Today I have finished my final thesis proposal report. This report also includes the state-of-the-art related with the subject of my thesis proposal. At 5:00 pm I will have to present this report to my colleagues, teachers and supervisor. After the presentation I will post a summary of the most important features, methodologies and tools of Roster Tracker, the name of the proposed system. For now you can have access to the full report, presentation and documents referenced in my thesis proposal through the following links:
Thesis Proposal: Roster Tracker - An Intelligent Way of Monitoring Airline Operations
Thesis Proposal Presentation: Roster Tracker
Wednesday, July 27, 2005
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
Comments about Michael N. Huhns paper "Software Development with Objects, Agents and Services"
During the reading of this paper I was able to spot some interesting ideas to explore during my thesis. I'm going tho share with all of you those ideas. In this post I will discuss only a few. If you want to read the original document just click the title of this post. If your prefer to read my detailed notes, click here.
In this paper Michael Huhns talks about SOC - Service Oriented Computing. According to him "it is a process of discovering and composing the proper services to satisfy a specification, whether the specification is expressed in terms of goal, a workflow (tasks), or some other model". One of the challenges for SOC is that it is necessary an Organization of Services in the repository (of services), something that does not happen nowadays. Among other things, it is necessary an infrastructure to enable discovery of pertinent objects. I know that there are some research related with this subject (for example X. Dong, J. Madhavan and A. Halevy paper "Mining Structures for Semantics"), however, I think we could try a different approach: consider a repository of web services meta-data and, given a specific service we are looking for, characterize that service in terms of meta-data and, according to the k-NN ranking method, receive a recommended ranking of existing web services to use. A mandatory characteristic of the meta-data has to be an excellent semantic definition of the web service.
The main focus of the paper is about Consensus Software, ie, the approach proposed by Michael. It seems to me that he is reflecting about a society of agents in a large scale, where an agent, after arriving to that society, could identify other agents to help him in realizing the tasks he has to fulfill. A lot of questions regarding security and so, arise from this moment on. But I think it is a very interesting vision.
Another interesting thought is that "as societies attempt to coordinate and control their members use of utilities and resources, individuals should have a means to influence the coordination and control based on their preferences...". For me the concept of democratization in software it's something important to explore: to leave the centralized perspective and allow users express their preferences. For this to be possible it is necessary to define objectives and constraints and, then, let the users express themselves. In the crew-scheduling problem, for example, this would allow the crewmembers to express their choice for the monthly crew roster. The objective would be to have Active systems that, after learning the user's preferences, could intercede on behalf of the user, when the decision has to be made.
Other things that might be useful for my thesis: Redundancy and Robustness. Just like in a cockpit of an airplane there are some replicated instruments and some of them using different technology, I could use different agents that try to solve the same problem using different algorithms. Using this approach I can increase the robustness of the application and, if I use a good criteria, I will have the opportunity to choose the best one among the several solutions.
Two more things before finish:
In this paper Michael Huhns talks about SOC - Service Oriented Computing. According to him "it is a process of discovering and composing the proper services to satisfy a specification, whether the specification is expressed in terms of goal, a workflow (tasks), or some other model". One of the challenges for SOC is that it is necessary an Organization of Services in the repository (of services), something that does not happen nowadays. Among other things, it is necessary an infrastructure to enable discovery of pertinent objects. I know that there are some research related with this subject (for example X. Dong, J. Madhavan and A. Halevy paper "Mining Structures for Semantics"), however, I think we could try a different approach: consider a repository of web services meta-data and, given a specific service we are looking for, characterize that service in terms of meta-data and, according to the k-NN ranking method, receive a recommended ranking of existing web services to use. A mandatory characteristic of the meta-data has to be an excellent semantic definition of the web service.
The main focus of the paper is about Consensus Software, ie, the approach proposed by Michael. It seems to me that he is reflecting about a society of agents in a large scale, where an agent, after arriving to that society, could identify other agents to help him in realizing the tasks he has to fulfill. A lot of questions regarding security and so, arise from this moment on. But I think it is a very interesting vision.
Another interesting thought is that "as societies attempt to coordinate and control their members use of utilities and resources, individuals should have a means to influence the coordination and control based on their preferences...". For me the concept of democratization in software it's something important to explore: to leave the centralized perspective and allow users express their preferences. For this to be possible it is necessary to define objectives and constraints and, then, let the users express themselves. In the crew-scheduling problem, for example, this would allow the crewmembers to express their choice for the monthly crew roster. The objective would be to have Active systems that, after learning the user's preferences, could intercede on behalf of the user, when the decision has to be made.
Other things that might be useful for my thesis: Redundancy and Robustness. Just like in a cockpit of an airplane there are some replicated instruments and some of them using different technology, I could use different agents that try to solve the same problem using different algorithms. Using this approach I can increase the robustness of the application and, if I use a good criteria, I will have the opportunity to choose the best one among the several solutions.
Two more things before finish:
- Agent-based Web Services.
According to Michael they are the answer for the communication among the heterogeneous objects in such a "distributed active-object architecture". I should analyze the new developments in JADE plataform regarding implementation of Web Services and study how to use them in my thesis. - Agent-oriented methodologies.
Agent UML, MAS-CommonKADS and GAIA, are the most investigated and applied. I should consider one of them to use in my thesis.
This concludes part of my reflection regarding this paper. If you want to read my detailed notes, just click here.
Friday, July 08, 2005
Neural Networks Summer School 2005
During this week (4 to 8th of July 2005) I participate in the NN Summer School 2005 in ISEP, Porto. My goal was to learn more about NN in particular and Learning in general and, of course, to have some inspiration and ideas to be used in my thesis. My "Moleskine" is full of notes that I was able to take during the school. Lectures from Chris Bishop and Juergen Schmidhuber as well as from many others were really inspiring. In the next few weeks I will post some of them here, just in time for my Thesis Project presentation at the end of this month.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
