The Agents Group at RMIT University meets periodically for informal research talks and discussions. These meetings happen in the Intelligent Systems Group area located in Building 14, Floor 8 on Mondays at 3pm. If you want to be scheduled, please send the request to Sarah Hickmott or use our document roster.

Go to: Next talk -  Upcoming talks -  Proposed readings - Past Meetings


** NEXT MEETING **
Monday 26th of March, 3:00pm - Floor 8, Building 14 (IS Common Area)
 
  Carole Adam

Intention and behaviour planning for a SAIBA-compliant ECA


  In this talk I will present work done with a PhD student in Grenoble in the frame of an ANR grant entitled CECIL (Complex Emotions in Communication, Interaction, and Language). This work is in the context of the SAIBA standard architecture for Embodied Conversational Agents,
that is composed of 3 sequential modules: intention planning (planning the agent's communicative intention), behaviour planning (planning the multimodal behaviour that realises this communicative intention), and behaviour realisation (rendering this behaviour in an actual ECA or robot). I will talk about our implementation for the first two modules: a Prolog reasoning engine to deduce the agent's intention, and a lexicon of Multimodal Conversational Acts that communicate it to the user. I will also mention ongoing evaluation of this work.




UPCOMING TALKS
Day
Moderator/Speaker
   Topic
Material
May 7 Carole Adam Intention and behaviour planning for a SAIBA-compliant ECA

May 14 Lin Padgham  
May 21 Sarah Hickmott  
May 28 Steven Shapiro  
June 4 Fabio Zambetta  
June 11
   QUEEN'S BIRTHDAY (holiday)
June 18
 David Morley  
June 25
    
July 2
    
July 9
    



PROPOSED READINGS
Day
Paper
Material
TBA
 J. S. Rosenschein and M. R. Genesereth. Deals Among Rational Agents. Proc. of
IJCAI-85, pages 91-99, 1985. 		paper
TBA
 Davis, R. and Smith, R. Negotiation as a Metaphor for Distributed Problem Solving, Artificial Intelligence 20, Issue 1, pp. 63-109.
 paper
TBA
 B. J. Grosz and S. Kraus (1996)  "Collaborative Plans for Complex Group Actions" Artificial Intelligence 86, pages 269-358.
 paper
TBA
 Yoav Shoham. Agent-oriented programming. Artificial Intelligence, 60:51--92, 1993.
PAST READINGS
July 19, 2006
James Harland		 A. Rao and M. Georgeff (1991)  "Modelling rational agents within a BDI-architecture"  Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR'91) pp.473-484. paper
September 6,2006
Michael Winikoff		 Cohen, P. R. and Levesque, H (1990). "Intention is choice with commitment" Artificial Intelligence, Volume 42, Issue 2-3. paper


PAST MEETINGS 2012
Day
Moderator/Speaker
   Topic
Material
February 6
 Louis Massey A Cognitive Model for Topics Identification
February 13


February 20


February 27 Michael Thielscher

General Game Playing in AI Research and Education

  
March 5
 Richard Dawson
 A dynamic agent-based model of Flood Incident Management processes
March 26
 Neil Yorke-Smith Model Checking of Agent Goals and Commitments
April 23
 Sebastian Sardina Apparate simulator for evaluating path-planning algorithms
Project website
April 30
 Daniel Macias Paper discussion: Probase: A Probabilistic Taxonomy for Text Understanding
Paper


PAST MEETINGS 2011
Day
Moderator/Speaker
   Topic
Material
January 10 Lin Padgham Planning for 2011
January 17   Planning for 2011 (2): Selection of papers for discussion
January 24   IJCAI'2011 deadline
January 31 Lawrence Cavedon and Steven Shapiro Intelligent Agents seminar course meeting
February 7 Julian de Hoog Dynamic Team Hierarchies in Communication-Limited Multi-Robot Exploration slides
February 14 Wei Liu A Demonstration of the Sony AIBO as a Companion Toy
February 21 Steven Shapiro Revising Conflicting Intention Sets in BDI Agents
March 7 Sandeep Pulla Vegetation-fire dynamics in a tropical forest
March 14   Labour Day
March 21 Nitin Yadav Decision theoretic behavior composition
April 4 Fabio Zambetta Kinect and Natural User Interfaces
April 11 Gaya Jayatilleke Scenarios for System Requirements Traceability and Testing
May 16 Lin Padgham AAMAS'2011 Discussion
May 23 Jimmy Sun Interaction Testing in Agent Systems
May 30 Deepak Dahiya Identifying Aspects, Components and multi agents in the Development of a Enterprise Knowledge Management System
June 6  

