Browsing by Author "Peter R. Wurman, Member"

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    Commitment-Based Interoperation for E-Commerce
    (2001-07-11) Xing, Jie; Muninda P. Singh, Chair; William J. Stewart, Member; Malden A. Vouk, Member; Peter R. Wurman, Member
    Successful e-commerce presupposes techniques by which autonomous trading entities can interoperate. Although much progress has been made on data exchange and payment protocols, interoperation in the face of autonomy is still inadequately understood. Current techniques, designed for closed environments, support only the simplest interactions.This dissertation concentrates on two themes. First, we develop a generic agent interaction model that supports agent coordination. We propose metacommitment patterns, which accommodate revisions and exceptions, to model agent interaction. We formalize metacommitment patterns declaratively in temporal logic. We apply statecharts to specify behavior models of agents who follow our commitment patterns. The statecharts provide an operational semantics, which can be used as a rigorous basis for agent coordination. We propose agent behavior models and prove that it operationally supports our temporal logic semantics. In this manner, we provide the basis for formally designing coordinated multiagent systems. Second, we apply agent behavior models for interoperation in e-commerce. This approach consists of (1) behavioral models to specify autonomous, heterogeneous agents representing different trading entities (businesses, consumers, brokers), (2) a metamodel that provides a language (based on XML) for specifying a variety of service agreements and accommodating exceptions and revisions, and (3) an execution architecture that supports persistent and dynamic (re)execution. Our implementation uses existing Java tool kits for parsing XML and building communicating agents. The main contributions of this dissertation are in developing some theoretical aspects of agent interaction with an emphasis on e-commerce.In addition, the proposed approach can also provide a rigorous basis for future standards for interoperation in e-commerce.
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    Emergence and Evolution of Agent-Based Referral Networks
    (2002-02-01) Yu, Bin; Munindar P. Singh, Chair; Henry A. Kautz, Member; James C. Lester, Member; Carla D. Savage, Member; Peter R. Wurman, Member
    Numerous studies have shown that interpersonal communication acts as an important channel for gathering information. But if we wish to rely oninterpersonal communication, we still need to figure out how to determinethe right person to ask. Usually we cannot find the potential expert(s) directly, and we need some assistance from our friends or friends' friends to locate them. The phenomenon of Six Degrees of Separation indicates that it is possible to use some intelligent software agents, who can interpret the links between people and follow only therelevant one, to find the desired experts quickly. A computational model of agent-based referral networks was proposed to assist and simplify the users to find potential experts for a specified topic in a person-to-person social network, in which each user is assigned a softwareagent, and software agents help automate the process by a series of "referral chains''. Unlike most previous approaches, our architecture is fully distributed and includes agents who preserve the privacy and autonomy oftheir users. These agents learn models of each other in terms of expertise(ability to produce correct domain answers), and sociability (ability to produce accurate referrals). We study this framework experimentally to see the effects that the different variables have on each other and the efficiencyof the referral networks. Furthermore, a social mechanism of reputation management was proposed tohelp agents (users) avoid interaction with undesirable participants inthe referral networks. The mathematical theory of evidence is used torepresent and propagate the reputation information in a referral network.Our approach adjusts the ratings of agents based on their observations as well the testimony from others. Moreover, we conducted several experimentsto study the reputation management in different settings. Social mechanismsare even more important when some centralized reputation managementmechanisms, i.e., trusted third parties, are not available. Our specific approach to reputation management leads to a decentralized society in which agents help each other weed out undesirable players.