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This paper provides an overview of research and development activities in the field of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. It aims to identify key concepts and applications, and to indicate how they relate to one-another. Some historical context to the field of agent-based computing

Since 1984, the Condor project has enabled ordinary users to do extraordinary computing. Today, the project continues to explore the social and technical problems of cooperative computing on scales ranging from the desktop to the world-wide computational grid. In this chapter, we provide

Nobody wants to use technology to recreate education as it is, yet there is not much to distinguish what goes on in most computer-supported classrooms versus traditional classrooms. Kay (1991) has suggested that the phenomenon of reframing innovations to recreate the familiar is itself commonplace

The difficulty of developing reliable distributed softwme is an impediment to applying distributed computing technology in many settings. Expeti _ with the Isis system suggests that a structured approach based on virtually synchronous _ groups yields systems that are substantially easier to develop

In tree-based multicast systems, a relatively small number of interior nodes carry the load of forwarding multicast messages. This works well when the interior nodes are highly available, d d cated infrastructure routers but it poses a problem for application-level multicast in peer-to-peer systems. SplitStreamadV esses this problem by striping the content across a forest of interior-nodno# sjoint multicast trees that d stributes the forward ng load among all participating peers. For example, it is possible to construct efficient SplitStream forests in which each peer contributes only as much forwarding bandH d th as it receives. Furthermore, with appropriate content encod ngs, SplitStream is highly robust to failures because a nod e fai ure causes the oss of a single stripe on average. We present thed#' gnand implementation of SplitStream and show experimental results obtained on an Internet testbed and via large-scale network simulation. The results show that SplitStreamd istributes the forward ing load among all peers and can accommod'9 peers with different band0 d capacities while imposing low overhead for forest constructionand maintenance.

Reusable ontologies are becoming increasingly important for tasks such as information integration, knowledge-level interoperation, and knowledgebase development. We have developed a set of tools and services to support the process of achieving consensus on common shared ontologies by geographically distributed groups. These tools make use of the worldwide web to enable wide access and provide users with the ability to publish, browse, create, and edit ontologies stored on an ontology server. Users can quickly assemble a new ontology from a library of modules. We discuss how our system was constructed, how it exploits existing protocols and browsing tools, and our experience supporting hundreds of users. We describe applications using our tools to achieve consensus on ontologies and to integrate information. The Ontolingua Server may be accessed through the URL http://ontolingua.stanford.edu/

With the significant advances in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) over the last half century, there is an increasingly perceived vision that computing will one day be the 5th utility (after water, electricity, gas, and telephony). This computing utility, like all other four existing

of hierarchical file caching do not merit the costs, warrants reconsideration in the Internet environment. The cache implementation supports a highly concurrent stream of requests. We present performance measurements that show that the cache outperforms other popular Internet cache implementations by an order

In this paper we show that application-aware adaptation, a collaborative partnership between the operating system and applications, offers the most general and effective approach to mobile information access. We describe the design of Odyssey, a prototype implementing this approach, and show how