Agent software is a rapidly developing area of research. However, the overuse of the word ‘agent ’ has tended to mask the fact that, in reality, there is a truly heterogeneous body of research being carried out under this banner. This overview paper presents a typology of agents. Next, it places

Estimation de modèles de mélange probabilistes: une proposition pour un fonctionnement réparti et décentralisé

Cloud computing is a recent advancement wherein IT infrastructure and applications are provided as “services ” to endusers under a usage-based payment model. They can leverage virtualized services even on the fly based on requirements (workload patterns and QoS) varying with time. The application

A penetrating analysis of our technical civilization and of the effect of an increasingly standardized culture on the future of man

solutions that optimise the utilisation of distributed resources for a stable and scalable execution of long-running services. This challenge is tackled by providing development and infrastructure support for two object-oriented distributed service models named replicated decentralised adaptive services

must happen automatically, and distribution of services must change in response to changes in the load. To counter this problem, we advocate creation of federated Cloud computing environment (InterCloud) that facilitates just-in-time, opportunistic, and scalable provisioning of application services

ly, the remote procedure call problem, which an RPC protocol undertakes to solve, consists of emulating LPC using message passing. LPC has a number of "properties" -- a single procedure invocation results in exactly one execution of the procedure body, the result returned is reliably delivered to the invoker, and exceptions are raised if (and only if) an error occurs. Given a completely reliable communication environment, which never loses, duplicates, or reorders messages, and given client and server processes that never fail, RPC would be trivial to solve. The sender would merely package the invocation into one or more messages, and transmit these to the server. The server would unpack the data into local variables, perform the desired operation, and send back the result (or an indication of any exception that occurred) in a reply message. The challenge, then, is created by failures. Were it not for the possibility of process and machine crashes, an RPC protocol capable of overcomi...

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This paper approaches the question of the appropriate level of decentralisation of power in government as a problem in the allocation of control rights under incomplete contracts. The model of the paper compares allocations of power to local, central and regional government as alternative means

of enterprise solutions, such as support for infrastructure service-level agreements. To address the challenges and deficiencies in the current state of the art, we propose a modular, extensible cloud architecture with intrinsic support for business service management and the federation of clouds. The goal