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Multi-Agent System Technology in the Telecom:
Experiences, advances and future challenges.
Francisco J Garijo
Telefónica I+D
Ten years ago Agent technology has fascinated
technology gurus, business managers, and politicians. The information
society in the 21 century was imagined populated by organizations
of intelligent and mobile agents managing resources and services,
carrying out tedious, repetitive and laborious tasks, negotiating
with other agents for finding cost effective solutions, helping
service providers to get new clients, performing security tasks
and achieving trading, commerce and information task on behalf
of users. Nowadays the agent metaphor still valid, however users
still dealing with stupid and unstable applications rather than
with intelligent systems.
It is not the first time that leading technologies does not meet
their expectations. This happened with expert systems and knowledge
technologies in the eighties.
This talk aims to discuss the reasons that explain the weak assimilation
of MAS technology in industry specifically in the Telecom sector,
and tries to present ideas to overcome the principal challenges.
European Telecom companies - British Telecom, Deutche Telecom,
France Telecom, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, and others
- , have done extensive R&D activities in agent technology.
Experiences started early in the nineties with company specific
projects which where complemented by collaborative research programs
funded at the European level e.g. EURESCOM and R&D EU programs.
The talk will overview experiences of MAS engineering dealing
with different aspects such as technology evaluation, methodology,
reusability, benchmarking, and applications to network management,
business processing, conversational services, and personal communication.
The presentation will discuss results, obstacles, successes, and
challenges, and finally present some ideas for the future of MAS
research, in particular for the progress of the Iberaomerican
AI Community.
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