July 1996
|
This file is a list of items added to the UMBC agents pages this month
and is in maintained chronological order. Past months:
June 1996,
May 1996,
April 1996,
March 1996,
February 1996,
January 1996,
December 1995,
November 1995,
October 1995,
September 1995,
August 1995 and before.
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Web robots
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Robots on the
Web is a short overview of web robots. 7/31/96
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Netscape and IIOP
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Netscape Communications Corporation announced on 7/29 that it will
adopt the OMG's Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP) standard as the
basis for its distributed object model in its new Netscape ONE
open network environment. Netscape has licensed VisiBroker, a
Java-based ORB from Visigenic
Software to include in the "Galileo" release of Netscape Navigator
client software and the "Orion" release of Netscape SuiteSpot server
software. Additional details are available in a white paper
"The Netscape Intranet Vision and Product Roadmap", as well as
several
press
releases.
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Verity's topicAGENT
|
Verity has announced topicAGENT
Server Toolkit -- a collection of tools for creating applications
that automatically filter, match and disseminate relevant information
to the user. "topicAGENTS are personal agents that search, filter, or
categorize information and deliver it according to the user's
preferences. topicAGENT Server Toolkit is a development kit with which
developers and integrators can build topicAGENT solutions. Many
leading partners have developed topicAGENT solutions, including Time
Inc. New Media, IBM InfoSage, Knight-Ridder, Xilinx, Cisco Systems and
Dell Computer." 7/29/96
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Reasoning
About Knowledge, by Ronald Fagin, Joseph Y. Halpern, Yoram Moses,
and Moshe Y. Vardi, MIT Press, 1995, ISBN 0-262-06162-7, 500 pp.,
$45.00 (cloth). 7/29/96
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Agents for factory planning and scheduling
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AARIA, Autonomous Agents at
Rock Island Arsenal, is an ARPA-sponsored project designing an
autonomous agent based factory scheduler at the Rock Island
Arsenal. The project team is headed by Intelligent Automation,
Inc. (Rockville, MD) and includes the University of Cincinnati,
Industrial Technology Institute, and Flavors Technology, Inc. The
agents, programmed in objective-C and running on a network of Pentium
based computers under PDO (Portable Distributed Objects), will
actively represent each step on the ladder of manufacturing a part:
going from the customer, through the sales representative, engineers,
manufacturing processes, and finally to the raw materials. 7/29/96
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Modula3 meets Obliq
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Phantom is an interpreted language designed for
large-scale, interactive, distributed applications such as distributed
conferencing systems, multi-player games, and collaborative work
tools. Phantom combines the distributed lexical scoping semantics of
Obliq with a substantial language core. The language core is based on
a safe, extended subset of Modula-3, and supports a number of modern
programming features, including static typing with implicit
declarations, objects, lightweight threads, and higher-order functions
and lambda expressions. 7/27/96
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Societies of Computation project, Sweden
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Societies of Computation
is a research project at the University of Karlskrona/Ronneby in
Ronneby, Sweden. Its goal is to study and develop computational
frameworks for complex distributed systems, bringing together
experiences from Distributed AI, Object Oriented Programming, and
Distributed Computing. The project is collaborating with industry on
real-world problems and well-defined application domains, such as
Power Distribution Automation and Telecommunication Management.
7/27/96
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Parallel, Distributed and Multiagent Production Systems
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Parallel, Distributed and Multiagent Production Systems, Toru Ishida,
Springer-Verlag / Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 878,
(subseries: Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence), ISBN
3-540-58698-9, xvi+166 pages, softback. Abstract: This volume
describes a series of research initiatives on concurrent production
systems, which can be classified into three categories: (1)
Synchronous parallel production systems or parallel rule firing, where
rules are fired in parallel to reduce the total number of sequential
production cycles, while rule firings are globally synchronized in
each production cycle. (2) Asynchronous parallel production systems
or distributed production systems, where rules are distributed among
multiple processes, and fired in parallel without global
synchronization. Organization self-design is then introduced into the
distributed production systems to provide adaptive work allocation.
(3) Multiagent production systems, where multiple production system
programs compete or cooperate to solve a single problem or multiple
problems. A metalevel control architecture is further discussed for
multiagent production systems. 9/27/96
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Agent-Oriented Systems in Manufacturing
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European Workshop on Agent-Oriented
Systems in Manufacturing, September 26 and 27, 1996, Berlin,
Germany. Paper dealine is AUgust 1.
