Connected communities from the standpoint of multi-agent systems

We study the provision of software agents for connected communities, a class of applications aiming to augment the way people interact and socialize in geographically co-located communities such as neighbourhoods. Following a number of experiments that we have carried out in this area, we propose a multi-agent architecture and we study how to instantiate it in order to design a specific connected community system. We further report on the research challenges, the opportunities and risks raised by agent-based connected communities. Abe Mamdani, Ph.D., FIEEE, Feng: He currently holds the Chair of Telecommunications Strategy and Services endowed by Nortel Networks and the Royal Academy of Engineering in the Department of Electrical & electronic engineering. He is well known for his research into fuzzy logic, which started in the early 70s, and for his research into artificial intelligence in telecommunications. He spent two years working at the central British Telecom Research Laboratories within the Network Management Department. His work was concerned with the application of Artificial Intelligence principally to that company’s network management products, but also to the other research and development activities concerned with Artificial Intelligence. His current research is concerned with applications of software agents mostly for the delivery of services. He is the technical advisor to FIPA—Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents—an International body dealing with the creation of standards in the area of software agents. Professor Mamdani is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering as well as The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. Jeremy Pitt, Ph.D.: He is a lecturer in the Intelligent & Interactive Systems group in the Department of Electrical & Electronic Engineering at Imperial College, London. He was awarded a PhD in 1991 from the Department of Computing at Imperial College, where as a Research Fellow he also implemented a number of innovative software tools, prototypes and demonstrators. His research now is focussed on the intersection of HCI, AI, and digital communication services; and he has made a particular contribution to the development of Agent Communication Languages. He has significant experience of project management: currently he is Principal Investigator on the UK EPSRC/Nortel Networks funded project CASBAh, and is Workpackage Leader on the EU-funded MARINER and MAPPA projects. He was Visiting Professor in the Department of Philosophy, University of Ferrara, Italy 1997–1998. Kostas Stathis, Ph.D.: He is currently a research associate in the Intelligent & Interactive Systems group in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College, London. In 1996 he received a Ph.D. from the Logic programming group of the Department of Computing, at Imperial College. From 1988 to 1992 he has worked as a Knowledge-Based Systems Engineer for Numerical Algorithms Group, Ltd, Oxford, UK, developing Knowledge-based Front-ends to software packages. His development work has contributed to the UK Alvey programme GLIMPSE, while his research work has contributed to a number of Esprit projects including: FOCUS, TEMPORA, LiMe and MAPPA. His current research interests include formulating interaction in computational logic, games as a development methodology for interactive systems, globalisation of interactive systems, multi-agent systems for connected communities, management games for training, and mobile agents for e-commerce.