1 Proceedings of the 2nd Asia-Pacific Conference on IAT DzvdDpmzni Editors Ning Zhong Jiming Liu Setsuo Ohsuga Jeffrey Bradshaw World Scientific Intelligent Agent Proceedings; trf the 22nndd AAssiiaa--PPaacciiffiicc rri 1 1 Conference on W A eCnnOIOgy Research and Development Intelligent Agent Proceedings erf the 2nd Asia-Pacific Technology Conference on IAT Research and Development Editors Ning Zhong Maebashi Institute of Technology, Japan Jiming Liu Hong Kong Baptist University Setsuo Ohsuga Waseda University, Japan Jeffrey Bradshaw University of West Florida, USA ^ Sj World Scientific wB New Jersey * London • Singapore • Hong Kong Published by World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd. P O Box 128, Farrer Road, Singapore 912805 USA office: Suite IB, 1060 Main Street, River Edge, NJ 07661 UK office: 57 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9HE British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. INTELLIGENT AGENT TECHNOLOGY Research and Development Copyright © 2001 by World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission from the Publisher. For photocopying of material in this volume, please pay a copying fee through the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. In this case permission to photocopy is not required from the publisher. ISBN 981-02-4706-0 Printed in Singapore by World Scientific Printers (S) Pte Ltd PREFACE Intelligent Agent Technology is concerned with the development of autonomous computational or physical entities capable of perceiving, reasoning, adapting, learning, cooperating, and delegating in a dynamic environment. It is one of the most promising areas of research and development in information technology, computer science, and engineering today. This book is an attempt to capture the essence of the current state of the art in intelligent agent technology and to identify the new challenges and opportunities that it is or will be facing. It contains the papers accepted for presentation at The Second Asia-Pacific Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT '01), held in Maebashi, Japan, October 23-26, 2001. The second meeting in the IAT conference series follows the success of IAT '99 held in Hong Kong in 1999. IAT '01 brought together researchers and practitioners to share their original research results and practical development experiences in intelligent agent technology. The most important feature of this conference was that it emphasized a multi-facet, holistic view of this emerging technology, from its computational foundations, in terms of models, methodologies, and tools for developing a variety of embodiments of agent- based systems, to its practical impact on tackling real-world problems. Much work has gone into the preparation of the IAT '01 technical program: Original, high-quality papers were solicited for various aspects of theories, applications, and case studies related to agent technologies. 134 full papers were submitted from 32 countries and regions of all continents. Each submitted paper was reviewed by at least three experts on the basis of technical soundness, relevance, originality, significance, and clarity. Based on the review reports, 25 regular papers (19%) and 40 short papers were accepted for presentation and publication. This book is structured into six chapters according to the main conference sessions: Chapter 1. Formal Agent Theories Chapter 2. Computational Architecture and Infrastructure Chapter 3. Learning and Adaptation Chapter 4. Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Agents Chapter 5. Distributed Intelligence Chapter 6. Agent-Based Applications In addition to the above chapters, this book also includes the abstract or papers for the IAT '01 keynote/invited talks by Benjamin W. Wah, Toyoaki Nishida, Zbigniew W. Ras, Andrzej Skowron, and Katia Sycara, which provide different perspectives to Intelligent Agent Technology. v vi We wish to express our gratitude to all members of the Conference Committee and the International Advisory Board for their instrumental and unfailing support. IAT '01 has a very exciting program with a number of features, ranging from technical sessions, invited talks, agent demos, and social programs. All of this work would not have been possible without the generous dedication of the Program Committee members and the external reviewers in reviewing the papers submitted to IAT '01, of our invited speakers, Benjamin W. Wah, Toyoaki Nishida, Zbigniew W. Ras, Andrzej Skowron, and Katia Sycara, in preparing and presenting their very stimulating talks, and of Jianchang Mao (Demos & Exhibits Chair) in soliciting demo proposals and setting up the program. We thank them for their strong support. The conference Web support team at the Knowledge Information Systems Laboratory, Maebashi Institute of Technology did a terrific job of putting together and maintaining the home page for the conference as well as building a software, namely, cyber-chair, which is an intelligent agent and interface among organizers, program committee members, and authors/attendees. We would like to thank Juzhen Dong, Muneaki Ohsima, Norichika Hayazaki of the conference Web support team for their dedication and hard work. IAT '01 could not have taken place without the great team effort of the Local Organizing Committee and the support of Maebashi Institute of Technology and Maebashi Convention Bureau. Our special thanks go to Nobuo Otani (Local Organizing Chair), Sean M. Reedy, Masaaki Sakurai, Kanehisa Sekine, and Yoshitsugu Kakemoto (the Local Organizing Committee members) for their enormous efforts in planning and arranging the logistics of the conference from registration/payment handling, venue preparation, accommodation booking, to banquet/social program organization. We are very grateful to the IAT '01 sponsors: ACM SIGART, Maebashi Institute of Technology, Maebashi Convention Bureau, Maebashi City Government, Gunma Prefecture Government, The Japan Research Institute, Limited, United States Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Asian Office of Aerospace Research and Development, and United States Army Research Office in Far East, and Web Intelligence Laboratory, Inc. for their generous support. We thank ACM SIGWEB, SIGCHI, Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence, JSAI SIGFAI, SIGKBS, and IEICE SIGKBSE for being in cooperation with IAT '01. Last but not the least, we thank Ms. Lakshmi Narayanan of World Scientific for her help in coordinating the publication of this book. October 2001 Ning Zhong and Jiming Liu Program Committee Chairs Setsuo Ohsuga and Jeffrey Bradshaw General Conference Chairs CONFERENCE ORGANIZATION General Chairs: Setsuo Ohsuga (Waseda U., Japan) Jeffrey Bradshaw (Inst. H&M Cognition, USA) Program Chairs: Ning Zhong (Maebashi Inst. Technology, Japan) Jiming Liu (Hong Kong Baptist U.) Demos and Exhibits Chair: Jianchang Mao (Verity Inc., USA) Local Organizing Chair: Nobuo Otani (Mabashi Inst. Technology, Japan) International Advisory Board Jeffrey M. Bradshaw (Inst. H&M Cognition, USA) Setsuo Ohsuga (Waseda U., Japan) Michele L. D. Gaudreault (US AOARD) Patrick S. P. Wang (Northeastern U., USA) Daniel T. Ling (Microsoft Corp., USA) Yiyu Yao (U. Regina, Cadada) Jiming Liu (Hong Kong Baptist U.) Jie Yang (U. Science & Technology of China) Jianchang Mao (Verity Inc., USA) Ning Zhong (Maebashi Inst. Technology, Japan) Hiroshi Motoda (Osaka U., Japan) Jan Zytkow (U. North Carolina, USA) Local Organizing Committee Masahiko Satori (Maebashi Inst. Tech., Japan) Toshio