June 13
Public holiday: Queen's birthday
June 20 Wilson Wong Health Conversational Agent based on Contextual Matching of QA Pairs
June 27 Daniel Macias Building Modular Knowledge Bases for Conversational Agents
August 22
IJCAI'2011 Discussion
September 19 Mahmud Hasan Agent based control system to create dynamic, non-linear narratives for interactive media.
October 17 Dave Scerri Agent based modelling and Modular Simulation
November 29 Daniel Macias Using a lexical dictionary and a folksonomy to automatically construct domain ontologies
December 5
 Lawrence Cavedon Some history behind Siri


PAST MEETINGS 2010
Day
Speaker
Title
Material
January 25
 Patrik Huslum
 Factored planning: Promises and Pitfalls
March 1 Ke Sun/Daniel Macias

- Summer Project Presentation: New Features in Prometheus Design Tool

- Work Plan Proposal for the Agents Meetings
March 15 Dinesh Kant Kumar
Robotic hand. Discussion of projects and possible collaborations
March 22 Lin Padgham Overview of research projects within the group
March 29
 Jimmy Sun
 Modeling Agent Interactions for Automatic Testing Purpose
April 12 Sarah Hickmott Modular Distributed Simulation with Agent-Based Models  
May 3 Michael Thielsher
Knowledge-Based General Game Playing
May 17 Lin Padgham
 AAMAS'2010 report
May 24 Sebastian Sardina
 Agent programming via planning programs (Paper Presented at AAMAS'2010)
May 31 Scott Sanner Decision Diagrams for Decision-theoretic Planning
June 7 John Thangarajah Automated Testing of Agent Systems - Unit and interaction
brief overview of work past and present
June 28 Bob Wesson Toys Project demo
July 5 James Harland
 Operational Behaviour for Executing, Suspending, and Aborting Goals in BDI Agent Systems

July 26 Carole Adam Personalised dialogue in a toy to engage children
August 2 Fabio Zambetta
 Procedural Generation of Narrative in Role-Playing and Strategic Games
August 9 Steven Shapiro
 Belief Change With Noisy Sensing and Introspection in the Situation Calculus (part I)
August 16 Steven Shapiro
Belief Change With Noisy Sensing and Introspection in the Situation Calculus (part II)
August 23 Jimmy Sun
 Paper discussion: Feedback-Directed Random Test Generation
August 30 James Harland
 ECAI'2010 report
September 13 Dhirendra Singh Paper discussion: Reinforcement Learning as Heuristic for Action-Rule Preferences, by Joost Broekens, Koen Hindriks and Pascal Wiggers
September 20 Vahit Kaplanoglu
Modeling and Solving Truck-load Consolidation Problems by using Multi-Agent Technology
September 27 Ralph Ronnquist Compiling a PDT design into Gorite code (Part I)
October 4 Ralph Ronnquist Compiling a PDT design into Gorite code (Part II)
October 11   AAMAS'2011 deadline (no meeting)
October 18 Simeon Visser
 Reasoning About Preferences in BDI Agent Systems
October 25 Dave Scerri
 Integrating a BDI module into the BLOCKS framework
November 8 Daniel Macias Using Wikipedia and other ontological resources to enhance domain specific knowledge bases
November 15 Carole Adam 2 years on the Toys project
November 22 Lawrence Cavedon An overview of the Thinking Head project
November 29 Peter Wallis The EU Companions Project  
December 6 Amit Goel Reasoning about Coalitions in Context of Virtual Enterprises
Using Cocktail of Temporal Logic and Coalitional Game Theory 		 
December 20 Lin Padgham End of year meeting


PAST MEETINGS 2009
Day
Speaker
Title
Material
February 16 Dhirendra Singh  Improving Online Learning Through Knowledge Guided Exploration  slides
March 2 Liam Magee (from the Global Cities Institute)
 A Framework for Evaluating the Commensurability of Semantic Web
Ontologies		 slides
March 11
 Paul Scerri (from CMU) Large Multi-Robot Teams: Faster, Better, Cheaper
March 23
 Wei Peng
 What Do We Mean by Constructive Memory Agents?
April 6
 Sebastian Sardina
 Composing non-terminating programs over infinite domains
May 4
 Lavindra de Silva First Principles Planning in BDI Systems
May 11
May 25
 James Harland
 A New Paradigm for Computational Agents: Turing machines
James Harland		 slides
June 1
 Daniel Macias
 Modular Knowledge Management and Development
for an Intelligent Interactive Agent
June 15
 Sarah Hickmott Optimality Properties of Planning via Petri Net Unfolding: A Formal Analysis
June 22
 Jimmy Sun
 On the new Eclipse-based PDT
Tuesday August 11  Nicolas Troquard (from Agent ART group, University of  Liverpool)
Logics of propositional control for social choice slides
August 17
 Qingmai Wang Putting simple hierarchy into ant foraging: Cluster-based softbots slides
August 31
 Austin Wood
 Agent Interface Layer at Liverpool
September 21
 Tim Miller
(from Melbourne University)
 What can the Agent Paradigm Offer Safety Engineering? slides
September 28
 AI Projects Presentation for students
October 5
 Nitin Yadav An empirical evaluation of progression and regression approaches for behavior composition slides
November 2
 Lin Padgham
 Overview of Climate Change Adaptation Project
November 9
 Dave Scerri An architecture for modular simulation
November 23
 James Harland
 What exactly is an agent? slides
November 30
 Patrick Ye
 Towards Interpreting Task-oriented Utterance Sequence


