ENDIF Engineering department in Ferrara - University of Ferrara

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ENDIF - Engineering department in Ferrara University of Ferrara via Saragat, 1 44100 Ferrara FE Italy
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Description

%%%% Societies Of ComputeeS (SOCS) %%%%

Societies Of ComputeeS (SOCS): "a computational logic model for the
description, analysis and verification of global and open societies of
heterogeneous computees".

The SOCS project aims at a providing computational logic model for the
description, analysis and verification of global and open societies of
heterogeneous computees, intended as abstractions of the entities that
populate open and global computing environments.

SOCS is a project funded by the European Commission under the Fifth
Framework Programme. The SOCS consortium is composed of six European
partners, based in Italy, UK, and Cyprus. The SOCS staff is composed
of more than 20 people.

The Engineering Department of the University of Ferrara is an
Assistant Contractor of the SOCS project. Its activity within the
project, during the first two years, has been devoted, in particular,
to the definition of a declarative framework for the specification of
computee interaction, to its operational counterpart, and to its
implementation.

The formal framework, based on abductive logic programming, exploits a
particular kind of abducible, called expectation, to represent the
computees' desired behaviour. Expectations are generated based on the
actual computee behaviour and on the specification of interaction
protocols, given in an abductive language, which extends the IFF
framework by Fung and Kowalski. A notion of fulfillment has been
introduced to represent the correct matching between computees'
desired and actual behaviour.

The operational counterpart is the SCIFF proof procedure, proven
sound, which extend the IFF proof procedure to support the language
extensions introduced in the declarative framework. SCIFF has been
implemented in SICStus Prolog and Constraint Handling Rules.

For the third and last year of the project, the Engineering Department
of the University of Ferrara will be involved in the SOCS work package
devoted to the proof of properties for societies of computees, and
will be the task leader of the experimentation work package.

%%% Agents applied in health-care %%%
This research activity is focused on the development of an agent coordination infrastructure to be used for building a virtual health care organization. To this purpose the system aggregates a set of agents; each agent is an autonomous element of this organization, and represents a particular actor in the health care organization (for example, physicians, patients, laboratories of analysis and hospital departments. Each agent supplies some services and interacts with the ones offered by other agents.
These services may be realized either by traditional programming technologies or knowledge-based systems with automatic reasoning mechanisms.
The infrastructure is characterized by two kind of agents: the application agents and the system agents

The application agents represent the medical entities involved in one or more medical activities and the services by each one. If we are considering, for example, a diagnosis problem, it is necessary to identify which clinicians and laboratories are involved and how a multi-agent system may support their work. It is also necessary to formalize the knowledge base necessary to provide diagnosis services. This knowledge may be elicited, for example, from clinician interviews or medical literature. It is also necessary to express how these entities interacts with the others in order to accomplish their objectives.
The inner structure of each application agent takes care of these considerations and is composed by two modules: the Agent Reasoning Module (ARM, for short) and Agent Behaviour Module (ABM).
The ARM module contains the knowledge used to provide each agent service. For example, the knowledge related to a reasoning service includes a rule set and an inference engine.
The ABM module is a set of logic clauses that describe the behaviour (i.e. actions and interactions) of the agent within the environment. described In particular, the social behaviour of each agent can be expressed within the ABM, by means of collaborative/competitive queries submitted to other agents and expressed by means of the MCL language.

The infrastructure supports the development of medical application thanks to a set of system agents which provide provide the services necessary to the correct functioning of the whole system.

The infrastructure may be easily extended with new agents and services, exploiting the set of JAVA classes on which it is built up.

Article

Lamma, E. and Pereira, L.M. and Riguzzi, F. (2003) Belief Revision via Lamarckian Evolution. New Generation Computing, 21 (3). pp. 247-275.

Ciampolini, A. and Lamma, E. and Mello, P. and Toni, F. and Torroni, P. (2003) Co-operation and competition in ALIAS: a logic framework for agents that negotiate. Computational Logic in Multi-Agent Systems, Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, 37 (1-2). pp. 65-92.

Lamma, E. and Mello, P. and Riguzzi, F. and Storari, S. (2003) Discovering Validation Rules from Micro-biological Data. New Generation Computing, 21 (2). pp. 123-134.

Gavanelli, M. (2002) An Algorithm Computing the Pareto Frontier in Constraint Satisfaction Problems. AI*IA Notizie, XV (2). pp. 15-23.

Book Section

Ciampolini, A. and Mello, P. and Storari, S. (2004) A multi-agent system for medical services synergy and coordination. In: Proceedings of the ECAI2004 workshop on "Agents in healthcare". .

