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GAIN Meeting in Vancouver
Posted, May 24,2002
Peter G. Kropf, PhD
Associate Professor
University of Montreal
Department of Computer Science and Operations Research
Email: kropf@iro.umontreal.ca
Concurrently with the 25th FIPA meeting in Vancouver, Canada, May 5-10, a representative group of about 25 Canadian researchers in agent technologies gathered together to discuss a Canadian agenda for this domain. This initiative to bring together the active agent community in Canada and to strenghten the links to FIPA and the Agentcities Taskforce was made possible through the support of the (Canadian) NSERC (National Sicence Engineering and Research Council). Mihaela Ulieru of the University of Calgary has initiated this effort which has now succesfully led to the definition of a structure for a research program in agent technologies in Canada. This program is intended to strongly relate to similar programs in other regions, specifically within theEuropean community. Because of the existing contracts between Canada and the EU, which allow for the full participation of Canadian partners in EU projects - with funding provided by Canadian agencies for Canadian partners - the envisaged research efforts in Canada are planned to be integrated with European efforts as much as possible.
During the meeting in Vancouver, the participants presented their interests to each other. The FIPA board and TC chairs provided a very concise presentation of their activities. Moreover, a series of presentations of FIPA and Agentcities related projects gave a most valuable overview of the activites of these communities. Throuhout the working sessions of this week, the Canadian group has then indentified and agreed upon the following areas of research in accordance with their respective competence:
- Ad-hoc service models
- Distributed negotiation models
- Knowledge representation and management
- Agent design methodologies
- Applications: Telecom, E-Business, Virtual Communities, E-Health Manufacturing, Energy
In the very near future, a research proposal based along these lines will be worked out under the leadership of Ramiro Liscano of Mitel Networks, Ottawa and Ahmed Karmouch of University of Ottawa. The collaboration with running as well as future European projects in this area will be an integral part of these efforts. While the meeting was attended primarily by academics, the future consortium is planned to also include Canadian firms.
On behalf of the Canadian agent community that came together in Vancouver, I would like to thank FIPA for having made possible to co-host this first meeting of the Canadian agent community and the extremly interesting discussions between the two communities
Peter Kropf
University of Montreal
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