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Research Interests

• Distributed Artificial Intelligence, esp. knowledge transfer from sociology to DAI, including social simulation, game theory and social dilemma research
• Application of concepts of organization and self-organization to (holonic) multiagent systems
• Robustness, fault-tolerance, failure recovery and autonomic computing.
• Peer-to-Peer systems and ad hoc networks
• Empirical methods for AI research

Academic Experience

Positions

• I currently hold a position at the socionics project at DFKI. This project (as all projects of the DFG's focus programme socionics) is concerned with transferring knowledge, theories and methods from DAI research to sociology and vice versa. The project I am involved in links multiagent systems work from Saarland University/DFKI with work from Technische Universität Hamburg-Harburg. Our project deals with the application of Pierre Bourdieu's Habitus-Field Theory (see Hyper Bourdieu for research on the massive bibliography of Pierre Bourdieu: ca. 1400 titles!). We intend to use this theory for improving current DAI agent architectures. The project started in November 1999.


• In 1999 I finished my Diplomarbeit, the german equivalent of a Master thesis. In this thesis I describe a mechanism for agents to evaluate trust in interaction partners and trust in communication partners. The work concludes with an evaluation of the mechanism in several settings, differentiated by the variables size of community, number of communication actions allowed and heterogeneity of the community. During this time, I worked as a student assistant for DFKI Saarbrücken. My task was to program a development kit for multiagent systems in Java (SIF).


• During my time at CCalas of the School of Computer Studies in Leeds, UK, my research focus was on the development of an in-car Intelligent Personal Assistant system and its natural language interface. I researched the design of a Voice-User Interface sublanguage, a subset of English which will allow users of a speech interface to issue commands in a reasonably 'natural' way while achieving acceptable speech recognition accuracy.

Publications

Conferences

• Co-organizer of the First German Conference on Multiagent System Technologies (MATES'03).
• PC member of AUTONOMY 2003, SOLI'03, MASHO'03 and RASTA'03.
• I reviewed articles for AAMAS'03, Euro-Par 2003, ECAI 2002, Autonomous Agents 2001, and ECAI 2000.

Seminars

• I assist in coordinating the seminar of the MAS group at DFKI.
• Winter semester 2001, with Prof. Jörg Siekmann: History of computer science.
• May 2001, with Carsten Ullrich SAGWAS 2001 on Sicherheit und Überwachung im Cyberspace.
• Summer semester 2000 with Dr. Klaus Fischer Sozionik: Erforschung und Modellierung künstlicher Sozialität.

Supervision

• Christian Hahn on
• Jamal Alam on Ramifications of Gift Exchange in Multiagent Systems
• Jörg Metzger on Distributed Spam-filtering with Multiagent Systems
• Tore Knabe recently finished his thesis on Self-organising Multiagent Systems
• Sven Jacobi wrote his thesis on Distributed Scheduling with Multiagent Systems

Diplomarbeiten und Fortgeschrittenenpraktika (deutsch)

• Effizientes Verteiltes Planen durch "Argumentation"
• Robuste Multiagentensysteme durch Modellierung von "Reputation"