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Space Science

Intelligent Agents And Robotic Telescopes 67

Posted by timothy from the spider-rose dept.
dpp writes "Astronomers working on the eSTAR Project have used software "Intelligent Agents" to control the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope and observe a dwarf nova. One of the astronomers says "The Agents can detect and respond to the rapidly changing universe faster than any human... [they] can be used to assist human observers, instead of replacing them entirely - augmenting their abilities to do science quicker, faster, and more reliably." Next up: getting results sent automatically to your 2.5G/3G mobile phone (with images!), and deploying on more telescopes including the Liverpool Telescope and the Faulkes Telescopes. The full story is at the Joint Astronomy Centre."
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Intelligent Agents And Robotic Telescopes More

Intelligent Agents And Robotic Telescopes

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  • I claim this article... (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    in the name of the hackingthemainframe hard drives! http://hackingthemainframe.com
  • Didn't we learn from the terrible mistakes of Agent Smith?

  • Agent's seem to be in the news.

    There's also an article [economist.com] in the Economist about using "agents" to model economic and social systems.

    So the question is: to what extent are these "agent" systems something new, and to what extent is it just re-packaging and/or hype?

    • The rabbit hole [microsoft.com] goes deeper than you can imagine.
    • It'll be something new and interesting the day the agents start formulating their own ideas about why something is happening in the sky, and then decided to let us mere mortals in on the secret.
    • Here is what an agent is:

      An agent is made up of Sensors (which receive data from the outside world, be it physical or digital eg a camera on a robot), Actors (means by which it can change the world in some way eg wheels on a robot) percept history (things it has perceived in the past), and an algorithm for using its percept history to decide how to act to maximize its "utility" which is determined by a scoring mechanism designed by the programmer. In this way you can program autonomous objects (or robots

      • Here is what an agent is: An agent is made up of Sensors...

        Err, no. Loosely, an agent is a computational entity which:

        • Acts on behalf of another entity in an autonomous fashion.
        • Performs its actions with some level of proactivity and/or responsiveness.
        • Exhibits some level of the key attributes of learning, co-operation and mobility.

        See "Software Agents: A Review", 1997, Green S., Hurst L., Nangle B, Cunningham P., Somers F., Evans R. for more details.

        Al.

        • Err, no.

          Loosely, an agent is whatever the person writing about agents decides it to be within the given context.

          There is no consensus about what agents are.

          For some, it's about perceptors, plans and things that are perceived. For others, it's about beliefs, desires and intentions. For others it's about autonomous systems with a certain level of intentionality. For others it's just about active objects that can be mobile and communicate through some intermediate language. And yet for others it's just an a

    • Agent technology isnt all that new. I did a small research project / paper on them in my undergraduate years. Various military bodies have been using them for ages for modeling purposes.

      I think, the reason they are becoming popular again is processing power. We have grunty computer power now on the cheap as well as more intelligent programming languages (well, let me rephrase, languages that allow for quicker prototyping) thus agents have come back into play again.

      Basically, all an agent is (yes, they a

    • As a discipline within artificial intelligence, (multi-)agent systems are about fifteen years old, although they have roots in the distributed artificial intelligence discipline from some years beforehand.

      A seminal early paper that gives an overview of the discipline is M. Wooldridge and N.R. Jennings Intelligent Agent: Theory and Practice, The Knowledge Engineering Review, 10 (2), pp. 115-152, 1995. (postscript [soton.ac.uk]). Other good sources are the proceedings of the main conference series on agents, AAMAS [aamas-conference.org].

  • Wonder how the agents decide if something is interesting or not?

    Maybe this technology will automate slashdot moderation someday ;)

    • Re:Interesting? (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      eStar's targets are things that change radically in brightness. Intesting = variable, whereas most of the objects in the sky have constant brightness. The agents take pictures at intervals and check relative brightnesses against on-line catalogues of celestial objects.

  • Intelligent? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 15, 2003 @04:06AM (#7217276)
    I wish they would stop calling these things intelligent. It's clever programming, yielding programs that act more or less like a human would in a very limited domain. These programs don't have general learning capability and they don't improvise if conditions change beyond what they were designed for, things any intelligent entity should be capable of IMHO.

    Lourens
    • Like talkagent [sf.net]?

      I wish someone could help me with the project....

      ----
      OK, computer
    • Serious question. Searching the entire site, there's no explanation of how these agents are programmed, whether they use AI, or what approach to analyzing the data are used that makes these agents better.

      Anybody got a link?

      • www.cougaar.org was where my project team found the documentation and details on the Cougaar architecture. there are also several other architectures, I believe, as the technology is still very fledgling.

