15221918
Maintaining the Identity of Dynamically Embodied Agents
Virtual agents are traditionally constrained in their embodiment, as they are restricted to one form of body. We propose allowing them to change their embodiment in order to expand their capabilities. This presents users with a number of difficulties in maintaining the identity of the agents, but these can be overcome by using identity cues, certain features that remain constant across embodiment forms. This paper outlines an experiment that examines these identity cues, and shows that they can be used to help address this identity problem.
10076896
Agent Assistance for 3D World Navigation
This paper presents mechanisms and approaches to assist user navigation and exploration within 3-dimensional worlds. Specifically, we advocate the deployment of an agent based approach for dynamic system assistance and intervention. An algorithm has been developed, that produces a performance measure, which is employed by the intelligent agent to activate system interventions. We outline the importance of providing discrete navigational cues to users in order to increase their sense of immersion and their overall satisfaction while working within the 3D world. We present HADES - the Home of the Adaptive Environmental System, which is a 3-dimensional world within which the intelligent agent is immersed. The agent therefore has the ability to transform this 3D world into an intelligent environment. HADES reacts proactively to users' movements and offers navigational help indirectly. Indirect navigational support increases the user's satisfaction with his own performance and therefore endorses the user's sense of immersion.
16348358
Agent Chameleons: Virtual Agents Real Intelligence
Agent Chameleons provides virtual agents powered by real intelligence, delivering next generation autonomic entities that can seamlessly migrate, mutate and evolve on their journey between and within physical and digital information spaces.
10352274
The AMPERE Algorithm - Area-Based Masking with the Performance Equation
The18th International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Symposium (FLAIRS-2005), May 16th-18th, Clearwater Beach, Florida
14479325
Bus catcher: a context sensitive prototype system for public transportation users
In this paper we describe the architectural andfunctional characteristics of Bus Catcher, a contextsensitive prototype system for public transportation users.Bus Catcher assists mobile users in planning their busrides by providing timely and accurate information aboutcurrent bus locations and estimated arrival times. Acomplete report on the implementation together with apreliminary evaluation of the system is provided in thispaper.
14876854
Security principles for public-resource modeling research
Large-scale distributed computing projects have many security concerns due to their public and often "open" nature. Climateprediction.net (CPDN) is taking the concept of public-resource, high-throughput grid computing a stage further, by using it for a major piece of modeling research. The aim is to harness the spare CPU cycles of potentially millions of individual users' PCs to run a massive ensemble of climate simulations. In doing so it has been faced with a range of security and integrity issues beyond those encountered by previous projects but likely also to confront similar initiatives in the future. This paper introduces the project and its software architecture, and outlines a threat model for such situations, including threats to participants, threats to the experiment and threats to other stakeholders. It goes on to discuss how these threats have been addressed, with the procedures presented expected to form a valuable foundation for an increasing number of similar projects.
2188414
Agents in bioinformatics, computational and systems biology
The adoption of agent technologies and multi-agent systems constitutes an emerging area in bioinformatics. In this article, we report on the activity of the Working Group on Agents in Bioinformatics (BIOAGENTS) founded during the first AgentLink III Technical Forum meeting on the 2nd of July, 2004, in Rome. The meeting provided an opportunity for seeding collaborations between the agent and bioinformatics communities to develop a different (agent-based) approach of computational frameworks both for data analysis and management in bioinformatics and for systems modelling and simulation in computational and systems biology. The collaborations gave rise to applications and integrated tools that we summarize and discuss in context of the state of the art in this area. We investigate on future challenges and argue that the field should still be explored from many perspectives ranging from bio-conceptual languages for agent-based simulation, to the definition of bio-ontology-based declarative languages to be used by information agents, and to the adoption of agents for computational grids.
26464031
A Taxonomy of Web Services Using CSP
Terms such as conversational and stateless are widely used in the taxonomy of web services. We give formal definitions of these terms using the CSP process algebra. Within this framework we also define the notion of Service-Oriented Architecture. These definitions are then used to prove important scalability properties of stateless services. The use of formalism should allow recent debates, concerning how and whether web services provide standardized access to state, to progress more rigorously.
33375279
Mapping PDB chains to UniProtKB entries
MOTIVATION
UniProtKB/SwissProt is the main resource for detailed annotations of protein sequences. This database provides a jumping-off point to many other resources through the links it provides. Among others, these include other primary databases, secondary databases, the Gene Ontology and OMIM. While a large number of links are provided to Protein Data Bank (PDB) files, obtaining a regularly updated mapping between UniProtKB entries and PDB entries at the chain or residue level is not straightforward. In particular, there is no regularly updated resource which allows a UniProtKB/SwissProt entry to be identified for a given residue of a PDB file.


RESULTS
We have created a completely automatically maintained database which maps PDB residues to residues in UniProtKB/SwissProt and UniProtKB/trEMBL entries. The protocol uses links from PDB to UniProtKB, from UniProtKB to PDB and a brute-force sequence scan to resolve PDB chains for which no annotated link is available. Finally the sequences from PDB and UniProtKB are aligned to obtain a residue-level mapping.


AVAILABILITY
The resource may be queried interactively or downloaded from http://www.bioinf.org.uk/pdbsws/.
6469757
Teaching Formal Methods in Context
The Software Engineering Programme at Oxford teaches formal methods as an integral part of its programme of professional education in software engineering. This paper explains how the methods are taught—in the context of emerging trends in software development, and in the context of existing practice—and how their use is promoted through course design and motivating examples.