Research Projects Software Demos Courses & Curricula Publications

The Center for Information Technology establishes the University of South Carolina as a leader in the research and development of advanced information systems. Under the broad themes of agent-based software systems and information security, researchers at the Center are investigating multiagent systems, information awareness and security, ontological engineering, and computational intelligence, with applications to enterprise integration, executive decision support, and agent-based software development. The Center is part of an ongoing effort at USC to increase information systems security awareness and develop high quality education and research in this area, with a goal of becoming one of the leading academic institutes in information security education. The Center serves as a focal point for the University's research, public service, and education efforts in these important new areas of technology, providing well-qualified scientists and engineers and an educational and research capability that meets the needs of industry.

FACULTY OF THE CENTER
GRADUATE STUDENTS

CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECTS

PROJECT	DESCRIPTION
ATAR: "Winning the Peace" Sponsor: USC CIT	We are developing real-time cultural decision aids accessible to both commanders and warfighters that will guide their choice of the appropriate tactics in the appropriate context.
BALER: Bayesian and Logical Engine for Reasoning Sponsor: ARDA	In a joint effort with Fair Isaac Corp./HNC Software, we are combining logical and probabilistic reasoning into a single integrated reasoning platform.
COORDINATORs Sponsor: DARPA/Global Infotek	We are helping to develop the Coordination Autonomy module.
Computational Ethics Sponsor: USC CIT	Our research will enable the design of, and experimentation with, a variety of systems of ethical philosophies.
Robust Software through Consensus Sponsor: National Science Foundation	We hypothesize that agents are the appropriate level of granularity for redundancy and that the software environment that takes advantage of them is akin to a society of such agents, where there can be multiple agents filling each societal role.
Multiagent Negotiation and Resource Allocation Sponsor: USC CIT	We are investigating cake-cutting algorithms for resource allocation and concurrent multiple-issue negotiation for Internet-based services.
Multiagent Dynamics Laboratory Sponsor: National Science Foundation	Under the direction of Dr. José M. Vidal, researchers in this laboratory are studying the emergent dynamics of multiagent systems in order to devise ways of engineering them from first principles. Specifically, they are finding ways to build adaptive multiagent systems whose behaviors can be predicted and which can satisfy any given requirements specification. They use the tools of game theory, economics, operations research, and sociology in order to characterize the behavior of these systems at a theoretical level.

COMPLETED RESEARCH PROJECTS

PROJECT	DESCRIPTION
Control of Agent-Based Systems Sponsor: DARPA/Global Infotek	We contributed to CoABS, a framework that integrates heterogeneous agent-based systems, object-based applications, and legacy systems.
Magellan/OmniSeer Project Sponsor: ARDA/GTRI/GITI	Magellan and OmniSeer demonstrated the capability for situation recognition from massive data by assembling fragments of Bayesian networks.
JIDOKA System for Terrain Recognition Sponsor: U.S. Army TACOM	We have designed and implemented a real-time terrain recognition system for military vehicles, using information from multiple heterogeneous sensors.
Pathogen Identification Project Sponsor: USDA Meat Animal Research Center	We investigated bioinformatics techniques for identifying pathogenic genetic sequences from both bacteria and viruses. The techniques were implemented using an agent-based architecture.
Agent-Based Supply Chain Automation Sponsor: NIST	We developed a linguistic approach to coordination modeling as a formal basis for supply-chain management in manufacturing. The approach promotes the interchange of standard documents: enterprises need only describe their supply processes using OAG business object documents and UML interaction diagrams. Our methodology and tools analyze the documents and interactions in terms of four linguistic primitives and convert the diagrams into specifications and implementations of software agents. The agents then cooperate in automating the resultant supply chain.
Achieving Comprehensive Mission Robustness Sponsor: NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts	We demonstrated how to construct complex software systems out of societies of distributed software agents, where each agent is imbued with a philosophy of ethics for its behavior within the society. The results are applicable to future extremely long-term NASA missions involving large numbers of spacecraft or planetary rovers.
Building Consensus Ontologies Sponsor: DARPA DAML Project	Our approach to reconciling heterogeneous ontologies is to make use of the constraints provided by multiple overlapping ontologies, thereby producing a consensus ontology that can enable the integration of heterogeneous information systems.

Web Site for Multiagent Systems
Maintained by Dr. José M. Vidal, University of South Carolina

PROJECT DEMOS

Description	Link to Application	Example Image
Agile Web Service Discovery - an agile software approach to the discovery, selection, and execution of services	Example Code
Agent Behavior Testbed (ABT) - a multiagent testbed for studying cooperation and benevolence		Typical ABT Scenario
Java Ontology Editor (JOE) - an ontology editor and browser		Example of JOE
Another Ontology Editor developed using Java	Ontology Editor	Main Window of Editor
Museum Ontology Browser	Museum Ontology Browser	Main Window of Editor

ACTIVITIES


International Foundation for Multiagent Systems (IFMAS)
Charter, Board of Directors, and By-Laws

Second IFCIS International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems
Kiawah Island, South Carolina, USA, June 24 - 27, 1997

CURRICULA AND COURSES


Information Technology
Computer Science and Engineering Department
College of Engineering
University of South Carolina

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