In many dynamic open systems, agents have to interact with one another to achieve their goals. Here, agents may be self-interested, and when trusted to perform an action for another, may betray that trust by not performing the action as required. In addition, due to the size of such systems, agents will often interact with other agents with which they have little or no past experience. There is therefore a need to develop a model of trust and reputation that will ensure good interactions among software agents in large scale open systems. Against this background, we have developed TRAVOS (Trust and Reputation model for Agent-based Virtual OrganisationS) which models an agent's trust in an interaction partner. Specifically, trust is calculated using probability theory taking account of past interactions between agents, and when there is a lack of personal experience between agents, the model draws upon reputation information gathered from third parties. In this latter case, we pay particular attention to handling the possibility that reputation information may be inaccurate.

Assessment of programming courses is usually carried out by means of programming assignments. Since it is simple to copy and edit computer programs, however, there will always be a temptation among some students following such courses to copy and modify the work of others. As the number of students in these courses is often high, it can be very difficult to detect this plagiarism. We have developed a package which will allow programming assignments to be submitted on-line, and which includes software to assist in detecting possible instances of plagiarism. In this paper, we discuss the concerns that motivated this work, we describe the developed software, tailoring the software to different requirements, and finally we consider its implications for large group teaching.

The Procedural Reasoning System (PRS) is the best established agent architecture currently available. It has been deployed in many major industrial applications, ranging from fault diagnosis on the space shuttle to air traffic management and business process control. The theory of PRS-like systems has also been widely studied: within the intelligent agents research community, the beliefdesire-intention (BDI) model of practical reasoning that underpins PRS is arguably the dominant force in the theoretical foundations of rational agency. Despite the interest in PRS and BDI agents, no complete attempt has yet been made to precisely specify the behaviour of real PRS systems. This has led to the development of a range of systems that claim to conform to the PRS model, but which differ from it in many important respects. Our aim in this paper is to rectify this omission. We provide an abstract formal model of an idealised dMARS system (the most recent implementation of the PRS architecture), which precisely defines the key data structures present within the architecture and the operations that manipulate these structures. We focus in particular on dMARS plans, since these are the key tool for programming dMARS agents. The specification we present will enable other implementations of PRS to be easily developed, and will serve as a benchmark against which future architectural enhancements can be evaluated.

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MA-associated cardiomyopathy is characterized by severe heart failure and depressed cardiac function. The extent of myocardial fibrosis seems to predict the recoverability of LV function. Cessation of MA abuse is associated with improvement in cardiac function and symptoms, whereas continued MA abuse leads to ongoing heart failure and worse outcome.

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Virtual organisations (VOs) are composed of a number of individuals, departments or organisations each of which has a range of capabilities and resources at their disposal. These VOs are formed so that resources may be pooled and services combined with a view to exploiting a perceived market niche. However, in the modern commercial environment it is essential to respond rapidly to changes in the market to remain competitive. Thus, there is a need for robust, agile, flexible systems to support the process of VO management. Within the CONOISE (www.conoise.org) project, agent-based models and techniques are being developed for the automated formation and maintenance of virtual organisations. In this paper we focus on the former, namely how an effective VO may be formed rapidly for a specified purpose. q

Abstract. Both the scientific and business communities, which are beginning to rely on Grids as problem-solving mechanisms, have requirements in terms of provenance. The provenance of some data is the documentation of process that led to the data; its necessity is apparent in fields ranging from medicine to aerospace. To support provenance capture in Grids, we have developed an implementation-independent protocol for the recording of provenance. We describe the protocol in the context of a service-oriented architecture and formalise the entities involved using an abstract state machine or a three-dimensional state transition diagram. Using these techniques we sketch a liveness property for the system.