Onn Shehory - Research Statement

My research interests are in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), both in theory and implementation. I am interested in the design of the single agent as well as the whole system, and in particular in the architectural issues and the interaction protocols. The development of efficient and stable algorithms for agent cooperation has captured a significant part of my research during the last years. Traditional computer science methods combined with methods from game theory and physics served as a means for introducing new solutions to problems arising in this new, exciting field of research. Specifically, I have been working in the last years on cooperation and coalition formation in MAS.

Currently I am involved in the RETSINA project (REusable Task-based System of Intelligent Networked Agents) at CMU, the Robotic Institute, where we design and implement agents to cooperatively perform tasks of information gathering from multi-modal web sources and decision support upon this information. We investigate issues of real time performance, load balancing, interleaving planning and execution, communication and coordination protocols, and human-computer interface. A future implementation domain of our MAS on which we currently work is the Wearable Computing Systems at CMU, involving wearable computers and mobile agents. We also investigate the role of MAS as a software engineering paradigm. We address issues of code reusability and modularity and system robustness and flexibility, and draw general guidelines for agent and MAS architecture and design.

Altogether, I am most interested in intelligent agents, multi-agent systems, their applications and their role in mainstream computer science.

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