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A review of popular technology adoption models identified several factors that are likely to influence Voice Activated Personal Assistant (VAPA) use in public spaces. To inform design decisions of how to make the private use of the VAPA in public spaces more acceptable from the users’ point of view, an online survey was conducted to investigate the likelihood of usage of the smartphone VAPA such as Apple’s Siri (compared to the usage of smartphone keyboard) as a function of location (private vs. public) and type of information (private vs. nonprivate). Responses from participants showed that users were more cautious of transmitting private than nonprivate information. This effect of type of information was amplified in the social context of public locations and when using conspicuous methods of information input such as the VAPA. Participants also preferred using the VAPA in private locations and showed no preference of location for keyboard entries. Correlations between likelihood of usage of VAPA and the social acceptability ratings were positive and predicted similar patterns of smartphone usage. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Security in host-based computing continues to be an area of regular research. Problems in host-based security exist in three principal areas: application protection, host environment protection, and data protection. These three areas echo the security issues for mobile agents: protecting agents from hostile hosts, protecting hosts from agents, and protecting data in transit as identified in Vuong and Peng (2001). Mobile agents are specialized applications which travel between hosts. Mobility is achieved by passing data and execution parameters from one host to another. A parallel can be drawn between mobile agents and host-based applications considering both perform host-based computations. In this paper we regard the security challenges for mobile agents equivalent to those of applications installed on a host. Furthermore, we also consider a circular threat that exists between applications and the host environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responsive environments are physical surroundings whose components change their behavior to accommodate the presence of people as well as other components. We describe a means to manage responsive environments whereby each component is dynamically assigned a software agent. Software agents are autonomous and reactive/proactive programs that communicate via message-passing. Arbitrary functionalities can be encoded in such agents, reflecting the capabilities of the components they represent, as well as extending them. Ours is a flexible and scalable approach allowing the gradual population of environments with physical devices and their agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mobility of agents is a distinct characteristic of mobile agent systems. Meanwhile, it has introduced new security issues. In this paper, we analyze the impact of an agent's path history (PH), as a resulting attribution of its mobility, on the access control decisions against it. The path could be an authorization basis. At the same time, the validity of the statically defined trust relationship with mobile agents is to be re-evaluated respecting where they have been, in which case the path information serves as a debasement of agents' trust degree and, therefore, weakens their privileges. To build a path-history-based access control model for the mobile agent application environment, path pattern and host patch are proposed here as conceptional components to declare the dynamic trust relationship with the migrating agents in a flexible and fine-grained manner. An integration of these two components with the well-known RBAC model is presented formally as a phRBAC model. Several application scenarios of phRBAC show its ability to enforce the special security policy in mobile agent environment. Some issues in implementing such a model are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In open societies of agents, where agents are autonomous and heterogeneous, it is not realistic to assume that agents will always act so as to comply with interaction protocols. Thus, the need arises for a formalism to specify constraints on agent interaction, and for a tool able to observe and check for agent compliance with interaction protocols. In this paper we present a JAVA-PROLOG software component built on logic programming technology, which can be used to verify compliance of agent interaction to protocols, and that has been integrated with the PROSOCS platform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

PROSOCS agents are software agents that are built according to the KGP model of agency. KGP is used as a model for the mind of the agent, so that the agent can act autonomously using a collection of logic theories, providing the mind's reasoning functionalities. The behavior of the agent is controlled by a cycle theory that specifies the agent's preferred patterns of operation. The implementation of the mind's generic functionality in PROSOCS is worked out in such a way so it can be instantiated by the platform for different agents across applications. In this context, the development of a concrete example illustrates how an agent developer might program the generic functionality of the mind for a simple application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper introduces some issues and related solutions adopted in order to realize the MMASS platform. This is a framework to specify and execute simulation applications based on the multi-layered multi-agent situated system model (MMASS). MMASS is a model for multi-agent systems (MAS) situated in an environment whose structure is explicitly defined. The behavior and interaction models of MMASS agents are strongly related to the spatial structure of their environment. The MMASS model is the result of a long-term research that has its roots and motivations on application domains and problems that require spatial features to be considered. Our experiences with these problems have concerned the design of domain models and their implementations, according to the MAS approach for simulation purposes. This activity has revealed that currently available tools do not support the management of spatial features of agent environment and interaction mechanisms defined by the MMASS model