        It's fascinating stuff, though, because it basically takes the human repetition out of things. For example, if you find yourself making a lot of similar software packages, all slightly different, but similar in key, identifiable ways, agents would be a good framework to do that in. There's nothing an ag
    • I wouldn't necessarily say they're not intelligent, right now they do work in restricted domains, but it's a good starting point.

      intelligent agents are designed to come up with their own contingency plans, and once they can do that reliably we can expand the domains.
      for example, when wright brothers had their first flight, they didn't stop there because they thought, "well gee, there's not much use in flying a plane for 12 seconds".

      all you need is a good starting point from which to improve and expand.
    • These programs don't have general learning capability and they don't improvise if conditions change beyond what they were designed for, things any intelligent entity should be capable of IMHO.

      The specifics to various agent architectures will vary wildly, but with my own experience with the Cougaar architecture, the agents are designed to a cognitive model, where they receive a task, break it up into smaller sub-tasks, assign the tasks to whatever other agents are necessary for the accomplishment of the ta

  • Nostalgia trip (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Max Romantschuk ( 132276 )
    Way back in 95(ish) I remeber this "intelligent agent" app, called Rover if I remeber correctly. It was suppose to help you searching the web (ah, the pre Google days).

    You could enter criteria, it'd crawl and you could rate the results, so it would learn to do it's thing better...

    The thing never really worked though, and I'm still waiting for my voice activated, "Grab me some information on stellar physics, and compile into a simple tutorial please." -style agent.

    OK, I'm sort of off topic here, but still
  • That press release is seriously lacking in substantive content. Yawn....

  • kepler (Score:3, Informative)

    by IAR80 ( 598046 ) on Wednesday October 15, 2003 @04:25AM (#7217325) Homepage
    This sounds like a very good aplication for the Kepler mission in detecting extrasolar planets. http://www.kepler.arc.nasa.gov/

  • From the article... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by RyoSaeba ( 627522 )

    Next up: getting results sent automatically to your 2.5G/3G mobile phone (with images!)

    Is this so urgent AND important results can't wait?
    I mean, yes nice to have that pic right away, but are you gonna rush to work because some nice results came in? or do you decide it can wait till tomorrow and regular hour days?

    Jeez, i don't mind technology, but this myth of 'everything right now, even if it's ultimately not that urgent and/or important' pisses me off...

    Yes, it's offtopic.

    • Hmmm. There is a practical reason why this is a good thing.

      Suppose you've got telescope time booked for observing a particular galactic cluster. But, for some reason or another, observations in that direction are being hindered (cloud cover, a nearby bonfire throwing off excessive heat, etc). Well the sooner you learn about it, the sooner you can offer that time to somebody else who's interested in a different area of the night sky.

      (Plus, if you're not already there, you can save yourself a pointless roun

    • Is this so urgent AND important results can't wait? I mean, yes nice to have that pic right away, but are you gonna rush to work because some nice results came in? or do you decide it can wait till tomorrow and regular hour days?

      It can be. Some astronomical events happen very quickly, reacting fast enough could make the difference between having no data and having something that could get you a nobel. Finding an exo-planet microlensing event, or a gamma-ray quiet gamma ray burster could make someones ca

      • I can see the benefit of an SMS telling you the event has occurred so you can get to a workstation and look at the raw data yourself. But surely sending the actual data to your phone is a little over the top?

        It wasn't clear to me from the article how much reduction these agents are doing to the telescope output, but I imagine there's a good deal of difference between what they are doing and the process you follow in a thorough post-event analysis of the images/spectra/etc?

        • Re:From the article... (Score:3, Interesting)

          by aallan ( 68633 )

          It wasn't clear to me from the article how much reduction these agents are doing to the telescope output, but I imagine there's a good deal of difference between what they are doing and the process you follow in a thorough post-event analysis of the images/spectra/etc?

          Actually, no. These days most of the research class telescopes (including UKIRT and the JCMT at the Joint Astronomy Centre in Hawaii) have real time data reduction pipelines. These output publishable quality data, the days of spending six

          • Actually, no. These days most of the research class telescopes (including UKIRT and the JCMT at the Joint Astronomy Centre in Hawaii) have real time data reduction pipelines. These output publishable quality data ...

            Is that from all instruments or just a subset? If all that's pretty impressive.

            the days of spending six months reducing your data after coming back from an observing run aren't over yet, but we're getting there.

            So what do your postgrads pretend to do now to cover up the fact that they're

            • Is that from all instruments or just a subset? If all that's pretty impressive.

