591
About the Contributors
Virginia Dignum received a PhD in computer science from the Utrecht University, The Netherlands. Before joining academia in 2003, she worked in consultancy and system development for more than 12 years. Her current research focuses on agent based models of organizations, in particular in the dynamic aspects of organizations, and the applicability of agent organizations to knowledge management. She participates and leads several national and EU-projects, and has more than 50 published articles. She organized several international workshops, was treasurer of AAMAS 2005 and is vice-chair of the Benelux Artificial Intelligence Association. *** Marco Alberti is a research fellow at the University of Ferrara’s Department of Engineering. Marco graduated in electronic engineering from the University of Ferrara in 2001 and obtained his PhD in information engineering from the University of Ferrara in 2005. Marco’s research interests are abductive logic programming, constraint logic programming, multi-agent systems, and normative systems. Alexander Artikis is a research associate at the National Centre for Scientific Research “Demokritos”, in Athens, Greece. He was awarded his PhD in computing (multi-agent systems) from Imperial College London. His research interests lie in the areas of distributed artificial intelligence, and temporal representation and reasoning. He has been publishing in related conferences and journals, and worked on several national and European projects. Olivier Boissier received his PhD in computer science at INPG Grenoble in 1993 and his Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (HdR) at ENS Mines de Saint-Etienne and University Jean Monnet Saint-Etienne in 2003. He is currently professor of Computer Science at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure Mines of Saint-Etienne, France. Olivier Boissier is active in the research and development of multi-agent systems for 15 years. His main research contributions concern: coordination and control of multi-agent systems. Olivier Bonnet-Torrès is originally an engineer in embedded computing and aerospace systems; he defended his PhD thesis in multi-agent robotics in 2007 at the French Aerospace Lab (ONERA) in Toulouse. Olivier was shortly employed by IBM Germany and worked as a UAV systems engineer at Aurora Flight Sciences and Athena TI in Manassas, VA. He is the co-founder and chief scientist of Beorn Technologies, a company based in Le Mans, France and specialized in applied research for autonomous systems and open-source management and business applications. Copyright © 2009, IGI Global, distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.
About the Contributors
Chris Burnett is a PhD candidate currently studying as the Computer Science Department of the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, and at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, PA. He attained his BSc (Hons) in computing science at the University of Aberdeen in 2006. His primary research interests lay is the areas of multi-agent systems, specifically the issue of trust in multi-agent systems. Cristiano Castelfranchi, is professor of Cognitive Sciences at the University of Siena (Communication Science); director of the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of the National Research Council, in Roma. His main contributions are on the cognitive foundations of social phenomena (cooperation, communication, power, norms, autonomy, institutions, social emotions, etc.). Program chair of the first AAMAS conference 2002; general chair of AAMAS 2009; member of JAAMAS and JASSS boards; Fellowship of ECCAI (August 2003) “for pioneering work in the field of AI”; Special award “Mind and Brain” for research in Cognitive Science- University of Turin, 2007. Christopher Cheong is a lecturer in the school of business information technology at RMIT University, and a PhD candidate in the school of computer science and information technology. His interests lie in the areas of artificial intelligence, intelligent agents, evolutionary computing and software engineering. More specifically, he is interested in applying these interests to the business domain. Federico Chesani is a research assistant the University of Bologna’s Department of Computer Engineering (DEIS). Federico received his PhD in computer science from the University of Bologna in 2007. Federico’s research interests include abduction and computational logic, verification techniques and specification languages, applied to multi-agent systems and service oriented computing. Federico is member of the Italian Interest Group on Logic Programming (GULP). Marco Colombetti is full professor of Computer Science at Politecnico di Milano and at Università della Svizzera italiana. His main research themes are agent communication languages, artificial institutions, semantic web, human communication and interaction. He is member of AI*IA (the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence) and ISCAR (the International Society for Cultural and Activity Research), and “Associate” of Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Luciano R. Coutinho received a MSc degree in Informatics from Federal University of Paraíba, Brazil, in 1999. Currently he is assistant professor at Federal University of Maranhão, in São Luís, Brazil, and PhD student at University of São Paulo, Brazil. His research interests include multi-agent systems, agent organizations, ontology engineering and model-driven engineering. Mehdi Dastani is a lecturer in computer science at the Utrecht University. He is working in the area of multi-agent systems and multi-agent programming for the last ten years and has published many papers on these subjects. He is the general chair of the European Agent Systems Summer School (EASSS), a co-organizer of ProMAS (The International Workshop on Programming Multi-Agent Systems) and multi-agent programming contest. He has been the PC member of various international conferences and workshops such as AAMAS (International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems) and JELIA (European Conference on Logics in Artificial Intelligence).
