16963632
Agents Making Sense of the Semantic Web
Effective use of the vast quantity of available information and services on the Internet will require multi-agent systems to be tightly integrated with existing web infrastructure. This however will be impossible unless the information on the web is presented in a semantic language, such as the DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML), which is one aim of the “Semantic Web”. As part of our exploration of Semantic Web technology, and DAML in particular, we have constructed ITTALKS, a web-based system for automatic and intelligent notification of information technology talks. In this paper, we describe the ITTALKS system, and discuss the numerous ways in which the use of Semantic Web concepts and DAML extend its ability to provide an intelligent online service to both the human community and, more interestingly, the agents assisting them.
9863446
ITTALKS: An Application of Agents in the Semantic Web
Effective use of the vast quantity of information now available on the web will require the use of "Semantic Web" markup languages such as the DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML). Such languages will enable the automated gathering and processing of much information that is currently available but insufficiently utilized. Effectively, such languages will facilitate the integration of multi-agent systems with the existing information infrastructure. As part of our exploration of SemanticWeb technology, and DAML in particular, we have constructed ITTALKS, a web-based system for automatic and intelligent notification of information technology talks. In this paper, we describe the ITTALKS system, and discuss the numerous ways in which the use of Semantic Web concepts and DAML extend its ability to provide an intelligent online service to both the human community and the agents assisting them.
1375108
Centaurus: a framework for intelligent services in a mobile environment
In an age where wirelessly networked appliances and devices are becoming commonplace, there is a necessity for connecting them to work together for a mobile user. The design outlined in the paper provides an infrastructure and communication protocol for providing 'smart' services to these mobile devices. This flexible framework allows any medium to be used for communication between the system and the portable device, including infra-red, and BlueTooth. Using Extensible Markup Language (XML) for information passing, gives the system a uniform and easily adaptable interface. We explain our trade-offs in implementation and through experiments we show that the design is feasible and that it indeed provides a flexible structure for providing services. Centaurus provides a uniform infrastructure for heterogeneous services, both hardware and software services, to be made available to the users everywhere where they are needed.
8713624
Intelligent agents meet semantic web in a smart meeting room
We describe a new smart meeting room system called EasyMeeting that explores the use of FIPA agent technologies, Semantic Web ontologies, logic reasoning, and security and privacy policies. Building on a pervasive computing system that we have developed previously, EasyMeeting can provide relevant services and information to meeting participants based on their situational needs. Our system exploits the context-aware support provided by the Context Broker Architecture (CoBrA). Central to CoBrA is an intelligent broker agent that maintains a shared model of context for all computing entities in the space and enforces the privacy policies defined by the users. We also describe the use of CoBrA ontologies, logic reasoning, and privacy protection mechanisms, and evaluate our initial user experience studies.
31295380
Intelligent Agents for Mobile and Embedded Devices
The pervasive computing environments of the near future will involve the interactions, coordination and cooperation of numerous, casually accessible, and often invisible computing devices. These devices, whether carried on our person or embedded in our homes, businesses and classrooms, will connect via wireless and wired links to one another and to the global networking infrastructure. The result will be a networking milieu with a new level of openness. The localized and dynamic nature of their interactions raises many new issues that draw on and challenge the disciplines of agents, distributed systems, and security. This paper describes recent work by the UMBC Ebiquity research group which addresses some of these issues.
7036833
Dynamic Service Discovery for Mobile Computing: Intelligent Agents Meet Jini in the Aether
The emergence of ad-hoc pervasive connectivity for devices based on Bluetooth-like systems provides a new way to create applications for mobile systems. We seek to realize ubiquitous computing systems based on the cooperation of autonomous, dynamic and adaptive components (hardware as well as software) which are located in vicinity of one another. In this paper we present this vision. We also describe a prototype system we have developed that implements parts of this vision – in particular a system that combines agent oriented and service oriented approaches and provides dynamic service discovery. We point out why existing systems such as Jini are not suited for this task, and how our system improves on them.
32552978
A Knowledge-Based Design for Hypertext-Based Document Retrieval Systems
This paper presents some aspects of an ongoing research that. aims at incorporating knowledge-based search mechanisms into hypertext-based document retrieval systems. We propose an information structure that is grounded on a semantic network-based thesaurus. It serves to represent the documents and concepts (terms) involved in information retrieval. The second important component of our design is heuristics-based search mechanisms that were derived from our prior cognitive modeling study (which investigated the search strategies of expert searchers). By incorporating these components into a navigation-based hypertext, we attempt to create a system that facilitates effective and efficient information retrieval in a complex retrieval environment.
21103781
Biomedical Informatics and Security Informatics Research in Digital Library
The Internet is changing the way we live and do business. It offers a tremendous opportunity for libraries, governments, and businesses to better deliver its contents and services and interact with its many constituents. After ten years of active research, there appears to be a need towards advancing the science of “informatics” in digital library, especially in several non-traditional but critical application areas. In this paper, we introduce two promising informatics research areas for digital library researchers, namely, Biomedical Informatics and Security Informatics. We discuss some common research elements between these two areas and present several case studies that aim to highlight the relevance and importance of such research in digital library.
34160766
Capacity competition of make-to-order firms
Two make-to-order firms, each modelled as a single-server queue, compete for a common stream of (potential) customers by setting their service capacities (rates) and service prices. Each customer maximizes her expected return by getting service from a firm or by balking. We completely characterize the Nash equilibrium of the competition.
8488192
Session-based overload control in QoS-aware Web servers
With the explosive use of the Internet, contemporary Web servers are susceptible to overloads and their services deteriorate drastically and often cause denial of services. In this paper, we propose two methods to prevent and control overloads in Web servers by utilizing the session-based relationship among HTTP requests. We first exploited the dependence among session-based requests by analyzing and predicting the reference patterns. Using the dependency relationships, we have derived traffic conformation functions that can be used for capacity planning and overload prevention in Web servers. Second, we have proposed a dynamic weighted fair sharing (DWFS) scheduling algorithm to control overloads in Web servers. DWFS is distinguished from other scheduling algorithms in the sense that it aims to avoid processing of requests that belong to sessions that are likely to be aborted in the near future. The experimental results demonstrate that DWFS can improve server responsiveness by as high as 50% while providing QoS support through service differentiation for a class of application environment.
17605322
Motion Activity Based Semantic Video Similarity Retrieval
Semantic feature extraction of video shots and fast video sequence matching are important and required for efficient retrieval in a large video database. In this paper, a novel mechanism of similarity retrieval is proposed. Similarity measure between video sequences considering the spatio-temporal variation through consecutive frames is presented. For bridging the semantic gap between low-level features and the rich meaning that users desire to capture, video shots are analyzed and characterized by the high-level feature of motion activity in compressed domain. The extracted features of motion activity are further described by the 2D-histogram that is sensitive to the spatio-temporal variation of moving objects. In order to reduce the dimensions of feature vector space in sequence matching, Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) is exploited to map semantic features of consecutive frames to the frequency domain while retains the discriminatory information and preserves the Euclidean distance between feature vectors. Experiments are performed on MPEG-7 testing videos, and the results of sequence matching show that a few DCT transformed coefficients are adequate and thus reveal the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism of video retrieval.