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IBM's RAISE-based AgentBuilder Product
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IBM's RAISE-based AgentBuilder
Product now available as Alpha version. AgentBuilder is an extensible
C++ class library for enhancing applications, especially
network-centric applications, with embedded intelligent agents.
AgentBuilder has innovative technology for agents to perform
reasoning, and for agents to be embedded closely and flexibly with a
variety of applications and software environments. 7/27/96
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Practical Application of Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Technology
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PAAM97 - The Second
International Conference and Exhibition on The Practical Application
of Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Technology. Monday 21st April -
Wednesday 23rd April 1997, London, UK. The Commercial Value of
Agents:- An Exploration Through Practical Applications. Paper
submission deadline is November 8, 1996. 7/27/96
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Extempo Systems Inc.
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Extempo Systems (Sunyvale, CA)
designs and builds synthetic actors for incorporation into interactive
products for entertainment, education, and business. Extempo was
founded by Dr. Barbara Hayes-Roth in 1995 and has funding from the
NIST ATP program and from DARPA. Extempo's software provides the
"brains" for characters that can be integrated with a variety of
graphics and animation systems to create life-like, intelligent, and
surprising improvisational behavior. 7/24/96 |
UCLA short course on intelligent software agents
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UCLA short course on Intelligent
Software Agents, October 23-25, 1996, $1395. The instructors are
Cindy Mason, PhD, UC Berkeley Institute for Soft Computing; Jeffrey
M. Bradshaw, PhD, Boeing Computer Services; Henry Lieberman, PhD, MIT
Media Laboratory; and Ted Selker, PhD, IBM Almaden Research Center.
7/24/96 |
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Dartmouth
Workshop on Transportable Agents, September 27-28, 1996. Dartmouth
College, Hanover NH. PArticipation will be limited and people wishing
to attend should submit abstract and bios by August 15, 1996.
7/23/96
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ICMAS'96
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The Second International
Conference on Multiagent Systems (ICMAS '96) will be held December
10 (Tue) - 13 (Fri), 1996 at the Keihanna Plaza, Kyoto, Japan. The
technical program as well as abstracts of the accepted papers and
posters are available from the ICMAS'96 web page. 7/23/96
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ACACIA
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ACACIA:
An Agency Based Collaboration Framework for Heterogenous Multiagent
Systems, Wilfred C. Jamison, Syracuse University. Abstract: We
introduce our framework called ACACIA for distributed problem solving
by multiple agents. While most efforts in multi-agent systems (MAS)
focus on homogenous agents, we acknowledge the need for a higher level
framework. The issue on interoperability among various frameworks is
addressed. We design a system whereby a group of heterogenous agents
can collaborate in solving a problem without having to re-engineer the
individual agents. This paper gives a macro-level description of our
framework which is based mainly on the notion of agencies. We also
apply a case-based coordination scheme in which a database of
collaboration protocols is consulted for the given problem
situation. First, we give our own view of agent and then present
agency as our metaphor for agent organization. The rest of the paper
will discuss ACACIA's problem solving paradigm and runtime
system.7/22/96
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Information Filtering
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Doug Oard's Information
Filtering Resources page is a resource for people conducting
research in information filtering. It is maintained as part of the
Information Filtering Project at the University of Maryland. It
contains links to working systems for a variety of operating systems
which are freely available on the net, links to papers and project
descriptions and links to commercial systems. 7/22/96
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| Smart Bookmarks is
a windows program by First Floor
Software Inc. that helps users organize Web bookmarks and monitor
sites for new information. Content providers can include a special
"Monitor Me button" which when clicked will cause the page to be
monitored for changes. Users can assign unique monitoring properties
to groups of bookmarks or URLs including polling schedules. "Visual
Bulletins" allow content providers to automatically deliver visual
content directly to a user's browser along with a notification of the
information and why it's important.7/22/96
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AgentNews
Webletter 1.10 was released. 7/22/96
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Massively parallel microworlds
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Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams, Explorations in Massively
Parallel Microworlds, Mitchel Resnick, 1994, Complex Adaptive