592
About the Contributors
Keith Decker is an associate professor in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Delaware. His research interests include multi-agent systems, computational organization design, distributed planning and scheduling, and bioinformatics. He received his BS in applied math from Carnegie Mellon University in 1984, his MS in computer science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1987, and his PhD in computer science from the University of Massachusetts in 1995. He received a NSF CAREER Award in 1998, and a DARPA recognition award in 2006. Decker is on the editorial board for the Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems Journal and is program co-chair for AAMAS 2009. Scott DeLoach is an associate professor in the Computing and Information Sciences Department at Kansas State University. His research focuses on methods and techniques for the analysis, design, and implementation of complex adaptive systems, which have been applied to both multi-agent and cooperative robotic systems. Dr. DeLoach is best known for his work in agent-oriented software engineering. He is creator of the multi-agent systems engineering methodology (MaSE), its follow-on organizationbased multi-agent systems engineering methodology (O-MaSE), and the associated agentTool analysis and design tool. He is on the editorial board of the International Journal of Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, has been on over 25 conference and workshop program committees, has in excess of 50 refereed publications, and has advised over 25 graduate students. Dr. DeLoach came to Kansas State University after a twenty year career in the US Air Force. Frank Dignum received a PhD in 1989 in Amsterdam. Subsequently he set up the computing science department of the University of Swaziland. In 1992 he joined the AI group in IST, Lisbon. From 1993 he started working on agents and electronic commerce at the TUE in Eindhoven. From 2000 he is associate professor at the UU in the area of agent technology. He has published numerous papers and books and organized several workshops and was the local chair of AAMAS 2005. Shaheen Fatima is a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at Loughborough University, UK. Her research interests lie in the area of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems, specifically in resource allocation in multi-agent systems using market-based methods, and in agent mediated negotiation for the domain of electronic commerce using techniques from game theory. She has published over thirty articles in the area and served on the program committees of several conferences and workshops. Jacques Ferber is professor of Computer Science at Montpellier II. He received his PhD degree from Univ. Paris 6 in 1983. His domain of research is about multi-agent systems since 1987, distributed systems and multi-agent simulation. He is author of the book Multiagent Systems, an Introduction to Distributed Artificial Intelligence, which has been published in French, English and German. He is member of several editorial boards such as JAAMAS and JAOSE. He co-authored the MadKit platform, widely used for educational and research purposes, and the AGR generic model for organizations. He has published more than a hundred scientific papers in international journals, conferences and workshops about multi-agent systems. Nicoletta Fornara has an MSc in computer science and a PhD in communication for a work on interaction and communication among autonomous agents in multi-agent systems. She is postdoc researcher and lecturer at Università della Svizzera italiana and at Politecnico di Milano. Her research
593
About the Contributors
mainly focuses on the formalization of artificial institutions for the specification of open interaction systems. She is member of the steering committee of the COIN workshop series, she has been in the PC of AAMAS since 2005 and in the PC of other international workshops. Marco Gavanelli is an assistant professor in computer science at the University of Ferrara’s Department of Engineering. Marco obtained his PhD in information science from the University of Modena and Reggio-Emilia. Marco’s research interests include logic programming and its applications, abductive reasoning, multi-criteria optimization, constraint logic programming and its integration with operations research, reformulation of problems into SAT. Marco is a coordinator of the interest group on Knowledge Representation and Automatic Reasoning of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AI*IA). Joseph A. Gianpapa is a research computer scientist and the project manager for Dr. Sycara’s research laboratory in the Robotics Institute, which is within the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He has a MSc from the Language Technologies Institute, also from the School of Computer Science at CMU, and a BA in computer science from Brandeis University. Prior to joining CMU he had designed and developed diverse commercial systems, such as an AI-based system to detect tax evasion and a multi-protocol data communications network gateway for a flagship European airline. His current research interest is in improving agent understanding of human intentions and