Now showing 1 - 10 of 17
  • Publication
    An agent-based domestic electricity consumption advisory system
    This paper introduces an agent-based domestic electricity consumption advisory system. It reflects upon the diffculties of realizing the ubiquitous sensing vision which underpins such systems. It advocates the need for an effective middleware which will support the evolution of heterogeneous, distributed, collaborative intelligent sensing artifacts. To this end, it introduces the SIXTH Middleware.
      784
  • Publication
    Towards pervasive intelligence : reflections on the evolution of the Agent Factory framework
    Agent Factory is a cohesive framework for the development and deployment of multi-agent systems. Since its inception in the mid 1990s, Agent Factory has gone through a metamorphosis process, whereby several new extensions, revisions, and enhancements have been made. This chapter provides a discussion of the incremental developments in Agent Factory and provides motivations as to why such changes were necessary. Agent Factory distinguishes itself from other intentional agent platforms in several ways. It provides a practical and efficient approach to the development of intentional agent-oriented applications. This is combined with a methodology, integrated development environment support, and a suite of tools that aid the agent fabrication process. A detailed comparison to related work is provided. We include a tutorial on how to use the framework.
      3297
  • Publication
    Implicitly influencing the interactive experience
    Enabling intuitive interaction in system design remains an art more than a science. This difficulty is exacerbated when the diversity of device and end user group is considered. In this paper, it is argued that conventional interaction modalities are unsuitable in many circumstances and that alternative modalities need be considered. Specifically the case of implicit interaction is considered, and the paper discusses how its use may lead to more satisfactory experiences. Specifically, harnessing implicit interaction in conjunction with the traditional explicit interaction modality, can enable a more intuitive and natural interactive experience. However, the exercise of capturing and interpreting implicit interaction is problematic and is one that lends itself to the adoption of AI techniques. In this position paper, the potential of lightweight intelligent agents is proposed as a model for harmonising the explicit and implicit components of an arbitrary interaction.
      355
  • Publication
    The clarity modular ambient health and wellness measurement platform
    Emerging healthcare applications can benefit enormously from recent advances in pervasive technology and computing. This paper introduces the CLARITY Modular Ambient Health and Wellness Measurement Platform, which is a heterogeneous and robust pervasive healthcare solution currently under development at the CLARITY Center for Sensor Web Technologies. This intelligent and context-aware platform comprises the Tyndall Wireless Sensor Network prototyping system, augmented with an agent-based middleware and frontend computing architecture. The key contribution of this work is to highlight how interoperability, expandability, reusability and robustness can be manifested in the modular design of the constituent nodes and the inherently distributed nature of the controlling software architecture.
    Scopus© Citations 5  869
  • Publication
    Distributed network intelligence : a prerequisite for adaptive & personalised service delivery
    Mobile computing is undoubtedly one of the predominant computer usage paradigms in operation today. The implications of what might be cautiously termed a usage paradigm shift have still not crystallised fully, either for society, or those envisaging a new raft of applications and services for mobile users. However, fundamental to the current and future success of mobile computing are mobile telecommunications networks. Such networks have been a success story in their own right in recent years, both as traditional voice carriers and, increasingly importantly, as a conduit of mobile data. The potential for new mobile data applications is immense, but, crucially, this potential is severely compromised by two factors inherent in mobile computing: limited bandwidth and computationally restricted devices. Hence, the academic and commercial interest in harnessing intelligent techniques as a means of mitigating these concerns, and ensuring the user experience is a satisfactory one. In this paper, the broad area of intelligence in telecommunications networks is examined, and issues relating to the deployment of intelligent technologies are explored. In particular, the potential of intelligent agents is identified as a viable mechanism for realising a full end-to-end deployment of intelligence throughout the network, including possibly the most crucial component: the end user's device. As an illustration of the viability of this approach, a brief description of a mobile blogging application is presented.
