CS 64995/74995 Distributed AI Systems and Languages
Instructor: Dr. Arvind Bansal
Office:  Room 214, Mathematics and Computer Science Building
Contact: 672-4004 ext. 214,  arvind@mcs.kent.edu
 

Motivation

Agent based systems integrated with distributed computing are becoming an essential part of AI
programming, and promise to replace complex systems such as monitoring systems, continuous diagnostic systems, process control systems, decision support systems, and Internet based search engines.  A group of agents can be mapped on a one or more computers to  perform very complex task.

In such a system, there are many major issues: providing fault tolerance to provide reliability in face of computer failure,  development of user friendly languages, handling of multi-agent systems and programming multi-agent based systems.  This course will provide the foundation for Fault Tolerant distributed computing, provide foundations for belief based multi-agent systems, review the current agent based languages and programming paradigm, and discuss research issues involved in the development of foundation and languages for fault tolerant distributed AI systems.

Content

Introduction to Fault Tolerance: phases in fault tolerance, overview of hardware fault tolerance, reliability and availability; Distributed Systems: system model, interprocess communication, ordering of events and logical clocks; Basic Building Blocks: Byzantine agreement, synchronized clocks, stable storage, fail stop processors, failure detection and fault diagnosis, reliable message delivery; Reliable Atomic and Causal Broadcast: reliable broadcast, atomic broadcast, causal broadcast; Recovering a consistent state: Asynchronous checkpointing and roll back, distributed checkpointing, replication, semantic checkpointing.

Introduction to agents,  Reactive agents, Agent Architectures, Belief systems consistency, Beliefs, desires, and intentions in agent based systems, Multi-based systems,  Co-operating logical agents, behavior based agents, Agent based languages and their evaluation, agent based searches, agents and interaction, Adaptation and learning in Multiagent based systems, Fault Tolerance and recovery in multi agent based systems

Reference Books

  1. Fault Tolerance in Distributed Systems by Pankaj Jalote, Publisher: Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, ISBN 0-13-301367-7
  2. Intelligent agents - Theories, Architectures, and Languages edited by Michael Woolridge and Nicholas Jennings, Publisher: Springer Verlag, Volume 890, ISBN 3-540-58855-8, 1995
  3. Intelligent Agents II - Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages edited by Michael Wooldridge, J. Muller, and M. Tambe, Volume 1037, ISBN 3-540-60805-2
In addition many research papers and currently available thesis and available system architectures will be discussed.

Grading      Assignments (30 %), One mid term (30 %), Final project (40 %)