actions through natural language and non-verbal interactions and observations. Davide Grossi is postdoctoral researcher at the University of Luxembourg. He has obtained a degree in philosophy at Pisa University and the diploma of “Scuola Normale Superiore” of Pisa in 2003. In 2007 he obtained a PhD in artificial intelligence at Utrecht University. His PhD thesis dealt with the formal aspects of the specification, analysis and design of agent organizations and institutions. His current research interests concern the connection between logic and the theories and methodologies of social sciences. Sachin Kamboj is a PhD candidate in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Delaware. His research interests include multi-agent systems, networking and bioinformatics. He received his BE in computer science and engineering from Rajiv Gandhi Technical University in 2002 and his MS in computer science from the University of Delaware in 2005. He received the Quantum Leap Innovations graduate student excellence award in 2008 and was nominated for a best student paper at AAMAS 2007. Dimosthenis Kaponis is a PhD student in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College London. His research interests include distributed artificial intelligence and in particular multi-agent systems, mathematical modeling, data mining and information visualization. He is currently working on models and methods for the evaluation of adaptable multi-agent systems. Marco Lamieri, PhD in computational economics at University of Turin. Currently economist at the Economic Research Department of Intesa Sanpaolo s.p.a. and associate researcher at the Complex Systems Lagrange LAB, Institute for Scientific Interchange Foundation, Turin, Italy. Marco’s research field is industrial economics. The selected research methods, besides verbal and statistical analysis, is
594
About the Contributors
agent-based computational economics (ACE) with particular focus on model’s realism using empirical data. The main research interest is economic dynamics, in particular the dynamics of interactive social processes involving (boundedly) rational, learning agents. Evelina Lamma received her degree in electronic engineering from University of Bologna, Italy, in 1985 and her PhD degree in computer science in 1990. Evelina is full professor at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Ferrara, Italy, where she teaches Artificial Intelligence. Evelina’s research activity focuses on logic programming languages and their extensions, logic for AI, knowledge representation systems, machine learning, multi-agent systems. Diana Mangalagiu, professor in Organization Sciences at Reims Management School, France and associate researcher at the Complex Systems Lagrange LAB, Institute for Scientific Interchange Foundation, Turin, Italy, has a background in both “hard” and “soft” disciplines: computer science and artificial intelligence (PhD), microelectronics and instrumentation (MSc), electrical sciences (MSc), sociology (MSc) and organization science (MSc). She specialized in the study and the modeling of social and economic systems, using an interdisciplinary approach combining organization sciences, sociology, economics, physics and computer science. Her research is both theoretical and empirical, aiming at identifying and analyzing the connections between the microscopic fundamental level of the individual agent and collective social phenomena. Paola Mello obtained her PhD in computer science in 1989 from the University of Bologna, Italy. Since 1994 Paola is a full professor at the University of Bologna’s Faculty of Engineering, where she teaches artificial intelligence. Paola’s research focuses on theoretical aspects and applications of logic programming languages, artificial intelligence, expert systems, multi-agent systems and Web services. Paola participated in several national and international (UE) research projects in the context of computational logic. John-Jules Ch. Meyer obtained his PhD in 1985 at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He was a professor in Amsterdam and Nijmegen from 1988 to 1993. Since 1993 he has been a professor at the computer science department of Utrecht University. Currently he is heading the Intelligent Systems Group. He was the scientific director of the Dutch graduate school in Information and Knowledge-based Systems (SIKS) during1995-2005. He is a member of the IFAAMAS board steering the international AAMAS conferences. In 2005 he was awarded a fellowship of the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI). Steven Okamoto is a doctoral candidate in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He holds a BSc and a MSc in computer science from the University of Southern California. Graçaliz Pereira Dimuro graduated in Civil Engineering at UCPel, Pelotas, Brazil, in 1980. MSc and PhD in computer science at UFRGS, Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1991 and 1998, respectively. Adjunct professor of Computer Science at UCPel, Pelotas, Brazil, since 1998. Graduate students supervisor at the Graduate Programme in Informatics at UCPel since 2005. Main interests: mathematical foundations of computer science, soft computing, mathematical aspects of multiagent systems.
