Office:
306 Computer Science Building
Tel: 545-1322, Email: lesser@cs.umass.edu
Office Hours: Th 11:00 - 12:15p.m. or by appointment
Grad. Asst.: Anita Raja Email: araja@cs.umass.edu
Course Time: MW 2:05 - 3:20 p.m.
Course Location: CMPS
140 (New Computer Science Building)
as of 04/04/00
Purpose of Course: The next generation of complex computer systems will involve large collections of intelligent, heterogeneous agents (both human and machine) working cooperatively and competitively over wide-area distributed processing networks. These networks will be highly reliable in the face of incomplete and possibly inconsistent information and processor failure, will operate in a satisficing mode in which they do the best with available information, will negotiate among themselves to resolve differences, will exploit organizational structuring when there are large numbers of agents, and will reorganize themselves both over the shortterm and longterm, based on the capabilities of the evolving agent set and environment. This course will focus on the intellectual ideas and techniques, both heuristic and formal, involved in building such systems, and the agents that populate them. We will also discuss a number of specific application systems in the areas of distributed situation assessment, distributed planning and resource allocation, cooperative information gathering, concurrent design, electronic commerce, etc., that provide concrete examples. The underlying software architecture that supports the building of such systems will also be analyzed.
Prerequistes: Graduate Level course in Artificial Intelligence (CMPSCI 683).
Credit: 3 units
Grading: There will be 3 to 5 homeworks that will include one or two programming projects(35%), and a mid-term (30%) and either a final or project(35%).
Required book: "Multiagent Systems: A Modern Approach to Distributed Artificial Intelligence," edited by Gerhard Weiss by MIT press
Course Web Page:
http://dis.cs.umass.edu/~araja/cs691V/
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