Web Intelligence and Agent Systems: An International Journal - Volume 1, issue 2

Authors: Congiusta, Antonio | Pugliese, Andrea | Talia, Domenico | Trunfio, Paolo

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: The increasing use of computers in all the areas of human activities is resulting in huge collections of digital data. Databases are common everywhere and are used as repositories of every kind of data. Knowledge discovery techniques and tools are used today to analyze those very large data sets to identify interesting patterns and trends in them. When data is maintained over geographically distributed sites the computational power of distributed and parallel systems can be exploited …for knowledge discovery in databases. In this scenario the Grid can provide an effective computational support for distributed knowledge discovery on large data sets. To this purpose we designed a system called Knowledge Grid. This paper describes the Knowledge Grid architecture and discusses some related systems and models recently proposed for knowledge discovery on Grids. The paper shows also how to design and implement distributed knowledge discovery services, according to the OGSA model, by using the Knowledge Grid environment starting from searching Grid resources, composing software and data elements, and executing the resulting application on a Grid. Show more

Citation: Web Intelligence and Agent Systems: An international journal, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 91-104, 2003

Authors: Yolum, Pınar | Singh, Munindar P.

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: Consider a decentralized agent-based approach for service location, where agents provide and consume services, and also cooperate with each other by giving referrals to other agents. That is, the agents form a referral network. Based on feedback from their users, the agents judge the quality of the services provided by others. Further, based on the judgments of service quality, the agents also judge the quality of the referrals given by others. The agents can thus adaptively …select their neighbors in order to improve their local performance. The choices by the agents cause communities to emerge. According to our definition, an agent belongs to a community only if it has been useful to the other members of the community in prior interactions regarding a particular topic. Hence, the membership in different communities is determined based on relationships among the agents. This paper compares topic-sensitive communities of the above kind with communities as studied in traditional link analysis. It studies the correlation between the two kinds of communities as they emerge in referral networks and evaluates the two kinds of communities in terms of their effectiveness in locating service providers. Show more

Citation: Web Intelligence and Agent Systems: An international journal, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 105-116, 2003

Authors: Ye, Yiming | Nandi, Prabir | Jeng, Jun-Jang | Kumaran, Santhosh

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: We propose the concept of a "smart distance" for complex enterprise systems and illustrate how to use it to adaptively connect dynamic and heterogeneous business objects, intelligent agents, and most importantly, human beings within enterprises. We illustrate the design of a generic agent architecture BESA, a Business Entity enabled, Smart distance oriented Agent architecture, and its application to a "sense and respond" system. With "smart distance" infrastructure operating within an enterprise system, the system can …eliminate inefficiencies that are due to lags and latencies that exist in the traditional environment. With various entities at different layers, the enterprise system is expected to be able to sense and respond to market conditions quickly and effectively through a closed-loop hierarchical control. Show more

Citation: Web Intelligence and Agent Systems: An international journal, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 117-129, 2003

Authors: Delgado, Jordi | Pujol, Josep M. | Sangüesa, Ramón

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: We use several models of scale-free graphs as underlying interaction graphs for a simple model of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), and study how fast the system reaches a fixed-point, that is, the time it takes for the system to get a 90% of the agents in the same state. The interest of these kind of graphs is in the fact that the Internet, a very plausible environment for MAS, is a scale-free graph with high clustering and <k_{nn}> , the …nearest neighbor average connectivity of nodes with connectivity k , following a power-law. Our results show that different types of scale-free graphs make the system as efficient as fully connected graphs, in a clear agreement with our previous research (Artif. Intell. 141, pp. 175–181). Show more

Citation: Web Intelligence and Agent Systems: An international journal, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 131-138, 2003

Authors: Vidal, José M.

Article Type: Research Article

Abstract: We present a method for solving service allocation problems in which a set of services must be allocated to a set of agents so as to maximize a global utility. The method is completely distributed so it can scale to any number of services without degradation. We first formalize the service allocation problem and then present a simple hill-climbing, a global hill-climbing, and a bidding-protocol algorithm for solving it. We analyze the expected performance of these …algorithms as a function of various problem parameters such as the branching factor and the number of agents. Finally, we use the sensor allocation problem, an instance of a service allocation problem, to show the bidding protocol at work. The simulations also show that phase transition on the expected quality of the solution exists as the amount of communication between agents increases. Show more

Citation: Web Intelligence and Agent Systems: An international journal, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 139-146, 2003

Article Type: Other

Citation: Web Intelligence and Agent Systems: An international journal, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 147-147, 2003

Article Type: Other

Citation: Web Intelligence and Agent Systems: An international journal, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 149-149, 2003