CS101c Course Schedule
Alan H. Bond, Department of Computer Science
email:bond@cs

Spring 2002 CS101c Course Schedule

1. Introduction
April 3rd, 5th
The concept of agent,
what leads us to need this concept - Wooldridge chapter
what is agent-oriented programming - Shoham paper in Huhns

Distribution, the many things that can be distributed - Bond and Gasser

The concept of intelligent agent

What are the main issues? from Bond and Gasser
The hard problems are:

• How do you represent agents - knowledge, inference and control
• How do you represent other agents - inferring intention etc
• How do you maintain relationships - negotiation and commitment
• How do you act jointly - distributed planning, coordination
• How do we organize sets of agents
• How do we provide openness of multiagent systems
• How do we provide for mobility of agents
• How do we maintain distributed information gathering, storage and use
• How can distributed agents communicate
• How can distributed agents learn together

Uses of agents - Bradshaw book
Management
Filtering
Interface agents
Searching agents
Mobile agents

2. Examples of problems
April 10th, 12th
Air traffic control, Rand work - Rand report
Distributed sensing, DVMT - Amherst papers

3. Distributed truth maintenance
April 17th
what is TM - the AI concept - McDermott paper
Huhns work - Huhns paper

4. Distributed planning and cooperation
April 19th, 21st
what is planning - the AI concept - AI review paper
partial global plans - DVMT paper

5. Agent knowledge and inference
April 26th, 28th
models of other agents
intentions - Phil Cohen etc
reflection - knowledge of oneself
BDI models - Shohman

6. Agent communication - high level protocols
May 3rd, 5th
Issues in agent communication
Languages for agent communication
KQML - KQML report

7. Agent contracts
May 10th
Contract nets - contract net paper, Sandholm and Lesser paper

8. Negotiation
May 15th, 17th
bargaining
Katia Sycara's work - Sycara paper
Mark Klein's work - Klein paper
Logical negotiation - my paper

9. Commitments
May 22nd
concept of commitment - my paper

10. Applications of game theory to multiagent systems
May 24th
Rationality - Sandholm
Coalitions - Sandholm

11. Agent Organizations
May 29th
Carl Hewitt - Hewitt paper
Tom Moran - Moran paper
Kathleen Carley - Carley paper

12. Distributed and cooperative learning
May 31st (Last day of classes)
Chapter by Sandip Sen

Study period, June 1st-4th.

Final exam period June 5th-7th