595
About the Contributors
Jeremy Pitt is a Reader in Intelligent Systems in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College London. His research is based on the application of logic to computing and communications, and he has worked on numerous projects concerned with natural language processing, automated reasoning, project management, telecommunications, human-computer interaction, and multi-agent systems. His current research focus is on organized adaptation in agent societies and affective computing and its impact on computer-mediated communication. Viara Popova is a research fellow at De Montfort University, UK. She received her master’s degree in computer science at Sofia University, Bulgaria. She defended her PhD at Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands in the area of knowledge discovery. She has performed research in a number of areas including modeling and analysis of organizations, machine learning and data mining, supply chain modeling and optimization, organizational performance indicators, etc. António da Rocha Costa graduated in electrical engineering at UFRGS, Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1977. MSc and PhD in computer science at UFRGS, in 1980 and 1993, respectively. Adjunct professor of Computer Science at UCPel, Pelotas, Brazil, since 1998. Graduate students supervisor at the Computer Science Graduate Programme at UFRGS since 1993. Director of the Graduate Programme in Informatics at UCPel since 2005. Main interests: foundations of artificial intelligence, theory and applications of multiagent systems, theory of interactive and developmental computation. Paul Scerri is a systems scientist at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute. He is involved in a number of research projects in multi-agent systems, including work with teams of unmanned aerial vehicles, intelligent personal assistants, human-agent collaboration and communication networks. Alexei Sharpanskykh is a postdoctoral researcher at the VU University Amsterdam. He received his master’s degree in computer science at the Zaporizhzhya National Technical University (Ukraine), and a PhD degree at the VU University Amsterdam in the area of artificial intelligence. Currently he is doing research in modeling and analysis of multi-agent organizations in the context of a number of projects in the areas of logistics, incident management and air traffic control. Jaime Simão Sichman received his PhD at INPG, France. He is associate professor at University of São Paulo, Brazil. His research interests are related to agents’ organizational models, multi-agent based simulation, and reputation and trust in MAS. He is program co-chair for AAMAS 2009. Munindar P. Singh is a full professor in the department of computer science at North Carolina State University. Munindar’s books include Multi-agent Systems (Springer-Verlag 1994), Readings in Agents (coedited with Mike Huhns; Morgan Kaufmann, 1998), Practical Handbook of Internet Computing (edited; Chapman & Hall, 2004), Service-Oriented Computing (with Mike Huhns; Wiley, 2005). Munindar was the editor-in-chief of IEEE Internet Computing from 1999 to 2002. Munindar is a founding member of the editorial boards of IEEE Internet Computing, Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems, Journal of Web Semantics, and Service-Oriented Computing and Applications. Munindar serves on the founding board of directors of IFAAMAS, the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems.
