Foundations of Institutions by Marina de Vos and Julian Padget

Course description:

This tutorial will begin by making the case why institutions are critical to the development of agent applications and their integral part in agents research.  We will then explore a number of practical institutional frameworks through a mixture of examples, case studies and exercises.  In the next part we will use these experiences to examine bottom-up and top-down approaches to the modelling of institutions and finally explore in some detail how to formalize the specification of a virtual institution and reason about it using declarative logic programming.

Tutor bio:

Marina De Vos is a lecturer at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom.  Her main area of research is answer set programming (ASP), a logic programming formalism, and its applications. In current and previous work, she studied the relationship between ASP and classical game theory, logical games, multi-agent systems and virtual institutions.  For the last three years she was the vice-coordinator of the European working group on answer set programming. Marina holds a postgraduate certificate in teaching and has several years of experience of teaching at various levels: high school, higher education and industry. Last year she co-authored two papers on teaching multi-agent systems to undergraduates and postgraduates.

Julian Padget is a senior lecturer at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom.  He has been working on the design of implementation of multi-agent systems for 10 years (previous work was on programming language design, distributed systems and computer algebra), focussing primarily on the specification, validation and generation of
organizations and institutions.  Related interests include semantic web services and grid economics.  He has taught a wide range of topics (functional languages, introductory programming, advanced compilers, software engineering) over many years, and has been co-teaching (with Marina De Vos) a module on agents and e-commerce at the University of
Bath since 2002, as well as contributing agent content to the @LIStechNET teaching and learning platform
(http://alis-learn.cs.bath.ac.uk).