKnowledge is to demonstrate that by shifting the emphasis to interaction (the details of which may be hidden from users) we can obtain knowledge sharing of sufficient quality for sustainable communities of practise without the barrier of complex meta-data provision prior to community formation. We ground our research in two testbed arenas: bioinformatics and emergency response.

Electronic Institutions are a way to implement interaction conventions for agents -human or software- who can establish commitments on an open environment.
This project involves four lines of activity:
1. Exploration of flexible convention making and enforcement.
2. Study of the usage of institutional constructs in social systems modelling.
3. Development of an institutional software layer to specify, activate and test electronic institutions.
4. Experiments on actual E-Institutions.

This project intends to make a step forward in the electronic commerce state of the art by building a tool that permits the construction of agent-mediated electronic markets. It is expected that during the next decade this type of software structures will be common on Internet. We'll profit >from the experience of the IIIA in the design of negotiation models, case-based reasoning, uncertainty management, an language development to formalize the concept of agent-mediated electronic institution. This formalization will serve to develop a visual specification language that verifies the correction of the diferent components of such institutions (behaviour rules, communication protocols, commitments, agents flux, etc.) Finally, and once the specification of an institution is verified, an agent server to permit the interaction of exogenous agents will be customised. In order to help in the use of the so specified institutions, we'll develop parametrizable agents (PITAs) that will permit the users to participate in the institutions in an off-line manner. These PITAs will be parametrised by users according to their preferences and will be in charge of closing deals following the user instructions codified in the form of negotiation strategies -to be studies also in the project. Among others, we will use case-based reasoning and possibilistic logic to generate intelligent negotiation strategies.

Last, and to verify the theoretical ideas of the design of electronic institutions and negotiation strategies, we will build three pilot tests on public prucurement and fish auctions. To do this, we have signed a collaboration agreement with three companies responsible of these activities.

The objective of IBROW is to develop intelligent brokers that are able to distributively configure reusable components into knowledge systems through the World-Wide Web.

The WWW is changing the nature of software development to a distributive plug & play process, which requires a new kind of managing software: intelligent software brokers.

IBROW will integrate research on heterogeneous DB, interoperability and Web technology with knowledge-system technology and ontologies.

The COMRIS project aims to develop, demonstrate and experimentally evaluate a scalable approach to integrating the Inhabited Information Spaces schema with a concept of software agents. The COMRIS vision of co-habited mixed-reality information spaces emphasizes the co-habitation of software and human agents in a pair of closely coupled spaces, a virtual and a real one. However, this project does not pursue the perceptual integration of real and virtual space into an augmented reality. Instead the coupling aims at focusing the large potential for useful social interactions in each of the spaces, so that they become more manageable, goal-directed and effective.