Frank Dignum Home Page & Baha'i information

Since September 2000, I am an associate professor at the Decision Support group of the Institute of Information and Computing Sciences from the Utrecht University.

In 2006 I was enjoying a sabbatical at the Department of Information Systems of the University of Melbourne.

Courses I teach:

I have tought the following courses:

Aibo Programming

From 2009 I am coordinating the Honours program of computer science and am superviser in the course:

Software project
Intelligent Interaction

I also taught a course on social aspects of software agents for PhD students in Barcelona and teach the tutorial on Agent Communication at the European Agent Systems Summer School. I also taught about Agent Organizations and Agents for Services in summer schools.

Research interests:

My main interests are in the area of formal specification of social aspects and reliable and flexible communications between autonomous systems. A major area in which autonomous systems are used is that of software agents. I also work in the area of agent based social simulation and serious gaming. Another area where this is very important is electronic commerce. I am involved in all areas as well as in their intersection. Because I still believe that formal specification of systems is important in order to better understand the way they have to be implemented, the main tool that I use in my research is some form of dynamic logic that incorporates both deontic elements as well as communication actions.

Things I organize(d):

I was the local organizing chair of AAMAS 2005.

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I co-organized the following workshops:

1. international workshop on Communication Modelling using the Language/Action perspective (1996)

2. the first international workshop on agent communication languages (1999)

3. The workshop on agent communication (2000)

4. The workshop on Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce (2000)

5. the workshop on Agent Communication Languages and Conversation Policies (2002)

6. the workshop on Agents for Information Management (2002)

7. the workshop on Agent Communication Languages and Conversation Policies (2003)

8. the workshop on Agent Communication (2004, 2009,2010)

9. the workshop on Agent Organization: Theory and Practice (2004)

10. 10. the workshop on Agents for Games and Simulations (2009, 2010)

Some of these workshops resulted in Springer books:

1. Issues in Agent Communication.

2. Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce

3. Advances in Agent Communication

4. Developments in Agent Communication

5. Agents for Games and Simulations

PC membership:

1. the Senior PC of international joint conference on Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (AAMAS)

2. the European conference of Multi Agent Systems (EUMAS)

3. the International Central and Eastern European Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (CEEMAS)

4. Int. Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT)

5. the International Joint Conference on AI (IJCAI)

6. area chair of the European Conference on AI (ECAI)

7. the national conference on AI from the AAAI (USA)

8. the Belgium/Dutch conference on AI (BNAIC)

9. the international workshop on Deontic Logic in Computer Science (DEON)

10. Int. Conference on Electronic Commerce (ICEC)

11. the international Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

12. the Bled Conference on eCommerce

13. the international workshop on Cooperative Information Agents.

14. the international workshop on Agent Mediated Electronic Trading (AMEC)

15. the international workshop on Agent Oriented Information Systems (AOIS)

16. the symposium “from agent theories to agent implementation” (1998,2000, 2002,2004)

17. the international Workshop on Multi-Agent Systems : Theory&Applications (MASTA)

18. Int. workshop on Programming Multi Agent Systems (ProMAS)

19. Int. workshop on Argumentation in Multi Agent Systems (ArgMAS)

20. Int. Conference on Grid Services Engineering and Management (GSEM)

21. the international Workshop on Agent Technologies for e-Services

22. Int. Conference on information integration and web-based applications and services (IIWAS)

23. the international workshop on the Language Action Perspective (LAP) (until 2003)

Projects:

Some recent projects I am involved in are:

Falcon. In this project we develop an agent organization to control the logistics of warehouse logistic systems.

Boon companion. An endeavour to develop a social robot that can play and teach children.

MADAM: a multi-agent based system for model based diagnosis applied to airport scheduling.

ANITA: Exchanging information between different departments within the police force in a legal and efficient way.

I co-coordinated the Special Interest Group on Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce (together with Carles Sierra) of the AgentLink network of excellence, which brings together researchers in the area of Agents from all over Europe.

The schedule and presentations of the last meeting of this SIG in Barcelona, February 2003.

The activities of this group also resulted in a book on Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce from a European perspective.

Publications:

My publications on (agent mediated) electronic commerce, flexible communication protocols, communicating agents and logic are for some part available on-line.

Presentations:

Some (invited) presentations I gave in the past years on current topics in my field of research :

Ø “Agents and virtual markets” (iiWAS99)

Ø “Agents and Electronic Commerce: Hype and Reality” (ICEIS2000)

Ø “Trust and Reputation for e-Business” (iiWAS2002)

Ø “Software agents: Theory and Practice” (EurAsia2002)

Ø “Web Services and Software Agents” (iiWAS2003)

Ø Social commitments (ISIS presentation December 2005)

Ø Norms, Groups and Social Simulation ( ESSA presentation September 2011)

Frank Dignum

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