Professor: Dr. Thomas R. Ioerger
Office: 322C Bright Bldg.
Phone: 845-0161
email: ioerger@cs.tamu.edu
office hours: make appointment by email

Meeting: Tu/Th, 9:35-10:50, 126 Bright Bldg.

Course Web Page: http://www.cs.tamu.edu/faculty/ioerger/cs631-fall05/index.html

Prerequisites: CPSC 625 (Artificial Intelligence)

Textbooks

To be used in the course:

Wooldridge, M. (2002). An Introduction to Multiagent Systems. Wiley.

• Ferber, J. (1999). Multi-Agent Systems. Addison-Wesley.
• Weiss, G. (1999). Multi-Agent Systems. MIT Press.
• Bradshaw, G. (1997). Software Agents. AAAI Press.
• Huhns, M. and Singh, P. (1998). Reading in Agents. Morgan Kaufmann.
• Wooldridge, M. and Rao, A. (1999). Foundations of Rational Agency. Applied Logic Series, Vol. 14, Kluwer.
• Wooldridge, M. (2000). Reasoning about Rational Agents. MIT Press.

Goals of this Course

To learn about extended topics in AI, with a focus on intelligent agents. Specifically, we will cover the following major topics/perspectives:

1. Agents: characteristics, environments, and architectures
2. Reactive Agents; JESS programming language
3. Knowledge-based agents and Reasoning about Actions
4. Planning Algorithms for Agents
5. BDI Architecture (e.g. reasoning about mental states with modal logic)
6. Agent Communication Languages and Protocols (e.g. KQML)
7. Multi-Agent Planning: PGP, Contract Nets, etc.
8. Utility-based Agents, Decision Theory (e.g. Markov Decision Problems)

The primary work for the couse will consist 2-3 programming projects. There will be one mid-term and one final exam. Grades for the course will be based on projects (45%), exams (45%), and class participation (10% - discussion of readings, or possibly a presentation). The weights are approximate and could be adjusted slightly by the end of the semester.

Schedule:

Tues, Aug 30: first day of class; go over syllabus
Thurs, Sep 1: What are Agents? (read. Ch 1-Ch. 2.5), environments
Tues, Sep 6: (class cancelled)
Thurs, Sep 8: (class cancelled)
Tues, Sep 13: Agent Architectures (reactive, deliberative, planning, BDI, decision-theoretic...)
Thurs, Sep 15: Knowledge-based agents (read Ch. 3), tic-tac-toe example
Tues, Sep 20: intro to Prolog (notes)
Tues, Sep 20: *** evening class *** 5:30pm, room 307 Bright, more about Prolog
Thurs, Sep 22: Agent-Oriented Programming (Yoav Shoham, 1993)
Tues, Sep 27: AOP continued
Thurs, Sep 29: Concurrent Metatem (end of Ch. 3)
Tues, Oct 4: intentions, Homework 1 due
Thurs, Oct 6: planning, Bratman, Israel, and Pollock (1988)
Tues, Oct 11: PRS papers: Ingrand et al (1992) - IEEE Expert, Ingrand et al (1996) - ICRA
Thurs, Oct 13: Reactive agents (read Ch. 5); Homework #2 due (tic-tac-toe in Prolog)
Tues, Oct 18: Normal Modal Logics (e.g. for Possibility and Necessity), read Ch. 12.1-12.4
Thurs, Oct 20: Epistemic Logics (for Belief and Knowledge)
Tues, Oct 25: Modal operators for BDI, Rao and Georgeff (1991)
Thurs, Oct 27: BDI continued
Tues, Nov 1: (class canceled)
Thurs, Nov 3: Cohen and Levesque (1990)
Tues, Nov 8: mid-term exam
Thurs, Nov 10: Contract Nets (Smith, 1980)
Tues, Nov 15: PGP (Durfee and Lesser, 1991)
Tues, Nov 15: *evening class* (5:00-7:00, 320 Bright) - Introduction to JESS
Thurs, Nov 17: DCSP (Yokoo and Durfee, 1998)
Tues, Nov 22: KQML, COOL (you may skip the section on Decision Theoretic Planning)
Thurs, Nov 24: (class cancelled - Happy Thanksgiving)
Tues, Nov 29: Markov decision processes (read Ch. 17.1-17.4 of Russell and Norvig, 2003, 2nd edition, pp. 613-628)
Thurs, Dec 1: game theory, strategies, equilibria (read Ch. 6, Wooldridge)
Tues, Dec 6: auctions, negotiation (last class) (read Ch. 7.1-7.3, Wooldridge)

References

• Smith, Reid G. 1980. The Contract Net Protocol: High-Level Communicaation and Control in a Distributed Problem Solver. IEEE Transactions on Computers, C-29(12), 1104--1113.
• Rao and Georgeff (1995)
• E. Ephrati and J. S. Rosenschein. The clarke tax as a consensus mechanism among automated agents. In Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pages 173--178, San Jose, California, July 1991.
• Zlotkin, G., and Rosenschein, J. S., "Coalition, Cryptography, And Stability: Mechanisms For Coalition Formation In Task Oriented Domains", Proceedings of the Twelfth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 432-437, 1994.
• O. Shehory and S. Kraus. Task allocation via coalition formation among autonomous agents. In Proceedings of IJCAI'95, pages 655--661, 1995.
• M. Tambe. Towards flexible teamwork. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 7:83--124, 1997.
• Makoto Yokoo and Edmund H. Durfee. The distributed constraint satisfaction problem: Formalization and algorithms. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 10(5), 1998.
• A. Rao and M. Georgeff, "Modeling rational agents within a BDI architecture," Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Cambridge, MA, 1991, pp. 473-484.
• Durfee, E. H., and Lesser V. R., Partial Global Planning: A Coordination Framework for Distributed Hypothesis Formation, IEEE Trans. Syst. Man and Cyber. SMC-21(5) pp 1167-1183, 1991.
• E. H. Durfee and V.R. Lesser. Using partial global plans to coordinate distributed problem solvers. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-87), pages 875-883, Milan, Italy, 1987.

Links

• JATLite - a java-based agent toolkit (download?)
• Jess
• Prolog notes
• Cyc
• Minsky