Download - DIET: Decentralised Information Ecosystem Technologies Paul Marrow Intelligent Systems Laboratory
DIET: Decentralised Information Ecosystem Technologies
Paul MarrowIntelligent Systems Laboratory
© British Telecommunications plc, 2003 DIET @ UIE 2
DIET: Some history
At BT, involved in development of applications drawing inspiration from nature since (at least) 1995
Common interest with other partners in developing software systems bringing together many interacting entities
Hence, when European Commission declared interest in information ecosystems… DIET
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Universal Information Ecosystems
What was said in the call: Information Ecosystem
- vision of future information devices interacting in many complex ways akin to natural ecosystems
- populated by infohabitants devices, virtual entities software agents individuals organisations
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The Real Thing
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Why DIET?
Decentralised- run applications made of many distributed entities
(mobile agents)- collaboration without need for centralised control
Information Ecosystem- manage information through interaction of many
entities- analogous to interactions in natural ecosystems
Technologies- basis for deployment of distributed technologies
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Involvement and roles
BTexact Technologies
Technical University of Crete
DFKI
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Visualisation
Economic interaction
Information brokering
Information filtering and mining
Core platform
Applications
Coordination
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Progress
WP1: The DIET Platform WP2: Information Alert WP3: Information Brokering WP5: Visualisation WP6: Dissemination and Exploitation
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The DIET platform> architecture
Applicationlayer
ARC layer
Core layer
Applicationreusableservices
Applicationcomponents
Visualisationcomponents
Validationcomponents
DIET platform kernelDebugging &visualisationkernel
Debugging &visualisationcomponents
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DIET platform kernel> overview
The “physics” of the DIET ecosystem Hierarchy of elements
- Universe, World, Environment, Infohabitant (=Agent), Connection, Message
DIET environment provides:- Agent creation- Agent destruction- Agent migration- Agent communication
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Lightweight agents> infohabitants
Agents can be very lightweight: Need only one thread...
- Event portal
… or even no thread!- Thread sharing
Connection contexts avoid look-up tables 500000 Agents on single machine.
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Thread sharing
ThreadPool
Environment
Environment
Environment
ThreadPool
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Decentralisation
Architecture fully decentralised No central agent naming scheme
- Agents have identities assigned locally- Identities are randomly initialised bitstrings
No central world registry- World neighbourhoods defined in P2P fashion- Connections between worlds created on demand
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The platform: further directions
Basis for research within DIET Basis for application development within
BTexact Scenarios for third-party licensing under
investigation
See Marrow et al. (2001); Hoile et al. (2002)
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Information Retrieval, Filtering and Mining
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid- with Technical University of Crete
Used DIET platform as basis to build societies of agents engaged in information push and pull tasks
Can use these agents to construct information retrieval, filtering and mining applications with which to validate the performance of the system
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I-Gaia: the world of Infocytes
TI
TI
TIMI
MI
MIMI
see Gallardo-Antolin et al. (2002)
SI
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Information Brokering
Technical University of Crete- together with BTexact Technologies- and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Models for the brokering of information in information ecosystem middleware
Implementation of brokering systems based on DIET platform
Development of self-organising communities application
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An Open Information Ecosystem
MiddlewareMiddleware
usersInformationconsumers
information sources
Informationproducers
queries/profiles
information
information
information
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Visualisation
DFKI (Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliches Intelligenz)
Simple visualizer of multi-agent system constructed early in project
Later work developing more complex user and development interface
See van Lengen & Bähr (2002)
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Visualisation> architecture
Applicationlayer
ARC layer
Core layer
Applicationreusableservices
Applicationcomponents
Visualisationcomponents
Validationcomponents
DIET platform kernelDebugging &visualisationkernel
Debugging &visualisationcomponents
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Visualisation
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Visualisation> further directions
Provision of different views of DIET multi-agent system
Interface to allow visual programming of DIET systems
Different approaches to debugging of DIET applications
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Dissemination and Exploitation
Dissemination- all partners
see e.g. references
Exploitation- BTexact Technologies leads application
development- Implementation of experimental scenarios- Development together with other projects
DIET providing infrastructure
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Examples
Self-organising communities Evolving preferences SWAN and DIET
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Self-organising communities> ideas
Flexible and effective organisation Organised by middle agents Users’ expressed characteristics
- track user preferences/interests from user behaviour
- no difficult user preference representation or matching problems
Flexible, scalable, robust, distributed
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Self-organising communities> implementation
User agents- register/unregister with a middle agent- initiate a query/process query results
Middleman agents- search scheme- award scheme- exchange scheme
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Formation of communities
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Self-organising communities> results
Algorithm is highly scalable Improves speed of search for users Now basis for further application
development- see Wang (2002)
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Evolving group preferences
Facilitating interaction between users in different environments
Using scout agents to locate alternative environments for communication
Selecting for improved adaptation to environments
Combining agent population with evolutionary algorithm
Using evolutionary algorithm to evolve preferences
See Marrow et al. (2002)
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Scout SuccessSingle Category
8 Users
128 Users
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Environment PreferenceSingle Category
8 Users
128 Users
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Changing scout success
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SWAN: Nodes in p2p system
Physical network
522
921 773
391
13.10.2.7
13.10.2.4
25.2.12.4
25.10.13.5
18.6.5.15494
identity (location-independent)address
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SWAN: Node look-up for p2p
Problem: identity of node address of node?
