Nicolas Lhuillier

An approach to agent-based service composition and its application to mobile business processes

This paper describes an architecture model for multiagent systems that was developed in the European project LEAP (Lightweight Extensible Agent Platform). Its main feature is a set of generic services that are implemented independently of the agents and can be installed into the agents by the application developer in a flexible way. Moreover, two applications using this architecture model are described that were also developed within the LEAP project. The application domain is the support of mobile, virtual teams for the German automobile club ADAC and for British Telecommunications.

Addressing uncertainty in implicit preferences

The increasing amount of content available via digital television has made TV program recommenders valuable tools. In order to provide personalized recommendations, recommender systems need to collect information about user preferences. Since users are reluctant to invest much time in explicitly expressing their interests, preferences often need to be implicitly inferred through data gathered by monitoring user behavior. Which is, alas, less reliable. This article addresses the problem of learning TV preferences based on tracking the programs users have watched, whilst dealing with the varying degrees of reliability in such information. Three approaches to the problem are discussed: use all information equally; weight information by its reliability or simply discard the most unreliable information. Experimental results for these three approaches are presented and compared using a content-based filtering recommender built on a Naïve Bayes classifier.

More Like This or Not for Me: Delivering Personalised Recommendations in Multi-user Environments

The television as a multi-user device presents some specificities with respect to personalisation. Recommendations should be provided both per-viewers as well as for a group. Recognising the inadequacy of traditional user modelling techniques with the constraint of televisions lazy watching usage patterns, this paper presents a new recommendation mechanism based on anonymous user preferences and dynamic filtering of recommendations. Results from an initial user study indicate this mechanism was able to provide content recommendations to individual users within a multi-user environment with a high level of user satisfaction and without the need for user authentication or individual preference profile creation.

Dealing with interoperability for agent-based services

Interoperability problems occur when developing agent systems with a strong notion of autonomy while interacting with other agents. The agent platform has become the intelligent distributed operating system for agent applications and therefore the support of much of the interoperability between agents will be through the platforms themselves. With the possibility of inter- platform interoperability comes support for open services that goes beyond current open agent architectures. This paper looks at the design issues of interoperability that need to be addressed on both the communication and application levels. It identifies solutions to some of these issues and defines a set of components, which are implemented and tested as a toolkit, in order to support Open Agent Service Architecture development and deployment.