Search

The complex systems lying at the heart of ensemble engineering exhibit emergent behaviour: behaviour that is not explicitly derived from the functional description of the ensemble components at the level of abstraction at which they are provided. Emergent behaviour can be understood by expanding the description of the components to refine their functional behaviour; but that is infeasible in specifying ensembles of realistic size (although it is the main implementation method) since it amounts to consideration of an entire implementation. This position paper suggests an alternative. `Emergence΄ is clarified using levels of abstraction and a method proposed for specifying ensembles by augmenting the functional behaviour of its components with a system-wide `emergence predicate΄ accounting for emergence. Examples are given to indicate how conformance to such a specification can be established. Finally an approach is suggested to Ensemble Engineering, the relevant elaboration of Software Engineering. On the way, the example is considered of an ensemble composed of artificial agents and a case made that there emergence can helpfully be viewed as ethics in the absence of free will. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a novel algorithm of classification based on the similarities among data attributes. This method assumes data attributes of dataset as basic vectors of m dimensions, and each tuple of dataset as a sum vector of all the attribute-vectors. Based on transcendental concept similarity information among attributes, this paper suggests a novel distance algorithm to compute the similarity distance of each pairs of attribute-vectors. In the method, the computing of correlation is turned to attribute-vectors and formulas of their projections on each other, and the correlation among any two tuples of dataset can be worked out by computing these vectors and formulas. Based on the correlation computing method, this paper proposes a novel classification algorithm. Extensive experiments prove the efficiency of the algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anisotropic chemical shifts observed from solid-state NMR spectroscopy of uniformly aligned samples can be influenced by three primary factors: a change in orientation of the nuclear site, a change in dynamics, or a change in the chemical shift tensor element magnitudes or orientation to the molecular frame. These features are particularly attractive for characterizing the influence of ions in ion conducting channels. Cation binding results in far more subtle effects than had previously been imagined. Prior to the analysis of the first solid-state NMR characterizations of ion binding [1,2] the experimental data were primarily in the form of a few water-soluble protein structures in the Protein Data Bank to which monovalent ions were bound [e.g. 3,4]. Such binding sites showed optimized solvation for the ions associated with strong binding. Computational modeling efforts on ion channels, for the most part, also showed substantial structural deformation upon ion binding [5-7]. We now realize that much better models for how ions interact with channels can be realized from the characterization of substrate binding to enzymes, for which we have a great deal of information represented in every biochemistry textbook. A delicate balance of molecular interactions and thermodynamic parameters has evolved for enzymes, so that substrates are attracted to the active sites of proteins while not compromising the primary function of these proteins to conduct chemistry on the substrates and to release the products ef- ficiently. Similarly, ions must be attracted to the channel and yet the primary function of these proteins is to facilitate the transfer of ions from one side of the membrane to the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grid and agent communities both develop concepts and mechanisms for open distributed systems, albeit from different perspectives. How to apply the agent technology in Grid infrastructure to facilitate distributed system integration (virtual organization formation) becomes an interest topic in recent years. In this paper, we investigate the issue and present an agent grid intelligent platform, called AGrIP, from the implementation point of view. AGrIP is based on the FIPA-compliant multi-agent environment MAGE and has four different layers, which apply the agent interface services for interaction and communication. It can integrate legacy systems and enables interoperability between distributed heterogeneous systems (organizations), expedite dissemination and retrieval of data, automate operator tasks and support the decision-making process. Up to date, it has been applied to several practice projects as the robust infrastructure. We will expound its recent application in Agent Grid Based City Emergency Inter-Act Project as an illustration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses issues of distributing multimedia presentations in an ambient intelligent environment, exams the existing technologies and proposes IPML, a markup language that extends SMIL for distributed settings. It uses a powerful metaphor of play, with which the timing and mapping issues in distributed presentations are easily covered in a natural way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To resolve the problem of agent tending to be helpless when performing tasks in the Internet in which is full of uncertain factors, this paper proposes a hierarchy-like agent assistant service framework that provides mediate services in agent society. This assistance services system is divided into three layers: the bottom is a description layer, which describes agent services and domain ontology by self-defined Ontology Based Knowledge Representation Language (OKRL); the middle is a support layer, which provides management mechanism to organize middle agent nodes and information repository of assistant services for upper layer; the top is assistant services layer, which provides services for registration, advisement and matchmaking of agent services. The growth mechanism and joint matchmaking process of middle agents, which realizes self-organising characteristic for agent assistant system, are also discussed in this paper. Finally, this paper gives evaluation and conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is necessary to find the relationship between product information and development process for saving product development time. Design information constraint tree (DICT) is proposed to describe the constraint relationships among multi-task information. Fuzzy timed workflow net (FTWN) is introduced to analyze product development time. An algorithm is proposed to map DICT onto FTWN. Task execution time and completion possibility are analyzed. The effectiveness of the proposed method to simulate product development time is validated by an example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social navigation in a community of practice (CoP) is an approach of locating information through increased social awareness. Designing support for social navigation requires precise knowledge about the users' needs and wishes so as to meet user participatory design methodology. User requirement definition on social navigation is, however, difficult to elicit. On the one hand, without the context of the CoP, it is hard to collect the user requirements on navigation, especially when the concept of virtual community is new to the target user group. On the other hand, to set up such a virtual community, preliminary studies on social navigation is however necessary. This paper presents the experiences how we dealt with such a chicken and egg problem. Different approaches were used: performing a theoretical study, administering an online questionnaire, observing on an existing virtual society, analyzing similar systems, prototyping, and conducting an expert walk-through. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, for real-time embedded software we consider the problem of checking component-based designs for scenario-based timing specifications. By adding time intervals on the actions, we extend the interface automata for modelling real-time systems. The component-based designs are modelled by real-time interface automaton networks, which includes a set of real-time interface automata synchronized by shared actions, and the scenario-based timing specifications are specified by UML sequence diagrams with a set of boolean expressions. Based on analyzing the compatible integer state space of a real-time interface automaton network and its compatible reachability graph, we develop an algorithm to check the consistency between real-time component-based designs and the scenario-based timing specifications. Keywords: embedded software designs, real-time systems, model checking, interface automata, UML sequence diagrams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scenario-based specifications such as message sequence charts (MSCs) offer an intuitive and visual way of describing design requirements. As one powerful formalism, Petri nets can model concurrency constraints in a natural way, and are often used in modelling system specifications and designs. Since there are gaps between MSC models and Petri net models, keeping consistency between these two kinds of models is important for the success of software development. In this paper, we use Petri nets to model concurrent systems, and consider the problem of checking Petri nets for scenario-based specifications expressed by message sequence charts. We develop the algorithms to solve the following two verification problems: the existential consistency checking problem, which means that a scenario described by a given MSC must happen during a Petri net runs, or any forbidden scenario described by a given MSC never happens during a Petri net run; and the mandatory consistency checking problem, which means that if a reference scenario described by the given MSCs occurs during a Petri net run, it must adhere to a scenario described by the other given MSC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The integration of web services and intelligent agents is promising for automated service discovery, negotiation, and cooperation. But due to the dynamic and heterogeneous nature of web services and agents, it is challenging to guide the behaviors of underlying agents to meet the high-level business (changeful) requirements. Traditional Policy-driven methods (Ponder, Rei, KAoS, etc) are not adaptable to direct the discovery, negotiation and cooperation of dynamic agents who may join in or leave out of a specific community or organization (virtual organization) at run time. The purpose of this paper is to model an ontology-based, policy-driven control framework that is suitable to supervise the dynamic agents according to high-level policies. On the basis of federated multi-agents infrastructure and ontologies of policies, domain concepts, and agent federations, a model of role-based policy specification framework is presented in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Grid and agent communities both develop concepts and mechanisms for open distributed systems, albeit from different perspectives. The Grid community has focused on infrastructure, tools and application for reliable and secure resource sharing within dynamic and geographically distributed virtual organizations. In contrast, the agents community has focused on autonomous problem solvers that can flexibly in uncertain and dynamic environments. Yet as the scale and ambition of both Grid and agent deployments increase, we see that multi-agent systems require robust infrastructure and Grid systems require autonomous, flexible behaviors. So, an Agent Based Grid Infrastructure of Social Intelligence (ABGISI) is presented in this paper. With multi-agents cooperation as main line, this paper expatiates on ABGISI from three aspects: agent information representation; the support system for agent social behavior, which includes agent mediate system and agent rational negotiation mechanism, and agent federation structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional methods for authorization within Grid computing have many shortcomings. Firstly, the enrolments of users and services into the server are done manually, which is not adaptable to the dynamic environment where the service providers and service consumers join or leave dynamically. Secondly, the authorization policy language is not expressive enough to represent more complex policies, and can't resolve the problem of semantic inconsistency between different parties who treat the same policy. This paper takes advantage of characteristics of intelligent agent such as autonomy, proactivity, and sociality, to treat with the authorization issues, including automated registrations and management of agents (service providers and service consumers), autonomous authentication and authorization based on policies, etc. On the other hand, an ontology-based content-explicit policy modeling framework is presented, which resolves the semantic inconsistency problem among different parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Web user patterns can be used to create a more robust web information service in personalization. But the user interests are changeable, that is, they differ from one user to another, and they are constantly changing for a specific user. This paper presents a dynamic mining approach based on Markov model to solve this problem. Markov model is introduced to keep track of the changes of user interest according to his or her navigational behaviors. Some new concepts in the model are defined. An algorithm based on the model is then designed to learn the user's favorite navigation paths. The approach is implemented in an example website, and the experimental results proved the effective of our approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]