Peer-to-peer (p2p) domain requires:- fully decentralised system - yet robust and scalable
Solution: - Let nodes self-organise into a Small World
Network (SWN)- Use SWN to find nodes
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Complementary Technologies
DIET - fail-fast- fully decentralised- indefinitely scalable, but no global addressing
SWAN- failure tolerant- fully decentralised- highly scalable global addressing system
See Bonsma & Hoile (2002)
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Discussion
Activities in DIET covering a range of research directions
Information ecosystem as implemented does not stick closely to biological inspiration
But provides useful infrastructure for a variety of experiments and applications
How will this be used in the future? What links are possible with results of other
projects?
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Discussion
How can results from information ecosystems projects contribute to the emergence of...
- peer-to-peer computing- ad-hoc mobile computing- ubiquitous computing- pervasive computing
How integrate these areas with agent technologies in information ecosystems?
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References Marrow, P, M. Koubarakis, R.H. van Lengen, F. Valverde-Albacete, E. Bonsma, J. Cid-Suerio, A.R.
Figueiras-Vidal, A. Gallardo-Antolín, C. Hoile, T. Koutris, H. Molina-Bulla, A. Navia-Vázquez, P. Raftopoulou, N. Skarmeas, C. Tryfonopoulos, F. Wang, C. Xiruhaki (2001) Agents in Decentralised Information Ecosystems: The DIET Approach. In: Proceedings of Symposium on Intelligent Agents for E-commerce, AISB01 (2001 Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour) Convention, University of York, April 2001.
Bonsma, E. & Hoile, C. (2002) A distributed implementation of the SWAN peer-to-peer look-up system using mobile agents. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 2002 (AAMAS2002), tba, Bologna, July 2002.
Gallardo-Antolín, A., Navia-Vázquez, A., Molina-Bulla, H.Y., Rodríguez-González, A.B, Valverde-Albacete, F.J., Cid-Sueiro, J., Figueiras-Vidal, A.R., Koutris, T., Xirouhaki, C. & Koubarakis, M. (2002) I-Gaia: an Information Processing Layer for the DIET Platform. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 2002 (AAMAS2002), pp. 1272-1279, Bologna, July 2002.
Hoile, C., Wang, F., Bonsma, E. & Marrow, P. (2002) Core specification and experiments in DIET: a decentralised ecosystem-inspired mobile agent system. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 2002 (AAMAS2002), pp. 623-630, Bologna, July 2002.
van Lengen, R.H. & Bähr, J.-T. (2002) Visualisation and debugging of decentralised information ecosystems. In: Proceedings of Dagstuhl Seminar on Software Visualization, Dagstuhl, February 2002. Springer, Berlin.
Marrow, P., Hoile, C., Wang, F. & Bonsma, E.R. (2002) Evolving preferences among emergent groups of agents. In: Proceedings of Symposium on Adaptive Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS-II), AISB02 (2002 Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour) Convention, Imperial College, London, April 2002.
Wang, F. (2002) Self-organising communities formed by middle agents. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 2002 (AAMAS2002), pp. 1333-1339, Bologna, July 2002.
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Acknowledgements
BTexact DIET team- Erwin Bonsma, Cefn Hoile, Fang Wang
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid- Francisco Valverde-Albacete et al.
Technical University of Crete- Manolis Koubarakis et al.
Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliches Intelligenz
- Rolf van Lengen et al.