Systems series. MIT Press, A Bradford Book, ISBN 0-262-18162-2, 192
pp., $24.95 (cloth). Resnick discusses decentralized systems,
self-organizing phenomena and their simulation using the massively
parallel programming language StarLogo. 7/22/96
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Java classes for intelligent agents 
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Bits & Pixels's Java Intelligent Agent Library ($179)
provides components for building intelligent agents, implemented
entirely in Java. The library is a collection of over 150 java classes
covering various aspects of building intelligent agents. In addition
to agent communication and data handling facilities, the library
contains rule-based and neural net-based processing modules. There is
also an extensive modeling facility for prototyping agent interactions
and graphical classes for creating static and animated interactive
displays. 7/21/96
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Computists International
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Computists International is an
AI-research-oriented mutual-aid association which publishes highly
condensed email newsletters: the twice-weekly Computists' Communique
(TCC) and the weekly Computists' Career Jobs (CCJ), Computists'
Applied Jobs (CAJ), and Computists' Research Software (CRS). TCC has
been published by Dr. Kenneth I. Laws (laws@computists.com) since 1991
and includes information on grant and funding opportunities; industry
news; Internet and Web news; online resources; research discussion
lists; news and software offers in AI, neural networks, genetic
algorithms, machine learning, pattern recognition, text understanding,
NLP, etc.; software development resources; and career or
entrepreneurial tips. 7/21/96 |
Network-aware mobile programs
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M. Ranganathan, Anurag Acharya, Shamik Sharma, Joel Saltz,
Network-aware Mobile Programs, Submitted for USENIX'97. Abstract:
In this paper, we investigate network-aware mobile
programs, programs that can use mobility as a tool to adapt to
variations in network characteristics. We present infrastructural
support for mobility and network monitoring and show how {\tt
adaptalk}, a Java-based mobile Internet chat application can take
advantage of this support to dynamically place the chat server so as
to minimize response time. Our conclusion was that on-line network
monitoring and adaptive placement of shared data-structures can
significantly improve performance of distributed applications on the
Internet.7/21/96
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Resource monitoring for mobile objects
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M. Ranganathan, Anurag Acharya, Joel Saltz, Distributed
Resource Monitors for Mobile Objects, Position paper submitted to
IWOOOS'96. Abstract: We present our position on resource monitoring
as three working hypotheses. First, a resource-aware placement of
components of a distributed application can provide significant
performance gains over a resource-oblivious placement. Second,
effective mobility decisions can be based on coarse-grained
monitoring. Finally, a simple and cheap distributed resource
monitoring scheme can provide sufficient information for effective
mobility decisions. We present a design for distributed resource
monitors which we believe can provide effective resource information
at an acceptable cost. 7/21/96
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Autonomous characters
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Characters,
improvisation, and ... is Craig Reynolds's
collection of references to autonomous characters that can improvise
and react to their environment. 7/21/96
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Swarm is a
software package for multi-agent simulation of complex systems being
developed at The Santa Fe Institute. Swarm is intended to be a useful
tool for researchers in a variety of disciplines, especially
artificial life. The basic architecture of Swarm is the simulation of
collections of concurrently interacting agents: with this
architecture, we can implement a large variety of agent based models.
Swarm runs on Unix machines running GNU Objective C and X windows.
The beta release is available for download to the general public and
source code is freely available under GNU Licensing
terms. 7/21/96
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Agentsheets
is an authoring environment developed by Alex Repenning at the
University of Colorado at Boulder . It features a versatile
construction paradigm to build dynamic, visual environments for a wide
range of problem domains such as art, artificial life, distributed
artificial intelligence, education, environmental design,
object-oriented programming, simulation and visual programming. The
construction paradigm consists of a large number of autonomous,
communicating agents organized in a grid, called the
agentsheet. Agents can use different communication modalities such as
animation, sound and speech. Agentsheets is written in Macintosh
Common LISP (MCL 2.0) and is available from the author.
7/21/96
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SUMPY maintains a Unix file system
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Hongjun Song, Stan Franklin, and Aregahegn Negatu, SUMPY:
A Fuzzy Software Agent, Proceedings of the international
conference on intelligent systems, Reno, Nevada, June 19-21, 1996.
