COLLOQUIUM
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of South Carolina

Intelligent Service Coordination in the Future Internet

Matthias Klusch

German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)

Date: January 11, 2012
Time: 1430-1530 (2:30pm-3:30pm)
Place: Swearingen 1A03 (Faculty Lounge)

Abstract

The future Internet will be determined by the ongoing convergence of
the social web, the Internet of services, and the Internet of
things. In particular, a growing number of varied application services
is envisioned to be pervasively offered, composed and traded by
networked service providers, brokers and consumers.  A major challenge
for realizing this vision is the intelligent coordination of services
which, in particular, requires scalable software support for their
proactive, adaptive and context-aware discovery, composition and
negotiation. This is in principle hard to achieve with web services
today due to their lack of well-defined semantics. Semantic web
technologies offer an elegant way to cope with this problem by
enabling intelligent software agents to automatically get a deeper
understanding of data and service semantics, thus allowing agents to
effectively coordinate application services on behalf of their user
either individually or jointly with other agents. In competitive
business webs or service marketplaces with charged services,
mechanisms for automated negotiation can be employed by service
provider and consumer agents to resolve their conflicts of interests.
In this seminar talk, I briefly introduce the principles of agents and
the semantic web which are used to realize intelligent coordination of
services in the Internet. I then present selected techniques for
agent-based semantic service selection, composition planning, and
negotiation that we have developed at DFKI. This is complemented by an
outline of representative applications in the domains of e-health,
virtual 3D product engineering, retail, manufacturing and
condition-based maintenance in which these coordination techniques are
leveraged.

Matthias Klusch is a senior researcher and distinguished research
fellow of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence
(DFKI), a private lecturer for computer science at the University of
the Saarland in Saarbruecken, Germany, and an adjunct professor of
computer science at the Swinburne University of Technology in
Melbourne, Australia. His research interests are the theory and
applications of semantic technologies, service-oriented computing and
intelligent software agents. Dr. Klusch received his MSc (1992) and
PhD (1997) from the University of Kiel and his habilitation (2009) in
computer science from the University of the Saarland. Before joining
DFKI, he was assistant professor at the Free University of Amsterdam,
the Chemnitz University of Technology and the University of Kiel
(Germany), and postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon
University. He is co-founder and steering committee member of the
German conference series on multi-agent system technologies (MATES),
editorial member of major international journals in the areas of
information systems, semantic web, service-oriented computing and AI,
and scientific advisory board member of the international center for
intelligent information technologies in Madrid (Spain). He served on
the organizational board of major conferences and was involved in many
research projects funded by different sources in these areas. He has
been an ACM SIGART award finalist for excellence in autonomous agent
research and authored or edited 27 books and about 130 papers.