Meeting Minutes – 26 November 2008

Today, Paul R. Schrater a guest researcher from University Minnesota, has made a presentation about active preference learning topics. He explained a topic of probability model in which an agent can derive a continous valuation formula which is a result from learning algorithm from a set of discrete data. He tried to explained the algorithm which can decide what approximate formula can be presented to an individual in order to find the projected result that they value highly in as few trial as possible, without making an accurate model the entire valuation surface.



About the presenter,

Paul R. Schrater hold a joint faculty position at the University of Minnesota, in the departments of Psychology and Computer Science. His current research interests generally involve using probabilistic methods to study issues in perception and motor control. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Neuroscience of the University of Pennsylvania, under David Knill, then of the Department of Psychology and Eero Simoncelli in the GRASP Laboratory who at that time had a primary appointment in the Department of Computer Science at Penn. His dissertation involved a psychophysical and ideal observer analysis of local motion processing.

Meeting Minutes - 19 November 2008

Today, the LARGE session has had a very nice presentation from Carsten Block, a ready to finish doctoral candidate of Information & Market Engineering department, TU Karlsruhe Germany. At our session he presented the topic of "Market-Based Control and Agent-Based Trading in Combined and Power Grids." which is pretty much the topic which has been the area of his doctoral specialization.

The background of the research is the emerging trends of the energy supply which is no longer in hierarchical setup of up down (e.g. from the source to household) distribution, but also in the reversal direction. So that not only the source can sell their energy to the downstream but also the downstream line if they produce energy, the downstream costumer can also sell their energy to the upstream.

This issue of developing two ways of distribution is explained pretty much from different perspectives. But especially, since the energy transaction mechanism between the upstream and the downstream mechanism is built in the agent based point of view and also the mechanism of transaction is involving auction mechanism, so a lot of things what Carsten have applied in his research pretty much coherent with the LARGE field. This session off course has brought big lesson fur the group.

The discussion of this reversible energy transaction is pretty much done in multiple perspectives, since in this session a lot of people come from different area of specialization (e.g. economics, business network, information and decision sciences, etc). Carsten did an excellent explanation also to the multi-background viewer’s questions.

Since Carsten have a strong computer science background, he also shared some of his experiences (e.g. tool for development) in the development of his project. He introduced us a new tools for faster software development like grailsTM and make some demo also about what the platform advances. This session was very successful and everybody was enthusiastic.

Meeting Minutes - 12 November 2008

Today Uzay Kaymak gave a presentation on the Ming Hua and Nicholas Jenning's paper of "Designing a Successful Trading Agent: A Fuzzy Set Aproach".

The paper tells us about the writers experience in implementing fuzzy logics in their SouthamptonTAC agent.

SouthhamptonTAC agent participated successfully in the first and second (TAC) Trading Agent Competition, a competition which facilitates the competition of the participant's "travel" agents in fulfilling their customer demand of travel package (flight ticket, hotel, and extra entertainment ticket). Those participating agents should compete with each other in different (flight ticket, hotel, and extra entertainment ticket) auctions provided by the TAC platform to statisfy the demand of the agent's costumer.

Uzay briefly explains how the SouthamptonTAC implements the fuzzy logics in the hotel, ticket, and entertaiment bidding actions. He (Uzay) found it quiet surprising how the performance of the fuzzy rules implementation can work well on the competition.

The presentation, is wrapped up by a small discussion about the competition conditions. Wolf gives the audience some description about the condition of the TAC competition (The rounds, the finalists, etc.).