596
About the Contributors
Gita Sukthankar is an assistant professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Central Florida, and an affiliate faculty member at the UCF’s Institute for Simulation and Training. She received her PhD from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon, an MSc in robotics from Carnegie Mellon, and an BA (cum laude) in psychology from Princeton University. From 2000-2003, she worked as a researcher at Compaq Research/HP Labs (CRL) in the handheld computing group. Dr. Sukthankar’s current research is on plan/activity recognition for adversarial games and multi-agent systems. Katia Sycara is a professor in the School of Computer Science at CMU and a Sixth Century Chair in Computer Science at the University of Aberdeen, UK. She has a PhD in computer science from Georgia Institute of Technology and holds an Honorary Doctorate from the University of the Aegean. She is a fellow of IEEE, fellow of AAAI and the recipient of the ACM/SIGART Agents Research Award. She has (co)authored more than 350 papers and has given numerous talks. She is on the Scientific Advisory Board of France Telecom. She has been founding EIC of the Journal of Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems and on the board of 6 additional journals. Tiberiu Stratulat is assistant professor at University of Montpellier II, France. He received a PhD degree in computer science from the University of Caen, France, in 2002, and a software engineer degree from “Politehnica” University of Bucharest, Romania, in 1993. His research works are related to the study of the multi-agent interaction using social metaphors. He investigated the use of norms in agent-based systems and proposed appropriate formal models and architectures to support them. He recently co-authored MASQ, an integrating model that allows the extension of AGR model and MadKit framework with institutional concepts. John Tranier obtained the BSc in computer science (2001), MA in computer science (2003), and PhD in computer science (2007), all from the University of Montpellier II. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the LIAFA (Laboratoire d’Informatique Algorithmique: Fondements et Applications), Paris. John Tranier is active in the research and development of multi-agent systems. His main research interests concern the design of open multi-agent systems and the concepts of environment, organization and institution for multi-agent systems. Catherine Tessier is a researcher at ONERA, the French Aerospace Lab, in Toulouse, France. She received her PhD in 1988 and her HDR (Habilitation à Diriger les Recherches) in 1999. Her research areas include cooperating agents, authority sharing, adaptive autonomy and situation assessment and tracking, mainly in projects involving uninhabited vehicles. Nick Tinnemeier is a PhD student at the Intelligent Systems Group, Utrecht University (the Netherlands). His research focuses on the development of programming languages for the implementation of multi-agent organizations. Before coming to Utrecht he completed his MSc in computer science at the University of Twente (The Netherlands) in 2006. Paolo Torroni is an assistant professor of computer engineering at the University of Bologna’s Department of Computer Engineering (DEIS). Paolo received his PhD in computer science from the University of Bologna in 2002. Paolo’s research interests include using logic in computer science and
597
About the Contributors
AI, declarative and logic programming, hypothetical reasoning, argumentation, semantic web services and agent-based systems. Paolo is a member of the steering committees of the agent-related workshop series CLIMA, DALT and CISWN, and the secretary of the Italian Interest Group on Logic Programming (GULP). Maksim Tsvetovat is an assistant professor of Computational Social Science at George Mason University. His research is centered on building multi-agent models of social systems, including evolution of conflicts in societies, formation and dissolution of political systems, modeling terrorist organizations and civil conflicts. He has received his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University, where he concentrated on development of models of terrorist organizations. Bob van der Vecht studied artificial intelligence at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen. For his master degree (2004) he conducted research on team coordination in Robocup soccer at the SocRob group at IST in Lisbon. He is currently employed by research company TNO, and is doing a PhD at the Universiteit Utrecht. Current work focuses on the relation between autonomy and coordination in the area of multi-agent systems. Francesco Viganò is assistant researcher at the Università della Svizzera italiana. His research themes are agent communication and formal verification of artificial institutions. Michael Winikoff is an associate professor in the school of computer science and information technology at RMIT University. His research interests concern notations for specifying and constructing software. In particular, he is interested in agent oriented software engineering methodologies and is co-author of the book Developing Intelligent Agent Systems: A Practical Guide, published by Wiley and Sons in 2004. Michael Wooldridge is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Liverpool, UK. He has been active in multi-agent systems research since 1989, and has published over two hundred articles in the area. His main interests are in the use of formal methods for reasoning about autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. Wooldridge was the recipient of the ACM Autonomous Agents Research Award in 2006. He is co-editor in chief of the journal Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems, and his introductory textbook, An Introduction to Multiagent Systems was published by Wiley in 2002. Pınar Yolum is an assistant professor at Boğaziçi University, Department of Computer Engineering. Pınar received her PhD in computer science from North Carolina State University in 2003. Pınar’s research interests include multi-agent interaction protocols, ontologies, and semantic Web services. Pınar serves on the program committees of international conferences, including International Joint Conference on Autonomous and Multi-agent Systems and International Conference on Web Services.
598
