Tutorial 2: Mobile agents: communication, security and context awareness

Speaker

Dr Arkady Zaslavsky, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

Abstract

This tutorial will present the evolution and state-of-the-art of mobile software agents with specific focus on communication abilities and means of agent communication, as well as on agent security and the abilities of agents to work with context. We’ll discuss publish-subscribe mechanism as a scalable and efficient platform for agent communication in heterogenous environments. We will look at ways of protecting mobile software agents from host tampering as well as from other software agents. We’ll discuss the ways how mobile agents can work with context, sensing it, extracting it, manipulating with context and reasoning about context. We will conclude with presenting a few research projects in the area of context-aware mobile software agents.

Outline

1. Mobile software agents
2. Context-awareness
3. Agent communication languages and platforms
4. Security aspects of mobile agents and multi-agent systems
5. Bringing mobile agents and context-awareness together
6. Case studies and research projects

Intended audience

No prereqs. The intended audience includes postgraduate students, researchers and academics who want to learn more about context-aware mobile software agents.

Biography

Arkady Zaslavsky is an Associate Professor at Monash University, Australia. He is also an Adjunct-Professor at the Lulea University of Technology, Sweden.

He received MSc in Applied Mathematics majoring in Computer Science from Tbilisi State University (Georgia, USSR) in 1976 and PhD in Computer Science from the Moscow Institute for Control Sciences (IPU-IAT), USSR Academy of Sciences in 1987. Arkady Zaslavsky has published more than 170 publications throughout his professional career. He organised and chaired many workshops and conferences in mobile computing area, including "Mobility in Databases and Distributed Systems" and International Conference on Mobile Data Management, MDM2003 & MDM2005. He is an editorial board member for Elsevier journals "Computer Communications" and "Information and Software Technology". His research interests include mobile and pervasive computing; distributed and mobile agents and objects; wireless networks; distributed computing and database systems; distributed object technology and mobile commerce.

Arkady Zaslavsky has been awarded and involved in many research grants and projects including DSTC's "M3: Enterprise Architecture for Mobile Computation", "Context-rich mobile agent technology to support information needs of financial institutions", "ContextExporers: context-aware mobile agents", "Adaptive Distributed Information Services", "Mobile City" and others.

He is a member of ACS, ACM and IEEE Computer and Communication Societies.