Gavanelli, M. and Lamma, E. and Mello, P. and Torroni, P. (2004) An abductive framework for information sharing in multi-agent systems. In: CLIMA-IV: Computational Logic in Multi-Agent Systems, Fourth International Workshop. Proceedings, Fort Lauderdale, FL, USA, Jan. 6-7 2004. Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence. Springer-Verlag.

Alberti, M. and Chesani, F. and Gavanelli, M. and Lamma, E. and Mello, P. and Torroni, P. (2004) Compliance Verification of Agent Interaction: a Logic-based Tool. In: Symposium "From Agent Theory to Agent Implementation" (AT2AI-4). Proceedings of the 17th European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research (EMCSR2004), II. Austrian Society for Cybernetic Studies, Vienna, Austria, pp. 570-575.

Alberti, M. and Daolio, D. and Gavanelli, M. and Lamma, E. and Mello, P. and Torroni, P. (2004) Specification and verification of agent interaction protocols in a logic-based system. In: Proceedings of the 19th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2004). Special Track on Agents, Interactions, Mobility, and Systems (AIMS), Nicosa, Cyprus, Mar. 14-17 2004. ACM Press, pp. 72-78.

Alberti, M. and Ciampolini, A. and Gavanelli, M. and Lamma, E. and Mello, P. and Torroni, P. (2003) A social ACL semantics by deontic constraints. In: Multi-Agent Systems and Applications III. Proceedings of the 3rd International Central and Eastern European Conference on Multi-Agent Systems, CEEMAS 2003. Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, 2691. Springer-Verlag, Prague, Czech Republic, pp. 204-213.

Alberti, M. and Gavanelli, M. and Lamma, E. and Mello, P. and Torroni, P. (2003) An Abductive Computational Model for Open Societies. In: Proceedings of the 8th National Congress on Artificial Intelligence, AI*IA 2003, Pisa, Italy. LNAI (2829). 2829, pp. 287-299.

Gavanelli, M. and Lamma, E. and Mello, P. and Milano, M. and Torroni, P. (2003) Interpreting Abduction in CLP. In: APPIA-GULP-PRODE Joint Conference on Declarative Programming. , Universita Mediterranea di Reggio Calabria, Italy, pp. 25-35.

Alberti, M. and Ciampolini, A. and Gavanelli, M. and Lamma, E. and Mello, P. and Torroni, P. (2003) Logic Based Semantics for an Agent Communication Language. In: Proceedings of the International Workshop on Formal Approaches to Multi-Agent Systems (FAMAS). , Warsaw, Poland, pp. 21-36.

Alberti, M. and Gavanelli, M. and Lamma, E. and Mello, P. and Torroni, P. (2003) Modeling interactions using social integrity constraints: a resource sharing case study. In: Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies, First International Workshop, DALT 2003. , Melbourne, Victoria, pp. 81-96.

Alberti, M. and Gavanelli, M. and Lamma, E. and Mello, P. and Torroni, P. (2003) Specification and verification of agent interactions using social integrity constraints. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Logic and Communication in Multi-Agent Systems, LCMAS 2003, Eindhoven, the Netherlands, 29 June 2003. Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science, 85 (2). Elsevier Science.

Ciampolini, A. and Lamma, E. and Mello, P. and Torroni, P. (2002) A Proof System for the Safe Execution of Tasks in Multi-Agent Systems. In: Proceedings of the 8th European Conference on Logics in Artificial Intelligence (JELIA02). LNAI (2424). Springer-Verlag, pp. 14-26.

Gavanelli, M. (2002) An Algorithm for Multi-Criteria Optimization in CSPs. In: Proceedings of the 15th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2002). IOS Press, Lyon, France, pp. 136-140.

Gavanelli, M. (2002) An Implementation of Pareto Optimality in CLP(FD). In: CP-AI-OR - International Workshop on Integration of AI and OR techniques in Constraint Programming for Combinatorial Optimisation Problems. , Le Croisic, France, pp. 49-64.

Alberti, M. and Lamma, E. (2002) Synthesis of Object Models from Partial Models: A CSP Perspective. In: ECAI 2002, Proceedings of the 15th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence. IOS Press, Lyon, France, pp. 116-120.

Conference or Workshop Item

Ciampolini, A. and Ciampolini, P. and Storari, S. (2004) Integration of medical services in the MeSSyCo agent system (demo session). In: AAMAS 2004.

Monograph

Ciampolini, A. and Mello, P. and Storari, S. (2002) Distributed medical diagnosis with abductive logic agents. Technical Report. , Bologna, Italy.

This list was generated on Mon Sep 10 16:39:20 BST 2007.