Logic Based Electronic Institutions

Abstract: Communication is the key feature of Multi-agent Systems. The interactions among components of a system may take many distinct forms of increasing complexity such as in auctions, negotiations and argumentations. In this talk we propose a notation to specify and reason about an expressive class of protocols. Our notation is logic-based, employing a restricted form of first-order constructs added with sets. We formally associate the syntax of our constructs with a precise semantics. The semantics enables us to automatically build explicit models which can be used to restrict the possible executions of a given Multi-Agent System. Our notation has been incorporated to a variant of electronic institutions -- an encompassing and flexible approach to specify open agent organisations -- and we have implemented a proof-of-concept platform to enact arbitrary protocols using our notation.

About the speaker:

Wamberto Vasconcelos is a lecturer in Computing Science at the University of Aberdeen. He is a member of the Aberdeen Agents Group within the department's Databases & Distributed Information Management research theme. Prior to his appointment Wamberto was a Research Fellow in the Centre for Intelligent Systems and their Applications (CISA), which is part of the Division of Informatics, at the University of Edinburgh. Before that Wamberto was a lecturer in Brazil and a research assistant at the Institut fuer Informatik der Universitaet Zurich (Zurich, Switzerland). Wamberto did his PhD (1995) in the now extinct (in fact, merged and reorganised but alive and kicking) Department of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, Scotland, UK).

Parking: Visitors requiring a parking pass are asked to contact us at least one working day before the seminar.

Enquiries: sals@ics.mq.edu.au