and thus they are not suitable for our purposes. The paper focuses on the MMASS platform that aims to support the specification and development of applications (mainly, simulations) based on MMASS. Design issues and related solutions that have been adopted in order to manage those aspects that characterize the MMASS model will be shown. After a description of the conceptual model that underlies the MMASS platform and its general architecture, we will overview how the platform supports the specification of agent structured environment, behavior and interaction, and how it supports the execution of agent actions and interactions. Then we will describe issues and adopted solutions (both algorithmic and implementative ones) to manage at-a-distance interaction among MMASS agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enabling and managing coordination activities between autonomous, possibly mobile, computing entities in dynamic computing scenarios challenges traditional approaches to distributed application development and software engineering. This paper specifically focuses on the problem of motion coordination, and proposes field-based coordination as a general framework to model and engineer such coordinated behaviors. The key idea in field-based coordination is to have agents' movements driven by computational force fields, generated by the agents themselves and/or by some infrastructure, and propagated across the environment. This paper shows that field-based approaches enable the definition of adaptive and effective motion coordination schemes, which can be modeled and tested by making use of a dynamical systems formalism, and which can be easily implemented either above existing middleware infrastructures or by making use of novel middleware specifically conceived for field-based coordination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The evolution of powerful portable networked devices allows nomadic users seamless access to business and leisure information any time and any where. This drives service infrastructures to similarly evolve to meet new service management challenges in order to adapt information delivery to a richer spatial, temporal, and user context whilst balancing the concerns of the different stakeholders. This paper presents the use of a multi-agent system service infrastructure and associated privacy model to maintain the balance between the service provider's need to maximize its knowledge of the user context against the need for the user's privacy to be protected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present the Gaia2JADE process concerning how one can implement a multi-agent system with the JADE framework using the Gaia methodology for analysis and design purposes. This process is particularly dedicated to the conversion of Gaia models to JADE code. It is described using the Software Process Engineering Metamodel (SPEM) and extends the one proposed by FIPA for describing the Gaia modeling process. Thus, it proposes to potential MAS developers a process that covers the full software development lifecycle. This work is based on the experience we have acquired by applying this process for implementing a real-word multi-agent system conceived for providing e-services to mobile users. With this paper, we share this experience with future multi-agent systems (MAS) developers, who would like to follow this process, taking into account several technical issues that emerged during the implementation phase, helping them to easily model and implement their systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-agent systems are well suited for building large software systems. A great deal of these complex systems includes process flows that are concerned with time or are even time-critical. The activities of these process flows are often executed in distributed autonomous subsystems that have to be synchronized with respect to the superordinated task execution. To be able to build such systems and test their behavior adequately, it is often advantageous and sometimes necessary to simulate them in the run-up to their practical use. Testing and simulation of process flows within multi-agent systems requires synchronization of the participating agents with respect to the global simulation time. In this paper, a design proposal and a service implementation for time management is presented, which takes care of the special requirements imposed by multi-agent settings. This so-called time service is implemented as an FIPA-compliant agent, and can be used to couple heterogeneous subsystems implemented on different agent platforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present the agent architecture development environment (ADE), intended for the design, implementation, and testing of distributed robotic agent architectures. ADE is unique among robotic architecture development environments in that it is based on a universal agent architecture framework called APOC, which allows it to implement architectures in any design methodology, and in that it uses an underlying multi-agent system to allow for the the distribution of architectural components over multiple host computers. After a short exposition of the theory behind ADE, we present the multi-agent system setup and give an example of using ADE in a multi-robot setting. A general discussion then highlights some of the novel features of ADE and illustrates how ADE can be used for designing, implementing, testing, and running agent architectures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to harness complexity in multi-agent systems (MAS), first-class entities that mediate interaction between agents and environment are required, which can encapsulate control over MAS behavior and evolution. To this end, MAS infrastructures should provide mediating artifacts , both enabling and constraining agent interactions, and possibly representing admissible agent perceptions and actions over the environment. Along this line, in this paper, we take the notion of agent coordination context (ACC) as a means to model agent-environment interactions, and show how it can be embedded within a MAS infrastructure in terms of model and runtime structures. Then, we take the TuCSoN coordination infrastructure as a reference, and extend it with the ACC abstraction to integrate the support for coordination with organization and security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]