Daniela D'Aloisi

Coordinating space telescope operations in an integrated planning and scheduling architecture

The heuristic scheduling testbed system (HSTS), a software architecture for integrated planning and scheduling, is discussed. The architecture has been applied to the problem of generating observation schedules for the Hubble Space Telescope. This problem is representative of the class of problems that can be addressed: their complexity lies in the interaction of resource allocation and auxiliary task expansion. The architecture deals with this interaction by viewing planning and scheduling as two complementary aspects of the more general process of constructing behaviors of a dynamical system. The principal components of the software architecture are described, indicating how to model the structure and dynamics of a system, how to represent schedules at multiple levels of abstraction in the temporal database and how the problem solving machinery operates. A scheduler for the detailed management of Hubble Space Telescope operations that has been developed within HSTS is described. Experimental performance results are given that indicate the utility and practicality of the approach. >

Fostering social interaction of home-bound elderly people: the easyreach system

This paper presents the EasyReach system, a tool that aims at getting the elderly and pre-digital divide population closer to new technologies by creating a simplified social enviroment that facilitates interaction, trying to allow them to (i) easily keep in contact with friends and relatives, (ii) share their lifetime expertise, and (iii) avoid isolation. The EasyReach tool creates for the elderly a special social TV channel accessed by means of their own TV set and a specialized remote control endowed with gesture recognition, video and audio capture capabilities. A hidden personal assistant reasons on user preferences in the background allowing better focalization on his/her social interests.

A Framework for Dealing with Belief-Goal Dynamics

This paper illustrates the Goal Dynamics theory, a proposal for dealing with some crucial aspects of “goal revision”, bas belief revision, one of the most fundamental aspects in a cognitive agent architecture. The theory concerns the relationships between beliefs, goals and intention; moreover it shows the different forms that goals and intentions can assume according to the status of their supporting beliefs. Since beliefs support goals and intentions in the various phases of their processing, it is possible demonstrate how the acquisition or the elimination of beliefs brings to goal activation—and then to actuate the intention—or their suspension or withdrawal.

Propositional and terminological knowledge representations

Abstract Formalisms based on a propositional representation demonstrate a high representational competence because of their flexibility, properties, and their great expression power, even if they often fail to represent the meaning of the nodes that make up the propositional networks. The presence of a network of definitions would make the representation richer, and would augment the expressiveness and the inferential capabilities of the whole system: the twofold architecture of the hybrid systems seems to be suitable to satisfy these prerequisites. Nevertheless, the hybrid systems fail to clearly define the intensional and extensional levels of knowledge. This paper proposes a different distribution of tasks between the two parts of a hybrid system on the ground of a precise distinction among intensional, mental extensional, and extensional aspects of knowledge. Moreover, it suggests employing a propositional approach also for arranging the abstract definitions of the terminological box. These principles...

Tailorable interactive agents for scheduling meetings

This paper presents Masma, an interactive agent-based system able to assist users in managing their personal agendas. In Masma different tasks are carried out by agents endowed with different capabilities. The paper mainly concerns the interface agents, here called Meeting Agents, that directly interact with users. In particular, capabilities are described that allow the agents to customize their behaviors according to user preferences and to participate to multiple meeting negotiations following different contextual preferences. Issues are also shown that allow the users to maintain control over the delegated task. Examples of interactions are presented to support the particular solutions developed.

Active interfaces for useful software tools

Abstract The majority of public domain software tools is endowed with programmer-oriented interfaces and, as a consequence, they are mainly devoted to ”hackers” or specialized programmers. This paper concerns the development of an active interface used to make the utilization of a free software for filtering e-mail messages easy. A multi-agent implementation of an interface is proposed that from one side allows the user to easily specify his needs and from another actively reasons on the users choices to improve the performance of the filtering process.

A Terminological Language for Representing Complex Knowledge

This paper describes the current implementation of KRAM, a hybrid system for knowledge representation that is part of a project whose task is to build a realistic model of how agents interact with each other and with the external world: the simulation should be embodied in a cooperative and user-friendly interface for an information system.