Narrow Results

Agents for online trading purpose can be seen as a tool that helps computer users to purchase products from distributed resources based on their interests and preferences. One of the major features that determine the success of trading agent is the ability to negotiate with other agents, because most trading tasks involve interaction among agents. This paper presents a peer-to-peer multi-agent system architecture for online trading. The main objective of this system is to address some of the shortcomings that are present in contemporary online trading systems that focused on providing solutions for specific trading issues, such as single attribute-based negotiation, the requirement of an electronic marketplace and variations and status changes within the network. The proposed system architecture is a multi-tier, multi-agent architecture. The system architecture consists of three types of agents that are classified based on their functionality: interface, resource and retrieval agents. The interface agents are the front-end of the system and able to interact with different users to fulfill their needs. At the middle-tier, the resource agents access and capture the contents and the changes of the local information database. The retrieval agents are the back-end of the system and able to travel and interact with other agents at remote host machines. A prototype of this system is implemented using the IBM Aglet SDK.

A hand-designed internal representation of the world cannot deal with unknown or uncontrolled environments. Motivated by human cognitive and behavioral development, this paper presents a theory, an architecture, and some experimental results for developmental robotics. By a developmental robot, we mean that the robot generates its "brain" (or "central nervous system," including the information processor and controller) through online, real-time interactions with its environment (including humans). A new Self-Aware Self-Effecting (SASE) agent concept is proposed, based on our SAIL and Dav developmental robots. The manual and autonomous development paradigms are formulated along with a theory of representation suited for autonomous development. Unlike traditional robot learning, the tasks that a developmental robot ends up learning are unknown during the programming time so that the task-specific representation must be generated and updated through real-time "living" experiences. Experimental results with SAIL and Dav developmental robots are presented, including visual attention selection, autonomous navigation, developmental speech learning, range-based obstacle avoidance, and scaffolding through transfer and chaining.