Practical User-Centered Multi-Agent Systems
Abstract: Multi-agent systems (MAS) have now existed for more than 20 years. In the first 10 years, the community was asked to build usable MAS. In the following 10 years, it was asked to build useful MAS. It is now time to build MAS that are regularly used. This mainly concerns in specifying the purpose of the domain and the purpose of the end-user. In this lecture, we first discuss the VOWELS paradigm (Agent, Environment, Interaction, Organisation) as was introduced for design purposes in the 90’s. We show how it has evolved from design to programming to contribute to the trend of multi-agent oriented programming. Such a traditional way of design and programming multi-agent systems has been highly successful and we illustrate this with several examples. We will then focus on the purpose of the domain and show how the design of MAS can be so different for different domains. We then turn the focus of VOWELS on the purpose of the end-user, who has been quite neglected in MAS during the last 20 years. We will discuss the role of the end-user within the VOWELS paradigm and we will exemplify it in interactive games. Again, we illustrate it through several examples. Playing with the VOWELS and including the end-user is not only an intellectual exercise; it contributes to the evolution of computing towards creativity and ethics concerns, and more generally towards the service to the user. This line of thought is driving our agenda of work for the next years towards an enriched VOWELS and always more used method.
Biography of speaker: Yves Demazeau received his PhD in Computer Science at Grenoble National Polytechnic Institute in 1986 and his HDR at the same university in 2001. He is currently Director of Research at CNRS and External Professor at the Faculty of Science and Engineering of the University of Southern Denmark since 2002. He has been Visiting Professor at VUB Brussels in 1989, Southern Denmark University in 1994, and University of Technology, Sydney in 2014. Yves Demazeau has been active in the research and development of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) for 27 years. He has edited 27 books or proceedings, has authored or co-authored 151 papers and has given more than 46 invited lectures, 141 seminars, and 22 tutorials in this research area. With a close connection to his research interests, Yves Demazeau has advised 51 MSc and 28 PhD theses. He has also participated to 78 PhD examination boards and 13 HDR examination boards. From design to development, his main research contributions in the MAS have been the introduction of interaction protocols for Agent Communication Languages as adopted by the FIPA, the introduction of the concept of organisations as a ground component of MAS, and the overall VOWELS multi-agent oriented framework. He is also well known for the large-scale and original applications he has developed together with his research team in various domains: autonomous robotics, computer vision, language processing, geographical information systems, telecommunications, interactive games, artistic creation and web intelligence. Since 2004, Yves Demazeau has expanded his research to more general Artificial Intelligence issues. His current basic research activities in Artificial Intelligence address four themes: user modelling, privacy and trust, MAS dynamics, and MAS evaluation. Applications are also at number of four: smart networks, service to the person, production management, and bio-robotics. Yves Demazeau has been teaching MAS in Western Europe (AGH Krakow, UJF Grenoble, UL Luxembourg, UPD Paris, UPM Madrid, USD Odense), and in Southern America (UFC at Fortaleza, UFRGS Porto Alegre, UNICEN Tandil) for more than 25 years. He has served or is serving on the program committees of 240 conferences and workshops. He was the co-originator in 1989 of the MAAMAW workshop series and in 1999 of the CEEMAS workshop series. He was cofounder of the ICMAS conference series, that has been later transformed into the AAMAS conference series. He has been member of the Board of the International Foundation on Multi-Agent Systems (IFAAMAS) from 1998 until 2002, and the co-originator and research coordinator from 1998 until 2002 of AgentLink, the CEC European Network of Excellence in the area of (multi-) agent-based computing. He currently holds the chairing of the PAAMS series since 2009. Yves Demazeau has served or is serving as editorial board member for the Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems (JAAMAS, Springer Verlag), Multi-Agent and Grid Systems (MAGS, IOS Press), Revue d'Intelligence Artificielle (RIA, Hermes, currently serving as Editor-in-Chief), and of the book series on Multi-Agent Systems, Artificial Societies and Simulated Organisations (MASA, Springer Verlag). He is President of the French AI Association (AFIA) since 2011.