The Finalists

CONSORTS (Architecture for COgNitive reSOurce management with physically-gRounding agents) is a new kind of agent architecture for Ubiquitous computing, which is designed to realize mass-user support in addition to conventional personal assistance. The key concepts in Consorts are "physically-grounding" and "cognitive resources”. By using sensory information brought by ubiquitous environment, agents have grounding to physical world and they are conscious of physical resources (especially spatio-temporal resources) in a cognitive way, i.e., they can recognize, reorganize, and operate raw physical resources as cognitive resources. Services realized in Consorts include 1) extension of conventional personal services using physical information such as position, and 2) mass-user support that realizes information providing and social coordination for mass-user as mass beyond personal support. Challenge of Consorts Architecture For the purpose of CARC (Cyber Assist Research Center, AIST) that pursuits human-centered information technology, we have been developing CONSORTS, an agent-based software architecture that mediates the real world and a digital world, for assisting human in accessing intelligent information services. The Ubiquitous computing emphasizes sensor-based physical information in the real world; the semantic web emphasizes ontological information resources in a digital world; Consorts architecture emphasizes harmony of the information between two sorts of the worlds. In order to bridge the gap between the digital world and the real world, the Consorts agents roam both in the Ubiquitous computing environment and in the Semantic web based Web services. The Consorts agent provides the context-aware assists over the physical-location-based cognitive resources and the semantic-information-based digital services, in the cooperation with the orchestrated agents that manage the both sensor information of the physical environment and ontological information of the web services. If participants of Agentcities provide our proposed services about location-based local information for Agentcities, an agent can access the real world information covering all over the world. It can also be a great demonstration of a capability of agents connected to open environments such as the Internet, Web services or Agentcities. From the academic standpoint of the agent research, our proposal can clarify a possibility whether Ubiquitous agents can be unified with open agent systems including Agentcities. Our challenge is aiming at achieving the paradigms of agents tomorrow: Agentcities, Ubiquitous computing, Web services and the Semantic web. Outline of Consorts Architecture The Consorts architecture consists of the following type of agents to realize the concept.