Leader: INSEAD Nature: Report Dissemination: CO Date: M07
This first step will consist in the definition of the internal architecture of the attentive agent (including components for the detection of the user attention, attention reasoning, intervention, and user interface via artificial characters), and the definition of an interface for embedding it in a digital environment.
This deliverable is confidential
This document represents the first step used for elaborating the design of the AtGentive systems, which consists in providing a first basic architecture of AtGentive and a short description of the core components that compose it. It is also aimed at presenting the different principles that are used for the design, as well as the approach that has been adopted to integrate these components into AtGentive Platforms.
The first part of this document (chapter 2) presents an overall view of the new approaches that have emerged in the last years to design very flexible software architecture, as well as a brief presentation of different agent architectures that have been elaborated. In particular it makes a small inventory of the different recent methodologies, concepts and technics that have appeared such as User-centred design, eXtreme Programming (XP) and Agile Software Development, and finally the important use of prototyping, as well as the web 2.0 approaches and technologies. It also presents briefly different agent architectural frameworks that have been proposed to build advanced cognitive systems.
The second part of this document presents a set of design principles that are to be adopted in AtGentive, and proposes an agent architecture for the design of Atgentive. Practically these principles, consist in the adoption of the methodologies and concepts that we have indicated previously (user-centered, prototyping, etc.) aiming at facilitating the rapid iteration in the design. The architecture is based on the use of approaches and technics (such as pluggability, service orientation, rich client, etc.) conducing to the elaboration of a very interactive, flexible and open architecture. Concerning the agent architecture, it relies on the idea of extending a platform with a set of key components (tracking, reasoning, execution and meta-reasoning) supporting a particular aspect of attention (the categories originates an adaptation of the dimension of attention support defined in del 1.3 – the conceptual framework for supporting attention), or providing accompanying services to the platforms (such as a character based user interface).
The third part consists in a presentation of the most important modules. For instance, it presents (1) the tracking component for capturing and pre-processing the different events such as the user activities; (2) the reasoning component for reasoning, diagnosing, making plans and determining lines of action; (3) the execution component, which is responsible of the execution of a line of action, or to intervene; (4) the meta-reasoning component, which role it to support more meta-cognitive support to attention, and can also provide some controls over the other components; (5) the artificial characters based user interface component.
1. INTRODUCTION 1 2. OVERVIEW OF DESIGN APPROACHES AND AGENT ARCHITECTURES .........3 2.1 The advent of new design principles in Information Technology .3 2.2 An Overview of Agent Architectures .........................8 2.3 Modern Architectures of Collaborative Virtual Environments 15 3. DEFINING THE ATGENTIVE DESIGN ................................18 3.1 What is AtGentive ........................................18 3.2 Defining the Design principles of AtGentive ................19 3.3 Conceptual Architecture of AtGentive ........................20 3.4 The Technical architecture of Atgentive ........................22 4. THE ATGENTIVE COMPONENTS ................................25 4.1 The Virtual Environment Platforms ........................25 4.2 The Tracking component (T) ................................26 4.3 The Reasoning module (R) ................................28 4.4 The Meta-cognition component (M) ........................29 4.5 The Execution component (or intervention) (Ex) ................30 4.6 The user-interface (UI) ........................................30 4.7 The user model ................................................32 5. REFERENCES ................................................34 6. ANNEXE ........................................................37 6.1 ReST (Representational State Transfer) Web services ........37 6.2 Taxonomy of events and states ................................37
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