CPE/CSC 580Spring 2006 Artificial Intelligence -- Intelligent Agents Assignment 1: Agent Toolkits

Goal

The goal of this assignment is to explore agent development environments that might be suitable for later assignments, or for your team project. Since the domain is still somewhat immature, the availability and suitability of such environments is subject to considerable changes over time, and so far, I have not been able to find one single environment that I could recommend for all or even most assignments or projects.

Description

In this homework, your task is to investigate and evaluate one or a family of tools for the development of agents (agent toolkits). You can either find a toolkit on your own, or use one from the list of agent toolkits.

Background Material

An evaluation of agent toolkits was prepared on a larger scale a few years ago by people at McMaster University. Their report is available at http://www.business.mcmaster.ca/msis/profs/detlorb/nserc/McMaster_Working_Paper_455.pdf and a presentation with the results is at http://www.business.mcmaster.ca/msis/profs/detlorb/nserc/Agent_Toolkits_McMaster_2.pdf. The report was also published in the Journal of Computing in Higher Education: Serenko, A., & Detlor, B. (2003). Agent toolkit satisfaction and use in higher education. Journal of Computing in Higher Education. 15(1), 65-88.

Submission and Deadline

Your material should be submitted to the respective Blackboard discussion forum. Please create a thread as soon as you have decided which environment you will use, and then post your material.

Grading Criteria

The number of points for this homework is 25. The score will be determined by the following criteria:

knowledge of subject matter (does the author demonstrate a good grasp of the topic)
evidence, (does the author present facts, examples, or other material that supports the arguments, and are the sources cited)
complexity of the tool investigated, (what is the scope of functionality available through the tool)
thoroughness of the evaluation, (are all relevant features of the tool examined)
accuracy (is the material presented correct, consistent, and complete)
organization and readability of the write-up, (is the paper well organized and easy to follow)
presentation (is the appearence of the paper of professional quality, e.g. without spelling or grammatical errors)

A tentative version of the evaluation form I will use is available here: 580-A1-Evaluation.txt. For a high score, your evaluation should probably be at least three pages long.