CAN THE GALAXY'S GROWING VIOLENCE BE STOPPED? Captain Kirk and his crew are on a mission to investigate the mysterious wave of violence that has overtaken the Helvans -- revolutions, mass riots, horrible tortures. This chaos is all part of an experiment by an unimaginable power that soon grips even the crew of the U.S.S. EnterpriseTM. Captain Kirk is plagued by violent hallucinations and removed from command. Spock takes charge but his orders seem irrational -- even cruel. Unless this terrible power can be stopped, not only the Starship Enterprise, but an entire galaxy will be ensnared in the deadly grip of the... Prometheus Design.
"The book presents, analyzes and compares the most significant methodological approaches currently available for the creation of agent-oriented software systems"--Provided by publisher.
Software architectures that contain many dynamically interacting components, each with its own thread of control, engaging in complex coordination protocols, are difficult to correctly and efficiently engineer. Agent-oriented modelling techniques are important for the design and development of such applications. This book provides a diverse and interesting overview of the work that is currently being undertaken by a growing number of researchers in the area of Agent-Oriented Software Engineering. This volume constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Agent-Oriented Software Engineering, AOSE 2007, held in Honolulu, Hawaii in May 2007 as part of AAMAS 2007. The 16 revised full papers were carefully selected from numerous submissions during two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The volume contains the papers presented at the workshop, together with papers resulting from discussions on tools and platforms. The papers have been organized into four sections on: methodology and processes, interacting heterogeneous agents, system development issues, and tools and case studies.
Build your own intelligent agent system... Intelligent agent technology is a tool of modern computer science that can be used to engineer complex computer programmes that behave rationally in dynamic and changing environments. Applications range from small programmes that intelligently search the Web buying and selling goods via electronic commerce, to autonomous space probes. This powerful technology is not widely used, however, as developing intelligent agent software requires high levels of training and skill. The authors of this book have developed and tested a methodology and tools for developing intelligent agent systems. With this methodology (Prometheus) developers can start agent-oriented designs and implementations easily from scratch saving valuable time and resources. Developing Intelligent Agent Systems not only answers the questions “what are agents?” and “why are they useful?” but also the crucial question: “how do I design and build intelligent agent systems?” The book covers everything a practitioner needs to know to begin to effectively use this technology - including an introduction to the notion of agents, a description of the concepts involved, and a software engineering methodology. Read on for: a practical step-by-step introduction to designing and building intelligent agent systems. a full life-cycle methodology for developing intelligent agent systems covering specification, analysis, design and implementation of agents. PDT: Prometheus Design Tool – software support for the Prometheus design process. the example of an electronic bookstore to illustrate the design process throughout the book. Electronic resources including the Prometheus Design Tool (PDT), can be found at: http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/agents/prometheus This book is aimed at industrial software developers, software engineers and at advanced undergraduate students. It assumes knowledge of basic software engineering but does not require knowledge of Artificial Intelligence or of mathematics. Familiarity with Java will help in reading the examples in chapter 10.
What place does motivation have in the lives of intelligent agents? Mele's answer is sensitive to the concerns of philosophers of mind and moral philosophers and informed by empirical work. He offers a distinctive, comprehensive, attractive view of human agency. This book stands boldly at the intersection of philosophy of mind, moral philosophy, and metaphysics.
In Japan there are robots that guide customers through marketplaces advising them where to find the product matching their needs, and realistic replicas of university professors allow them to teach their lectures a hundred kilometers away from the classroom. Not to speak about intelligent prostheses and remote high-precision surgery.
The explosive growth of application areas such as electronic commerce, ent- prise resource planning and mobile computing has profoundly and irreversibly changed our views on software systems. Nowadays, software is to be based on open architectures that continuously change and evolve to accommodate new components and meet new requirements. Software must also operate on di?- ent platforms, without recompilation, and with minimal assumptions about its operating environment and its users. Furthermore, software must be robust and ̈ autonomous, capable of serving a naive user with a minimum of overhead and interference. Agent concepts hold great promise for responding to the new realities of software systems. They o?er higher-level abstractions and mechanisms which address issues such as knowledge representation and reasoning, communication, coordination, cooperation among heterogeneous and autonomous parties, p- ception, commitments, goals, beliefs, and intentions, all of which need conceptual modelling. On the one hand, the concrete implementation of these concepts can lead to advanced functionalities, e.g., in inference-based query answering, tra- action control, adaptive work?ows, brokering and integration of disparate inf- mation sources, and automated communication processes. On the other hand, their rich representational capabilities allow more faithful and ?exible treatments of complex organizational processes, leading to more e?ective requirements an- ysis and architectural/detailed design.
This book presents a coherent, well-balanced survey of recent advances in software engineering approaches to the design and analysis of realistic large-scale multi-agent systems (MAS). The chapters included are devoted to various techniques and methods used to cope with the complexity of real-world MAS. Reflecting the importance of agent properties in today's software systems, the power of agent-based software engineering is illustrated using examples that are representative of successful applications.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the workshops which complemented the 13th International Conference on Practical Applications of Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, PAAMS 2015, held in Salamanca, Spain, in June 2015. The 36 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 91 submissions. This volume presents the papers that have been accepted for the following workshops: Workshop on Agents and multi-agent Systems for AAL and e-HEALTH, Workshop on Agent-Based Solutions for Manufacturing and Supply Chain, Workshop on MAS for Complex Networks and Social Computation, Workshop on Intelligent Systems for Context-based Information Fusion, Workshop on Multi-agent based Applications for Smart Grids and Sustainable Energy Systems, Workshop on Multiagent System based Learning Environments, Workshop in Intelligent Human-Agent Societies.
Through four decades, five television series comprising over seven hundred episodes, ten feature films, and an animated series, fandom's thirst for more Star Trek stories has been unquenchable. From the earliest short-story adaptations by James Blish in the 1960s, followed by the first original Star Trek novels during the seventies, and on throughout the eighties, nineties, and into the twenty-first century, fiction has offered an unparalleled expansion of the rich Star Trek tapestry. But what is it that makes these books such a powerfully attractive creative outlet to some and a compelling way to experience the Star Trek mythos anew to others? Voyages of Imagination takes a look back on the first forty years of professionally published Star Trek fiction, revealing the personalities and sensibilities of many of the novels' imaginative contributors and offering an unprecedented glimpse into the creative processes, the growing pains, the risks, the innovations, the missteps, and the great strides taken in the books. Author Jeff Ayers has immersed himself in nearly six hundred books and interviewed more than three hundred authors and editors in order to compile this definitive guide to the history and evolution of an incomparable publishing phenomenon. Fully illustrated with the covers of every book included herein, Voyages of Imagination is indexed by title and author, features a comprehensive timeline, and is a must-have for every fan.
