Giovanni Rimassa, Whitestein Technologies AG

Giovanni Rimassa is currently employed in a Senior Researcher position from Whitestein Technologies AG, in Zürich. He is involved in several projects within the Research & Consulting group at Whitestein, dealing with the application of Agent Technology to the telecommunication domain and with improving infrastructures and tools that support the development of software products and solutions based on Agent Technology. Before joining Whitestein, he first worked as a contract researcher for Parma University (1999-2003) and then (2001-2004) he was with the company he founded, FRAMeTech s.r.l.

He holds a Laurea Degree in Electronic Engineering and a Ph. D. in Information Technology, both obtained with honours from the University of Parma, Italy. Since 1995, he has been involved in applied research dealing with concurrent and distributed systems, software engineering and artificial intelligence, working with both academic and industrial partners in joint applied research projects, such as LEAP (IST-1999-10211), CoMMA (IST-1999-12217) and AgentCities.RTD (IST-2000-28385). He is author of more than 40 published papers in international refereed journals, conferences and workshops. He was a member of the Program Committee and a reviewer of several conferences on multi-agent systems, and he has been serving as a reviewer for various journals since 1999. He has been a member of the IEEE and IEEE Computer Society for 10 years.

He is one of the main contributors to JADE (http://jade.tilab.com), an Open Source agent platform that runs from J2ME MIDP to J2EE and is one of the most popular middleware systems to build multi-agent systems.

Track:   Pervasive Computing

Abstract:

Agents and multi-agent systems are an approach to software construction that gathers together fields as diverse as component software engineering, distributed artificial intelligence, organization and management science, and economic models. The very basic notion of agency has traits that become much more critical when considering Pervasive Computing scenarios.

A first look at the basic properties of the component model of Agent Technology will lay the groundwork for the presentation, highlighting those subtle issues that don't look like a big deal in principle, but that actually set Agent Technology apart from other approaches in practice. Beyond having the fundamental features of autonomy and social capability, an agent is situated not just within its physical environment, but also within its social milieu. Both facets of agent situatedness contribute to define the agent boundaries, that encompass its interface as a software component, and its perceivable events and feasible actions as well. Moreover, they take further relevance and have the strongest impact on system design and construction when addressing Pervasive Computing challenges through Agent Technology.

The Agent Technology approach, as suited as it may be to Pervasive Computing, would not be very appealing without concrete technologies supporting it. The final part of the talk presents a few of these technologies, along with real application scenarios in the telecommunication domain.

Track:   Pervasive Computing