DM: "Intelligent Software Agents" UCLA short course

[Jeffrey M. Bradshaw]

Intelligent Software Agents

November 11-13, 1999

Agents are at the center of software design for the 21st century, 
providing
both the technology and the perspective for constructing and 
maintaining
complex information systems. This course explores basic software
constructs, designs, and tools for engineering and organizing software
agent processes. Basic concepts include the relation between objects 
and
agents, agent communication and coordination, agent architectures, 
agent
intelligence, agent programming languages and learning. These are 
examined
in terms of industrial applications and prototypes in which they have 
been
applied and developed. The course material is divided into two main
sections: technologies for agent-agent software processes (agents 
organized
as teams, networks and technologies for agent-human software 
processes);
and agents that facilitate human-machine interaction. The course also 
looks
at a variety of advanced concepts in software agents such as lifelike
characters, multi-modal interfaces, and global business enterprises. 
No
programming is involved in the course, although programming examples 
and
languages are presented.

UCLA Extension has presented this highly successful short course 
since 1996.

Course Materials

The text, Software Agents, J.M. Bradshaw (AAAI/MIT Press, 1997) and 
lecture
notes are distributed on the first day of the course. These notes are 
for
participants only and are not for sale. Optionally, participants are
encouraged to bring their own laptop computers to class for use in the
interactive exercises.

Coordinator and Lecturer

Cindy Mason, PhD, Research Scientist, University of California, 
Berkeley;
founder and CEO, Agents Research and Technologies. Dr. Mason's 
consulting
firm specializes in collaborative agent technologies, and her 
interests
include coordination science, local and wide area network 
applications, and
speech recognition. Her network applications experience includes 
global
networks of seismic monitoring stations, robotic teams for planetary
exploration, global and regional networks of automatic telescopes, and
constellations of small spacecraft. Her current projects include agent
architectures and programming languages for coordinated multi-agent
behavior and speech interface agents. She also works with the Stanford
University Digital Libraries Committee. Previously, Dr. Mason held the
position of research fellow at the Stanford University School of 
Medicine,
and was a National Research Council Scholar at the NASA Ames Research
Center from 1992 to 1995. She received an award for outstanding 
research in
the field of distributed artificial intelligence, and has more than a
decade of experience working on multi-agent Internet applications.

Lecturers

Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, PhD, is an Associate Technical Fellow at The 
Boeing
Company, where he leads the Intelligent Agent Technology program, 
known for
its development of the KaoS Java agent framework. He is also 
technical lead
for a research group at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. In
1993-1994, he was a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar at EURISCO, and 
in
1997-1998 was a visiting professor at the Institute for Human and 
Machine
Cognition. His work on agent conversation and security policy design 
tools
is currently funded by a grant from the DARPA control of agent-based
systems (coABS) program. He is also funded by NASA to extend KAoS 
agent and
middleware technology as part of an industry collaboration to build a
secure extranet to enable advanced forms of data sharing and 
system-wide
simulation and monitoring within the global aviation community. Jeff 
is
actively involved in the agent research community, and is general 
chair of
the Autonomous Agents 99 conference. Among other publications, he has
edited the books Knowledge Acquisition as a Modeling Activity (with 
Ken
Ford, John Wiley, 1993), Software Agents (AAAI Press/The MIT Press, 
1997),
and the forthcoming Handbook of Software Agents.

Henry Lieberman has been a Research Scientist at the MIT Media 
Laboratory
since 1987. His interests are in the intersection of artificial
intelligence and the human interface. He is a member of the Software 
Agents
group, which is concerned with making intelligent software that 
assists
users in interactive interfaces.  His current projects involve 
intelligent
agents for the Web that learn by "watching what you do". He has also 
built
an interactive graphic editor that learns from examples, and from
annotation on images and video. From 1987-94 he worked on intelligent 
tools
for visual design, information visualization and software 
visualization.