Student project: Autonomous Agenda Agents

Suitable For

M.Sc. Conversion (Research Project)
M.Sc. Global
4th year final project

Number of People

Synopsis

An Autonomous Agenda Agent (AAA) is an entity that maintains a person's agenda. The main task of an AAA is to negotiate appointments for meetings. It can operate either interactively (via the web) or communicate with other AAA's through TCP/IP.

The AAA tries to satisfy the user's preferences (group meetings together on the same day, Wednesday = research day) as much as possible. Such preferences are represented declaratively as rules. In a second stage of the project these rules should be acquired automatically by machine learning methods. The approach is to develop plug-in modules that enhance the AAA with learning capabilities.

Objectives

To build a practical AAA
To explore the use of machine learning in agents

Deliverables

An operational Autonoous Agenda Agent that can maintain a user's personal agenda, negotiate dates for appointments respecting the user's preferences, and possibly acquire such preferences by machine learning techniques.

Skills Required

competence in programming (preferably Java)
general understanding of the agent paradigm
general understanding of machine learning

Tools/Environments

Java, WWW, TCP/IP

Benefit to Student

To take part in some genuine and valuable artificial intelligence research
Develop modular programming skills

Contact

Peter.Flach@cs.bris.ac.uk

Background

http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/Research/MachineLearning/
http://www.ececs.uc.edu/~abaker/JAFMAS/