Agent-oriented techniques represent an exciting new means of analysing, designing and building complex software systems. They have the potential to significantly improve current practice in software engineering and to extend the range of applications that can feasibly be tackled. Yet, to date, there have been few serious attempts to cast agent systems as a software engineering paradigm. This paper seeks to rectify this omission. Specifically, it will be argued that: (i) the conceptual apparatus of agent-oriented systems is well-suited to building software solutions for complex systems and (ii) agent-oriented approaches represent a genuine advance over the current state of the art for engineering complex systems. Following on from this view, the major issues raised by adopting an agent-oriented approach to software engineering are highlighted and discussed.

We propose a novel formalism, called Frame Logic (abbr., F-logic), that accounts in a clean and declarative fashion for most of the structural aspects of object-oriented and frame-based languages. These features include object identity, complex objects, inheritance, polymorphic types, query methods

The popularity of peer-to-peer multimedia file sharing applications such as Gnutella and Napster has created a flurry of recent research activity into peer-to-peer architectures. We believe that the proper evaluation of a peer-to-peer system must take into account the characteristics of the peers

This paper reports measures of preference parameters relating to risk tolerance, time preference, and intertemporal substitution. These measures are based on survey responses to hypothetical situations constructed using an economic theorist's concept of the underlying parameters

We devise new numerical algorithms, called PSC algorithms, for following fronts propagating with curvature-dependent speed. The speed may be an arbitrary function of curvature, and the front can also be passively advected by an underlying flow. These algorithms approximate the equations of motion, which resemble Hamilton-Jacobi equations with parabolic right-hand-sides, by using techniques from the hyperbolic conservation laws. Non-oscillatory schemes of various orders of accuracy are used to solve the equations, providing methods that accurately capture the formation of sharp gradients and cusps in the moving fronts. The algorithms handle topological merging and breaking naturally, work in any number of space dimensions, and do not require that the moving surface be written as a function. The methods can be also used for more general Hamilton-Jacobitype problems. We demonstrate our algorithms by computing the solution to a variety of surface motion problems. 1

The problems of designing large software systems were studied through interviewing personnel from 17 large projects. A layered behavioral model is used to analyze how three lgf these problems-the thin spread of application domain knowledge, fluctuating and conflicting requirements

the lowest possible supply voltage coupled with architectural, logic style, circuit, and technology optimizations. An architectural-based scaling strategy is presented which indicates that the optimum voltage is much lower than that determined by other scaling considerations. This optimum is achieved

The dynamic and lossy nature of wireless communication poses major challenges to reliable, self-organizing multihop networks. These non-ideal characteristics are more problematic with the primitive, low-power radio transceivers found in sensor networks, and raise new issues that routing protocols

, and coherent-based depending on the protocol operation. We study the design tradeoffs between energy and communication overhead savings in every routing paradigm. We also highlight the advantages and performance issues of each routing technique. The paper concludes with possible future research areas. 1

in networked dynamic systems and diverse applications including synchronization of coupled oscillators, flocking, formation control, fast consensus in small-world networks, Markov processes and gossip-based algorithms, load balancing in networks, rendezvous in space, distributed sensor fusion in sensor