Abstract: SUMPY is a software agent "living" in and helping to
maintain a UNIX file system for better disk space utilization by
compressing and backing up files. Built using subsumption
architecture, SUMPY displays a "plug and play" property. A new UNIX
maintenance task can be added to SUMPY's repertoire without
modification of existing layers. One of SUMPY's layers sports a fuzzy
control mechanism enabling it to achieve its goals in a real-world
manner. Another restricts SUMPY's activity to times of slow CPU
use. An experiment in agent architecture and in the use of agents for
such maintenance tasks, SUMPY promises to prove useful, and has added
no significant problems to the test systems. 7/21/96
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Will this agent help you "get a life"?
|
Bruce Krulwich of Andersen Consulting will be testing an intelligent
agent named LifestyleFinder
on Friday, July 19th, between 10am and 12 noon Central (Chicago) time.
They expect to launch LifestyleFinder for real on July 29th, and are
testing it now for accuracy and for system load. No word on what it
will do, but check out "http://bf.cstar.ac.com/bf/lifestylefinder" to
find out. 9/17/96
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Java Agent Template 0.3 released
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The Java(tm)
Agent Template, Version 0.3, is now available. The JAT provides a
fully functional template, written entirely in the Java language, for
constructing KQML-speaking software agents which communicate
peer-to-peer with a community of other agents distributed over the
Internet. The JAT includes functionality for dynamically exchanging
"Resources", which can include Java classes (e.g. new languages and
interpreters, remote services, etc.), data files and information
inlined into the KQML messages. JAT agents can be executed as either
stand alone applications or as applets via the appletviewer.
7/16/96
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Personal agents: A walk on the client side
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Kearney, P J (1996). Personal agents: A
walk on the client side Real-World Applications of Intelligent
Agent Technology seminar London, June 1996, Unicom. This paper will
also be presented at the IBC Seminar on Intelligent Agents, London
June 1996. An earlier version was presented at the IEE Professional
Group C3 Colloquium on Intelligent Agents and their applications,
April 1996. Digest No: 1996/101, Distributed Intelligent Systems,
Sharp Laboratories of Europe Ltd. Oxford, UK. Abstract: The world is
fast becoming a giant heterogeneous information system in which
personal electronics products (including PDAs, PCs, set-top-boxes,
etc.) play a key role. The vast number and diversity of the components
and uses of the system necessitates a decentralised, emergent
organisation. The agent metaphor offers an attractive route to
achieving such an organisation. In this paper, I outline the role of
agent software in personal electronics in mediating between the
individual user and the available services and project a likely
sequence in which personal agent-based products will be successful. I
also discuss various standardisation and interoperability issues
affecting the practicality of agents in this role.7/16/96
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Robots beware -- xxx.lanl.gov attacks back
|
Administrators of the XXX.LANL.GOV web server
complain of
``"intelligent agents" (a.k.a. "robots") that mindlessly
download every link encountered, ultimately trying to access the
entire database through the listings links. ... Very few of these
same robotrunners would ever dream of downloading entire databases via
anonymous ftp, but for some reason conceptualize www sites as somehow
associated only to small and limited databases. This mentality must
change --- large databases such as this one [which has millions of
distinct URL's that lead to gigabytes of data] are likely to grow ever
more commonly exported via www.''
They have followed the proposed standard for robot exclusion by
maintaining a file /robots.txt specifing the URL's that are
off-limits to robots, but this has not been effective. So, to protect
themselves, they have set a robot trap (at
http://xxx.lanl.gov/seek-and-destroy -- caution: do not visit
this page). They say ``We are not willing to play sitting duck to
nonsensical methods of "indexing" information. This server is
configured to monitor activity and deny access to sites that violate
the above guidelines. Continued rapid-fire requests from any site
after access has been denied (i.e. with 403 Access denied HTTP
response) will be interpreted as a network attack; and we will respond
accordingly --- without hesitation, and without further warning.''
7/16/96
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Intelligent Agents = Stupid Humans?
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Wired magazine is sponsoring a web-based debate between Pattie Maes
and Jaron Lanier on Intelligent
Agents = Stupid Humans? which deals with the feasibility and
desirability of intelligent agents. The debate consists of daily
comments and responses from the participant between June 15 and June
24 and also includes a forum for ongoing comments from observers.
This is the latest debate in Wired's "Brain Tennis" series which
previously has featured "the Web as a perpetually unprofitable
publishing medium", "the end of science", and "journalistic
objectivity".
The two are starting from somewhat different perspectives:
- Pattie Maes: "Agents will bring about a social revolution: almost
anyone will have access to the kind of support staff that today is the
mark of a few privileged people. As a result, they will be able to
digest large amounts of information and engage in several different
activities at once."
