Introduction

The Intelligent Agents Group (IAG) has been in existence for approximately 10 years and much of its work to date has concentrated on the production of psychologically plausible intelligent agents. Projects have included deploying such agents in place of human players within large-scale simulations (e.g. ModSAF and JSAF), and designing and implementing an intelligent agent so that a pilot in a flight simulator can fly with this agent as a wingman, as opposed to another human pilot. Other projects have concentrated on reducing the cost of acquiring behaviours for intelligent agents and the use of agents in OOTW situations, as well as implementing decision support systems. Reports have also been commissioned from this group on such topics as the use of intelligent agents for tactical picture monitoring and alerting, and a survey of modelling technologies for OOTW.

A slight departure from this has been the recent EU-funded SCOUT project, which looked at the use of AI and agents as a possible solution to deal with the expected increase in complexity, from the user's point of view, of B3G devices, such as SDR. This work was directed towards the personalisation of the mobile device itself, by learning the user’s habits for using the device and the user’s preferences for certain network and operators, costs, and quality of services. Thus, the would fit the user's working habits rather than vice versa,

Publications

The IAG has produced around a dozen refereed conference papers and 14 internal reports for DERA, along with monthly and quarterly reports for the EU-funded SCOUT project, and final reports on this work for the EU Commission in Brussels and other FP5 funded projects.

Contributions to areas of research

Areas of research for the IAG have included: a novel decision support for naval command & control using cognitive modelling, the use of cognitive agents for OOTW mission simulation, flexible communication in agent teams, which extends the work of colleagues at the University of Southern California. Other work includes the use of intelligent agents for peace negotiation training, re-using knowledge for agent construction, the design and implementation of an intelligent agent as a wingman, user profiles for software defined radio, and the use of agents in reconfigurable radio.

Income Generated

The IAG has received continual funding from DERA, Qinetiq, and Dstl for eight of the 10 years, amounting to over £373,000 and EU funding of approximately €1000,000 (~£60,000), making a total of over £433,000.

Contribution to Other Groups

It can contribute to the work of other (possible) groups in CT, mainly Games, VR, and Intelligent Applications.