Research Interests

My research interests lie in agents and multi-agent systems and their theoretical foundations and practical applications

Theoretical Foundations

I am interested in formal theories of cognitive agents. Cognitive agents that can be viewed as having a mental state consisting of such attitudes such as knowledge, beliefs, desires and intentions. I am interested in the the dynamics and interrelationships among these notions and their impact on an individual agent's behaviour. I am also interested in agents that have self-referential capabilities and can reason about the truth and falsity of propositions.

Individual agents rarely act in isolation. On the contrary, they are increasingly required to act as elements of large and complex systems and cooperate and coordinate with a number of other agents. Reasoning about cooperative activity and teamwork in the context of formal theories requires a very rich ontology of social and collective attitudes such as mutual beliefs and intentions, commitments as well as normative concepts such as obligations and rights. I am currently exploring an approach in which the central idea is that stability and regulation of activity within a group of agents can be accounted for by means of a complex web of roles, commitments obligations and rights.

I am also interested in software engineering methodologies for the development of agent-based and multi-agent systems and in particular in using organizational concepts such as roles.

Practical Applications

I am also interested in the applications of agent technology in particular to e-commerce. In particular, I am interested in market mechanisms such as auctions, strategic decision making and trading agents. I have been leading teams of students in the International Trading Agent Competition (TAC) testing ideas on bidding strategies for trading agents engaging in simultaneous auctions that offer substitutable and complementary goods. The TAC competition is an open-invitation event featuring complex software agents competing in challenging market games. In the 2001 competition we achieved the 7th place with the agent CaiserSose competing against 28 teams from research and academic institutions as well as companies from all around the world. In the 2002 competition we achieved the 3rd place with the agent Thalis competing against 26 other teams. Thalis achieved the 4th place in 2003. In 2004 a new agent called Socrates competed in the new Supply Chain Management game and was placed among the 12 best agents in the competition.

As part of our research in agent technology for e-commerce we have developed a configurable on-line auction server that supports both humans and software agents. e-Game allows independent developers to design, implement and run market based simulations using auctions and experiment with e-markets, negotiation protocols and strategic behaviour. e-Game can be used in research as well as for teaching purposes.

I am also interested in collaborative filtering techniques for recommendation systems and implicit relevance feedback and its potential applications as a mechanism to obtain feedback in web search engines to improve the results returned to the user.

Legal aspects of agents in particular in the context of e-commerce applications, both from a theoretical as well as practical point of view are also issues that interest me and with the proliferation of agents in the Internet it will become a real issue in the next few years. In this context issues surrounding trust and reputation are also very relevant.

Finding an appropriate provider agent to delegate a task or job in a network the size of the Internet is a non-trivial problem. Algorithms that enable efficient and accurate matching between the requests from clients and the advertisements of providers are essential. The same problem arises in the area of web services. How agents and web services can work together is another interesting issue as well as how agents can offer composite web services by coordinating basic services.

Pedagogical Research

I am also very much interested in pedagogical research and in particular game-based learning, interactive learning, collaborative-based learning and the use of technology in general to both support as well as enhance the students' learning experience. More information about my learning and teaching approaches and interests can be found in the Learning and Teaching section of my site.

• Globerunners: A 3D graphic novel