- Jaron Lanier: "The idea of 'intelligent agents' is both wrong and
evil. I also believe that this is an issue of real consequence to the
near-term future of culture and society. As the infobahn rears its
gargantuan head, the agent question looms as a deciding factor in
whether this new beast will be much better than TV, or much worse."
7/16/96
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|
Agent Knowledgebase Associates is a
Virginia Beach based company specializing in "Knowledge Management,
Information Agents and WWW Advertising". 7/13/96
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ICMAS'96 Workshop -- Animal societies as a DAI metaphor
9/12/96
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Animal
societies as an alternative metaphor basis for Distributed Artificial
Intelligence , an ICMAS'96 Workshop, December 10th, 1996 (Keihanna
Plaza, Kyoto, Japan). Scope: When designing computational
organizations, DAI research generally gives more attention to
sociological metaphors than to biological ones. However, it is worth
noting that most of the issues being addressed in DAI (e.g.,
cooperation, coordination, organization, social interaction) have a
significant intersection with the goals and interests of a variety of
research communities (ethology, primatology, behavioral ecology, or
artificial life) that study the social mechanisms that occur in
non-human societies - i.e. animal societies.
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Tcl Plug-ins for Netscape Navigator
released by Sun
|
Sun has released Tcl Plug-ins
for Netscape Navigator, making it possible to create Web pages that
include Tcl/Tk scripts. This provides an interesting alternative to
the use of Java applets for Web-based agent programs. Ray Johnson
says "Tcl/Tk complements the capabilities of Java. While Java is a
system programming language that meets the needs of sophisticated
programmers with features such as objects, threads, and rich class
libraries, Tcl/Tk is a scripting language that is ideal for smaller
applications, such as simple user interfaces, macros, and system
integration." Sun's current version of the Tcl plug-in runs only with
Netscape Navigator under Solaris, Macintosh, and Windows with support
for other browsers and operating systems planned. 9/11/96
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Intelligent Software Agents on
the Internet
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Thesis: Bjorn Hermans, "Intelligent Software Agents on
the Internet: an inventory of currently offered functionality in
the information society & a prediction of (near-)future developments"
is now available on the World Wide Web.", Tilburg University, Tilburg,
The Netherlands. Abstract: Software agents are a rapidly developing
area of research. However, to many it is unclear what agents are and
what they can (and maybe cannot) do. In the first part, this thesis
will provide an overview of these, and many other agent-related
theoretical and practical aspects. Besides that, a model is presented
which will enhance and extend agents' abilities, but will also improve
the way the Internet can be used to obtain or offer information and
services on it. The second part is all about trends and
developments. On the basis of past and present developments of the
most important, relevant and involved parties and factors, future
trends and developments are extrapolated and predicted. 9/9/96
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AgentWeb Salon opens
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The AgentWeb salon
is a Java-based on-line chat room for people and agents interested in
real-time interactions. It is implemented with the alpha version of
JavaTalk!, an
interactive web (java) based chat. 7/9/96
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IBM releases Aglets library
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Technology: IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory is making available
an early release of their Aglets Library for programming mobile agents
in Java(tm). The package is based on JDK 1.0.2 and Object
Serialization in the RMI package from JavaSoft. The first beta release
includes Java packages, documentation, and a demo applications.
7/9/96
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ICMAS'96 Workshop:
Learning, Interaction and Organizations in Multiagent Environments
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Workshop:
Learning, Interaction and Organizations in Multiagent
Environments, ICMAS'96 Workshop, December 10th, 1996. Extended
abstracts due August 25.
This workshop FOCUSES on the relationships between learning,
interaction and organizations in multiagent environments. The need
for studying these relationships is twofold. On the one hand, the
efficiency and the success of a multiagent system largely depends on
how efficient and successful the individual agents interact. On the
other hand, even in simplified application domains it is almost
impossible to correctly specify appropriate interactions between the
individual agents a priori, and it is therefore desirable that the
agents themselves are capable of learning to interact appropriately.
The workshop is INTENDED to cover the whole range of open questions
and problems concerning these relationships in all types of multiagent
systems (e.g., robots interacting with dynamic environments, multiple
robot systems, systems composed of interacting software agents, hybrid
systems composed of both interacting humans and machines). A major
GOAL of the workshop is to get a better understanding of how learning
can improve the interactivity between agents embedded in multiagent
environments.