Kawamura (Maebashi Convention B.) Tadaomi Miyazaki (Maebashi Inst. Tech., Japan) Masaaki Sakurai (Maebashi Convention Bureau) Nobuo Otani (Mabashi Inst. Technology, Japan) Kanehisa Sekine (Maebashi Convention Bureau) Sean M. Reedy (Mabashi Inst. Technology, Japan) Midori Asaka (IPA, Japan) Ning Zhong (Maebashi Inst. Technology, Japan) Yoshitsugu Kakemoto (JRI, Limited, Japan) Program Committee K. Suzanne Barber (U. Texas-Austin, USA) Hideyuki Nakashima (ETL, Japan) Guy Boy (EURISCO, France) Wee-Keong Ng (Nanyang Tech. U., Singapore) Cristiano Castelfranchi (CNR, Italy) Katsumi Nitta (Tokyo Inst. Technology, Japan) Kerstin Dautenhahn (U. Hertfordshire, UK) Yoshikuni Onozato (Gunma U., Japan) Edmund H. Durfee (U. Michigan, USA) Tuncer Oren (Marmara Research Center, Turkey) E. A. Edmonds (Loughborough U., UK) Ichiro Osawa (ETL, Japan) Tim Finin (UMBC, USA) Sun Park (Rutgers U., USA) Adam Maria Gadomski (ENEA, Italy) Van Parunak (ERIM, USA) Scott Goodwin (U. Regina, Canada) Zbigniew W. Ras (U. North Carolina, USA) Vladimir Gorodetsky (Russian Academy of Sci.) Eugene Santos (U. Connecticut, USA) Mark Greaves (The Boeing Company, USA) Zhongzhi Shi (Chinese Academy of Sciences) Barbara Hayes-Roth (Stanford U., USA) Carles Sierra (Scientific Research Council, Spain) Michael Huhns (U. South Carolina, USA) Kwang M. Sim (Chinese U. Hong Kong) Keniti Ida (Maebashi Inst. Technology, Japan) Andrzej Skowron (Warsaw U., Poland) Tom Ishida (Kyoka oto U., Japan) Ron Sun (U. Misouri-Columbia, USA) Lakhmi Jain (U. South Australia) Niranjan Suri (U. West Florida, USA) Stefan J. Johansson (U. Karlskrona, Sweden) Takao Terano (U. Tsukuba, Japan) Qun Jin (U. Aizu, Jaoan) Demetri Terzopoulos (U. Toronto, Canada) Juntae Kim (Dongguk U., Korea) Huaglory Tianfield (Glasgow Caledonian U., UK) David Kinny (U. Melbourne, Australia) David Wolpert (NASA Ames Research Center) Matthias Klusch (German Research Center for AI) Jinglong Wu (Kagawa U., Japan) Sarit Kraus (U. Maryland, USA) Takahira Yamaguchi (Shizuoka U., Japan) Danny B. Lange (General Magic, INC., USA) Kazumasa Yokota (Okayama Prefectural U., Japan) Jimmy Ho Man Lee (Chinese U. Hong Kong) Eric Yu (U. Toronto, Canada) Jiming Liu (Hong Kong Baptist U.) P. C. Yuen (Hong Kong Baptist U.) Mike Luck (U. Southampton, UK) Chengqi Zhang (Deakin U., Australia) Helen Meng (Chinese U. Hong Kong) Ning Zhong (Maebashi Inst. Technology, Japan) Joerg Mueller (Siemens, Germany) TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface v Conference Organization vii Invited Talks Intelligent Agents for Market-Trend Prediction 2 Benjamin W. Wah Social Intelligence Design for Knowledge Creating Communities 3 Toyoaki Nishida Query Answering Based on Distributed Knowledge Mining 17 Zbigniew W. Ras Approximate Reasoning by Agents in Distributed Environments 28 Andrzej Skowron Multi-Agent Infrastructure for Agent Interoperation in Open Computational Environments 40 Katia Sycara Chapter 1. Formal Agent Theories SPY: A Multi-Agent Model Yielding Semantic Properties 44 F. Buccafurri, D. Rosaci, G. M. L. Same, L. Palopoli ABT with Asynchronous Reordering 54 Marius-Calin Silaghi, Djamila Sam-Haroud, Boi Faltlngs Social Rationality and Cooperation 64 Guido Boella Belief Revision in Type Theory 69 Tijn Borghuis, Fairouz Kamareddine, Rob Nederpelt Heterogeneous BDI Agents II: Circumspect Agents 74 Maria Fash A Preference-Driven Approach to Designing Agent Systems 80 Stefan J. Johansson, Johan Kummeneje Agent Consumer Reports: of the Agents, by the Agents, and for the Agents 86 Xiaocheng Luan, Yun Peng, Timothy Finin Logical Formalizations Built on Game-Theoretic Argument about Commitments 92 Lamber Royakkers, Vincent Buskens Asynchronous Consistency Maintenance 98 Marius-Calin Silaghi, Djamila Sam-Haroud, Boi Faltings IX