Intelligent Autonomous Agents

Lectures:

30 hours

Recommended for

Graduate students or senior Master's students.

The course was last given:

A similar (not identical) course was offered in Spring 1998.

Goals

Intelligent autonomous agents are now being used in a broad range of areas from telecommunications, to education, defense and manufacturing. The students will learn about current successful agent systems including practical experience with systems. At the end of the course, the participants should have a good understanding of the principles and applications of intelligent software and hardware agents. An optional project allows students to gain in-depth experience with one or more agent systems.

Prerequisites

Knowledge of modern programming languages, artificial intelligence techniques and software development techniques.

Organization

Part A: A combination of lectures and seminars (prepared by the participants) plus practical exercises.

Part B: (optional) A term project developing or testing and evaluating one or more agent systems. Presentation and report of results.

Contents

Topics in intelligent autonomous agents:

• introduction to intelligent agents and agent-based technology/systems
• properties and capabilities of agents
• software and hardware agents
• architectures and languages of current agent systems
• design and development of agent systems
• multi-agent systems
• agents in complex environments
• application areas

Literature

Potential textbooks:

Multiagent Systems, G. Weiss, 1999, MIT Press.

Multi-Agent Systems, Ferber, 1999, Addison Wesley.

Software Agents, Ed. J. Bradshaw, 1997, AAAI/MIT Press.

Readings in Agents, Ed. M. Huhns and M. Singh, 1998, Morgan Kaufmann.

Agent Technology, Ed. N. Jennings and M. Wooldridge, 1998, Springer Verlag.

Current journal (e.g. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems) and conference (e.g. Autonomous Agents, IJCAI, ECAI, AAAI) articles.

Teacher

N. Reed.

Examiner

N. Reed

Schedule

Spring 2002.

Examination

Class participation, presentations and written report. Optional project with presentation and report.

Credit

3-6 points (3 points for part 1, 1-3 points for project)