      1840Scopus© Citations 13
  • Publication
    Intelligent user interfaces for mobile computing
    In this chapter, the practical issue of realizing a necessary intelligence quotient for realizing Intelligent User Interfaces (IUIs) on mobile devices is considered. Mobile computing scenarios differ radically from the normal fixed workstation environment that most people are familiar with; and it is in this dynamicity and complexity that the key motivations for realizing IUIs on mobile devices may be found. Thus the chapter initially motivates the need for the deployment of IUIs in mobile contexts by reflecting on the archetypical elements that comprise the average mobile user's situation or context. A number of broad issues pertaining to the deployment of AI techniques on mobile devices are considered before a practical realisation of this objective through the intelligent agent paradigm is presented. It is the authors hope that a mature understanding of the mobile computing usage scenario, augmented with key insights into the practical deployment of AI in mobile scenarios, will aid software engineers and HCI professionals alike in the successful utilisation of intelligent techniques for a new generation of mobile services.
      1259
  • Publication
    Ambience & collaboration embedded agents in a human-centered world
    Supporting people in the pursuit of their everyday activities is a laudable objective and one which researchers in various disciplines including computing, actively seek to accomplish. The dynamic nature of the end-user community, the environments in which they operate, and the multiplicity of tasks in which they engage in, all seem to conspire against the desired objective of providing services to the end-user community in a transparent, intuitive and context -aware fashion. Indeed, this inherent complexity raises fundamental problems for software engineers as they frequently lack the tools to effectively model the various scenarios that dynamic user behaviour give rise to. This difficulty is not limited to exotic applications or services; rather, it is characteristic of situations where a number of factors must be identified, interpreted, and reconciled such that an accurate model of the prevailing situation at a given moment in time can be constructed. Only in this way, can services be delivered that take into account the prevailing human, social, environmental and technological conditions. Constructing such services calls for a software solution that exhibits, amongst others, diffusion, autonomy, cooperation and intelligence. In this paper, the potential of embedded agents for realising such solutions is explored.
      448
  • Publication
    Fuzzy decision making through energy-aware and utility agents within wireless sensor networks
    Multi-agent systems (MAS) through their intrinsically distributed nature offer a promising software modelling and implementation framework for wireless sensor network (WSN) applications. WSNs are characterised by limited resources from a computational and energy perspective; in addition, the integrity of the WSN coverage area may be compromised over the duration of the network's operational lifetime, as environmental effects amongst others take their toll. Thus a significant problem arises--how can an agent construct an accurate model of the prevailing situation in order that it can make effective decisions about future courses of action within these constraints? In this paper, one popular agent architecture, the BDI architecture, is examined from this perspective. In particular, the fundamental issue of belief generation within WSN constraints using classical reasoning augmented with a fuzzy component in a hybrid fashion is explored in terms of energy-awareness and utility.
      2006Scopus© Citations 11
  • Publication
    Exploiting multi-agent systems in realizing adaptivity in the mobile tourist domain
    Ongoing developments in an array of mobile computing technologies have rendered the deployment of intelligent agents feasible on lightweight computational devices such as mobile phones. This development extends the Multi-Agent System (MAS) paradigm to a new frontier, opening up significant avenues of research in intelligent mobile computing, amongst others. To demonstrate the potential of this approach, the practical realization of adaptivity in two classic agent-based mobile computing applications is considered. Though focusing on the tourist domain, it is contended that the approach adopted is generalisable to a broad category of mobile computing applications.
      1396Scopus© Citations 4
  • Publication
    Coordinated intelligent power management and the heterogeneous sensing coverage problem
    One of the most important factors to be considered when developing an application for a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is its power consumption. Intelligent Power Management (IPM) for a WSN is crucial in maximising the operational longevity. An established regime for achieving this is through the opportunistic hibernation of redundant nodes. Redundancy, however, has various definitions within the field of WSNs and indeed multiple protocols, each operating using a different definition, coexist on the same node. In this paper, we advocate the use of a MAS as an appropriate mechanism by which different stake-holders, each desiring to hibernate a node in order to conserve power, can collaborate. The problem of node hibernation for the heterogeneous sensing coverage areas is introduced and the manner by which it can be solved using ADOPT, an algorithm for distributed constraint optimisation, is described. We illustrate that the node hibernation strategy discussed here is more useful than the traditional stack-based approach and motivate our discussion using intelligent power management as an exemplar.
      885Scopus© Citations 11