PAST MEETINGS 2008
Day
Speaker
Title
Material
January 17
 Michael Winikoff Goals in Agent Systems: A Unifying Framework preliminary paper
January 24
 Carlos Queiroz Complex Event Processing in Distributed Systems, David C. Luckham and Brian Frasca.

Amit - The Situation Manager, A. Adi and O. Etzion.
January 31 Hoa Khanh Dam Cost-Based BDI Plan Selection for Change Propagation preliminary paper
John  Thangarajah Suspending GOALS in BDI Agents
February 11 Tim Miller (from UofM)
 On first-class protocols for agent interaction



February 18 Lawrence Cavedon Computational Models of Spoken Dialogue I
February 25 Sebastian Sardina Behavior composition in the presence of failures & concurrent compositions
March 3
 Simon Duff Maintenance Goals
March 14
 Lavindra De Silva Planning from first principles in BDI systems: from creating operators to
finding good solutions
April 21 Lawrence Cavedon Computational Models of Spoken Dialogue II
April 28 Khanh Hoa Dam Cost-Based BDI Plan Selection for Change Propagation  AAMAS practice talk
May 5 Jennifer Sandercock Somatic Marker Agent Development (SoMAD) for Game Development
May 12 AAMAS 2008
May 19
June 16 Lin, John, & Hoa AAMAS recap
June 30
 Lin Padgham Learning in BDI systems  based on work appearing at ALAMAS+ALAg 2008 workshop
July 14 Amir Aryani Domain Based Change Propagation Analysis
July 21 Ralph Ronnquist  GORITE Modelling and Execution
July 28 John Thangarajah AAAI'08 overview
August 11 Dhirendra Singh Knowledge guided collaborative learning slides
August 18 James Harland Goal Reasoning and Management Techniques for Agents
August 25
NICTA Big Picture Seminar Invite
Rodney Brooks "Robotics: Shaped By and Shaping the World in 2000 to 2050" -  4pm

*** Registration to vrlss@nicta.com.au by Aug. 20th is essential for this free event! ***
September 1 Zhiyong Zhang Test Input Generation in A Unit Testing Process---Part of Automated Unit Testing for Agent Systems slides
September 8 Sebastian Sardina Realizing Multiple Autonomous Agents through Scheduling of Shared Devices
September 15 NMR-08 & KR-08 & ICAPS-08
September 22 Neil Yorke-Smith Goal Deliberation in a BDI Agent by Constraint Optimization
September 23 Stavros Vassos Progression of Basic Action Theories in the Situation Calculus:
4 Results and an Application in Video Games		 slides
September 29 Ralph Ronnquist GORITE Modelling and Execution II slides-pdf
slides-ppt
October 6 Ralph Ronnquist
 GORITE Modelling and Execution III
October 20 Simon Duff Formalising Maintenance Goals
October 27 John  Thangarajah Green, Amber, Red: Executing, Suspending, and Aborting Generic Goal Types
November 3 Clemens Mayr SmartWiki Roadshow
November 17 Lawrence Cavedon Overview of the "Toys Project"
November 24 Sarah Hickmott Directed Unfolding (PhD work)
December 1 Carole Adam Emotions: from psychological theories to logical formalisation and implementation in a BDI agent (PART I) (PhD work) 
December 8 Carole Adam Emotions: from psychological theories to logical formalisation and implementation in a BDI agent (PART II) (PhD work)