7/8/96
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Architectures for human-like agents
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Paper: What
sort of architecture is required for a human-like agent?, Aaron
Sloman, The University of Birmingham. Invited talk at Cognitive
Modeling Workshop, AAAI96, Portland Oregon, Aug 1996. Abstract: This
paper is about how to give human-like powers to complete agents. For
this the most important design choice concerns the overall
architecture. Questions regarding detailed mechanisms, forms of
representations, inference capabilities, knowledge etc. are best
addressed in the context of a global architecture in which different
design decisions need to be linked. Such a design would assemble
various kinds of functionality into a complete coherent working
system, in which there are many concurrent, partly independent, partly
mutually supportive, partly potentially incompatible processes,
addressing a multitude of issues on different time scales, including
asynchronous, concurrent, motive generators. Designing human like
agents is part of the more general problem of understanding design
space, niche space and their interrelations, for, in the abstract,
there is no one optimal design, as biological diversity on earth
shows. 7/7/96
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AgentNews 1.9
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AgentNews
v1n9 released. 7/6/96
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Yahoo! and Agents Inc. to team
|
Yahoo! and Agents Inc. announced a strategic partnership to
collaborate to produce a firefly-like service for Web sites. "The
degree of information overload on the Web today has no historical
precedent," said Nick Grouf, CEO of Agents Inc. "The combination of
firefly and Yahoo! will offer Web surfers today and in the future a
unique navigational tool to harness the full potential of the Web."
( More
info). 6/5/96
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Intelligence in Services and Networks
|
Conference: IS&N'97
, Fourth International Conference on Intelligence in Services and
Networks "Technology for Cooperative Competition". Como, Italy May
27-29, 1997. Extended abstracts due 31 Oct. 1996. More
information. 7/4/96
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Intelligent Integration of Information
|
Papers: Kluwer is making the double issue on `Intelligent
Integration of Information' of the Journal on Intelligent Information
Systems (Vol.6, ns. 2-3) available in bookform. See -- Wiederhold, Gio
(editor): Intelligent Integration of Information (summary);
Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston MA, July 1996. (Foreword);
(Glossary);
7/3/96
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IBM's Webbie
|
Agent: IBM has released an alpha version (OS/2 and Win95) of
the WBI (for
"Web Browser Intelligence" aka "Webby") agent which acts as a WWW
proxy between your browser and the rest of the Web. WBI can remember
wherever you've been on the web, what you found there, and can help
you recall any word on any page that you've visited. It can alert you,
before you go to a page, whether the site is not available or the
access time will be slow and helps you navigate more productively
through the web by learning your preferences and patterns for
searching for information. WBI can also alert you if a page you have
an interest in has had a content change. 7/2/96
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IBM's AgentBuilder
|
Technology: IBM has released an alpha version of AgentBuilder, a
developer's toolkit for building agent-based systems. The OS/2
version is curretnly available for download over
Internet. AgentBuilder is based in great part on the research version
of the RAISE (Reusable Agent Intelligence Software Environment) class
library developed at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center by Benjamin
Grosof, David W. Levine, Hoi Y. Chan, and others. 7/2/96
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Partially Controlled Multi-Agent Systems
|
Paper: Brafman, R.I. and Tennenholtz, M. (1996), "On Partially
Controlled Multi-Agent Systems", JAIR, Volume 4, pages 477-507.
Available as
brafman96a.ps (356K) or
brafman96a.ps.Z (146K). Abstract: Motivated by the control
theoretic distinction between controllable and uncontrollable events,
we distinguish between two types of agents within a multi-agent
system: controllable agents, which are directly controlled by the
system's designer, and uncontrollable agents, which are not under the
designer's direct control. We refer to such systems as partially
controlled multi-agent systems, and we investigate how one might
influence the behavior of the uncontrolled agents through appropriate
design of the controlled agents. In particular, we wish to understand
which problems are naturally described in these terms, what methods
can be applied to influence the uncontrollable agents, the
effectiveness of such methods, and whether similar methods work across
different domains. Using a game-theoretic framework, this paper
studies the design of partially controlled multi-agent systems in two
contexts: in one context, the uncontrollable agents are expected
utility maximizers, while in the other they are reinforcement
learners. We suggest different techniques for controlling agents'
behavior in each domain, assess their success, and examine their
relationship. 7/1/96
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