Hive is a distributed agents platform, a decentralized system for building applications by networking local system resources. This paper presents the architecture of Hive, concentrating on the idea of an "ecology of distributed agents" and its implementation in a practical Java based system. Hive provides ad-hoc agent interaction, ontologies of agent capabilities, mobile agents, and a graphical interface to the distributed system. We are applying Hive to the problems of networking "Things That Think," putting computation and communication in everyday places such as your shoes, your kitchen, or your own body. TTT shares the challenges and potentials of ubiquitous computing and embedded network applications. We have found that the flexibility of a distributed agents architecture is well suited for this application domain, enabling us to easily build applications and to reconfigure our systems on the fly. Hive enables us to make our environment and network more alive.

The Navigational Blocks project demonstrates a tangible user interface that facilitates retrieval of historical stories in a tourist spot. Orientation, movement, and relative positions of physical Blocks support visitor navigation and exploration in a virtual gallery. The Navigational Blocks system provides a physical embodiment of digital information through tactile manipulation and haptic feedback. The simple cubic form of the Blocks is easy to understand and therefore easy to use to manipulate complex digital information. Electromagnets embedded in the Blocks and wireless communication encourage users to quickly rearrange the Blocks to form different database queries.

During the 1940s, under the pseudonym of Will Stewart, Jack Williamson published a series of fictional stories describing a process for attaching atmospheres to planets in order to make them capable of sustaining life. ‘Terraforming, ’ the term he

Because ever more powerful intelligent agents will interact with people in increasingly sophisticated and important ways, greater attention must be given to the technical and social aspects of how to make agents acceptable to people [87]. The technical challenge is to devise a computational structure that guarantees that from

The Personal Satellite Assistant (PSA) is a softball-sized flying robot designed to operate autonomously onboard manned spacecraft in pressurized micro-gravity environments.

‘Emergent properties ’ represent one of the most significant challenges for the engineering of complex systems. They can be thought of as unexpected behaviors that stem from interaction between the components of an application and their environment. In some contexts, emergent properties can be beneficial; users adapt products to support tasks that designers never intended. They can also be harmful if they undermine important safety requirements. There is, however, considerable disagreement about the nature of ‘emergent properties’. Some include almost any unexpected properties exhibited by a complex system. Others refer to emergent properties when an application exhibits behaviors that cannot be identified through functional decomposition. In other words, the system is more than the sum of its component parts. This paper summarizes several alternate views of ‘emergence’. The intention is to lend greater clarity and reduce confusion whenever this term is applied to the engineering of complex systems. This paper was motivated by observations of a recent workshop on Complexity in Design and Engineering held in Glasgow, Scotland during March 2005. It builds on the analysis presented by the other papers in a special edition of Elsevier’s Reliability Engineering and Systems Safety journal. These other papers are indicated by references that are not accompanied by a numeric index. 1.

The CoABS Grid arguably provides the most successful and widely used infrastructure for the large-scale integration of heterogeneous agent frameworks with object-based applications, and legacy systems. In this paper we describe how we are extending Grid capabilities by integrating the NOMADS agent environment for strong mobility and safe execution and the KAoS framework for policy-based management of agent domains to support long-lived agents and their communities.

In recent years, educational technologists and designers have begun to explore a variety of ways in which physical and computational media can be integrated—for instance, through the design of “intelligent toys ” for children. This paper describes our ongoing efforts at exploring a different sort of physical-computational integration, focusing on children’s design activities, output devices, and the notion of “printing out ” more generally. We describe several representative systems under development in our group; each of these systems highlights particular possibilities for exploring and experimenting with output devices for children’s crafts. We also present a set of design heuristics—useful techniques for those educational designers interested in expanding the range and expressiveness of craft activities for children.

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The Personal Satellite Assistant (PSA) is a softball-sized flying robot designed to operate autonomously onboard manned spacecraft in pressurized micro-gravity environments. We describe how the Brahms multi-agent modeling and simulation environment in conjunction with a KAoS agent teamwork approach can be used to support human-centered design for the PSA.