PAST MEETINGS 2007
Day
Speaker
Title
Material
April 26 David Morley Aborting Goals and Plans in BDI Agents paper
April 19
 Michael Winikoff Implementing Commitment-Based Interaction paper
April 12
 Bao Vo Searching for joint gains in automated negotiations based on multi-criteria decision making theory
April 5 Sebastian Sardina
 Goals in the Context of BDI Plan Failure and Planning paper
March 29
 Roundtable
 Initial Agents Meeting session for 2007 - Introduction of members and research areas
May 10
 Duc Pham Temporal Linear Logic as a Basis for Flexible Agent Interactions paper
Modelling Agents'  Choices in Temporal Linear Logic. 5th International Workshop on  Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies paper
May 17
 AAMAS 2007 - Honolulu, Hawaii, USA
May 24
 Talks from the "Intelligent Agents" course
June 21
 Various
 AAMAS-2007 recap
July 12 Zhiyong Zhang Automated Unit Testing for Agent Systems
July 19 James Harland Reading no 1
 Proposed readings
July 26
 Jennifer Sandercock Improving BDI Plan Choice using Adaptive Situational Somatic Markers and Soft Goals
  
August 2
 Iftah Gideoni
 In-Flight Merit Based Switching of Plans in Unmanned Air Vehicle BDI Agents


August 9
 Amir Aryani
 Entity-based Change Propagation Analysis in Software Enhancement

 

  
August 16 Dhirendra Singh Collaborative Learning in Multi-agent Systems



August 23
 Cancelled for dept. Seminar
August 30
 Carlos Queiroz
 
September 6
 Simon Duff

Current Developments in Maintenance Goals

  
September 13
 Michael Winikoff
 Reading no 2:

Cohen, P. R. and Levesque, H (1990). "Intention is choice with commitment" Artificial Intelligence, Volume 42, Issue 2-3.

 Proposed readings
September 2
No meeting - go to Hugh's talk instead (11am-1pm, room 10.4.27)
September 27 Khanh Hoa Dam Supporting Change Propagation in Software Evolution
October 4 Lavindra De Silva Planning from First Principles in the BDI Architecture: Finding "Good" Solutions
October 11 Andy Song Prediction in Dynamic Environment
October 18 Stephane Airiau

November 1
 Stephen Cranefield Checking the fulfilment of social expectations modelled in a temporal logic
November 15
 Sandip Sen
 Learning agents and evolving societies I
November 22
 Sandip Sen Learning agents and evolving societies II
November 29
 AGENTS-VIC Workshop
December 6
 CSRC-2007
December 13 Clemens Mayr SmartWiki: An agent backend to provide support for Wiki users
December 20
 End of year BBQ!


PAST MEETINGS 2006
Day
Speaker
Title
Material
February 17
 Rao Kambhampati Current work on planning on belief sates
February 24
 Hu Qinyou
 Negotiation on collision avoidance of vessels
March 3
 Lavindra De Silva
 Research on integrating planning into BDI AAMAS-06 paper
March 17
 Jennifer Sandercock
 Same, Same, but Different - Creating Individual Personalities in Many Characters Without Hand-crafting Behaviors
March 31
 Sebastian Sardina
 On the Limits of Planning over Belief States under Strict Uncertainty KR60 paper - slides
April 7
 Hoa Khanh Dam
 An agent-oriented approach to change propagation in software evolution
April 21
 Chris Cheong
 Hermes' integration with Prometheus
May 5
 James Harland and Simon Duff
 Reviewed some interesting papers from AAMAS-06
 AAMAS-06
June 8
 Lin Padgham Current work on exploring what is needed in order for arbitrary agents to come into an e-institution, developed in something like Islander.
June 15 Michael Winikoff Towards Integrating Design and Programming Talk to be given at
"Foundations and Practice of Programming Multi-Agent Systems" Dagstuhl seminar
Thur. July 13 Jennifer Sandercock Creating Adaptive and Individual Personalities in Many Characters without Hand-crafting Behaviours Practice talk. To be presented at "Intelligent Virtual Agents Conference"
Thur. July 27 Michael Winikoff The 2APL language
Thur. August 3 John T e-institutions and ISLANDER
Thur. August 24
 Sebastian Sardina
 Situation Calculus: Reasoning about Action and Agent Programming
 slides
Thur. August 31
 Ryan Kelly (from UofM)
 Knowledge and Observation in the Situation Calculus slides
September 14
 Shankar Srikantaiah Oveview of Prometheus Design Tool (PDT)
September 21
 Hoa Khanh Dam An inconsistency-based approach for change propagation in UML
October 5
 Bao Vo  Conversation-based specification and composition of agent and web services
October 26
 Various
 Internal report on papers sent to  AAMAS07
November 6
 Simon Wilkinson Adaptive learning the next big thing in e-learning?
November 23
 Lavindra De Silva A Java API for Planning in Time-Limited Domains (work performed on an implementation within a DSTO project) slides
December 7 Michael Winikoff Designing Commitment-Based Agent Interactions
END OF YEAR