              It's for all instruments. The pipeline (called ORAC-DR [hawaii.edu] can reduce data from IRCAM (infrared camera that was used on UKIRT until 2002), CGS4 (spectrometer on UKIRT), UIST (imaging spectrometer with IFU on UKIRT), UFTI (infrared camera on UKIRT), Michelle (mid-infrared imaging spectrometer on UKIRT and Gemini) SCUBA (submillimetre array on JCMT), IRIS2 (imaging spectrometer on the Anglo-Australian Telescope), INGRID (infrared cam

    • Many astronomical events, such a gamma-ray bursts and supernovae, last for a very short amount of time, so it is important to get any many people observing them as possible as soon as they are detected.

      Time is indeed of the essence.

  • UK astronomy... (Score:5, Informative)

    by WIAKywbfatw ( 307557 ) on Wednesday October 15, 2003 @04:46AM (#7217382) Journal
    It looks like the UK government is about to propose legislation that would combat light pollution. This would be great for all UK astronomers, especially those of us that live in urban areas.

    When I was an undergraduate at University College London, we had to trek up tok to the university's observatory at Mill Hill (as featured in the Omen movies), to do our Practical Astronomy classes and to use the telescopes. Previously though, although how far back in time I'm not certain, the classes were taught using two telescopes housed in domes in the university's front quad, which is practically in the middle of London.

    The difference in light pollution between the two sites is amazing. Making observations of Delta Cephi (as required for one assignment, to calculate it's period) was impossible from central London but acheivable even with the naked eye at Mill Hill. Even so, the light pollution there (Mill Hill being a part of London, albeit one that's a few miles out from the centre) was still appreciable.

    It would be nice to see the stars from London again, to be able to pick out more than just a few constellations. However, I don't expect the situation to improve any time soon, if at all. I have a sneaky suspicion that the legislation will be more concerned about people who leave their garden lights shining brightly into their neighbours properties than anything else.
  • ...agents were known as Daemons. Being faster in thought than humans and more devious, they were appropriately described by the term Diabolical.

    The machines have become more subtle in these end times at their method of controlling our minds by corrupting our language, recasting the diabolical daemons of the netherworld as the more politically palatable and iconographically hip Intelligent Agents.
  • Ok, Will we now see the Alien Invasion fleets faster?

  • The Agents can detect and respond to the rapidly changing universe faster than any human... [they] can be used to assist human observers, instead of replacing them entirely

    On August 4th, 1997, Skynet becomes self aware ...

  • You'll find some more details on my blog [weblogs.com] today, including a diagram showing how the eSTAR network operates. And you can find additional information in "Smart software watches the skies [bbc.co.uk]," also published today by BBC News Online.

  • Intelligent agents (Score:3, Informative)

    by James1980 ( 664606 ) on Wednesday October 15, 2003 @07:37AM (#7217843)
    Some of the below has been hacked from my thesis, so please excuse the lack of references (the citation have been deleted).

    When AI research began to consider the possibilities of distributed applications, the field of distributed AI (DAI) emerged. Within this field, there are three general areas: Distributed Problem Solving (DPS), Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) and Parallel AI. Agents in DPS are low-grain, often sharing common resources. Agents in a MAS are large-grain, having autonomy and heterogeneity and are typically based the psychology-based Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) model. Although the BDI model is considered a robust and flexible way of describing the internal state of intelligent agents, it is complicated and difficult to implement. This gap between BDI theory and practice means that the model has to be extended for the development of practical goal directed agents. Furthermore, there is no general architecture in MAS research. Consequently, MAS are complex to construct and are usually built for a specific purpose. They are heterogeneous, that is, an agent from one MAS is inherently incompatible with another MAS. The field of Cooperating Knowledge-Based Systems (CKBS) provides a general architecture for the development of real-world systems (for example, where database are heavily used), and inherit the benefits of DAI: modularity, parallelism and reliability (due to redundancy).

    There have been various definitions of an agent and agent-based systems. Norvig defined agents as intelligent entities that can be "viewed as perceiving its environment through sensors and acting upon its environment through effectors" Others view agents from a more practical perspective, as software engineering solutions to complex problems. The Oxford Dictionary of Computing defined an agent as 'an autonomous system that receives information from it's environment, processes it, and performs actions on that environment. Agents may have different degrees of intelligence or rationality, and may be software, hardware, or both.' The point has been made that, under the banner of 'agents', the research is truely heterogeneous.

    Four important characteristics of a MAS were identified by Sycara and these may be applied to the pragmatic CKBS perspective:
    - Each agent has incomplete information or capabilities for solving the problem and, thus, has a limited viewpoint.
    - There is no system global control.
    - Data are decentralised.
    - Computation is asynchronous.

    The InfoSleuth project stated that the use of agents provides a 'high degree of decentralisation of capabilities which is the key to system scalability and extensibility.' This is due to fewer resource limitations, fewer communication bottlenecks and the absence of a single point of failure. Furthermore, modules may be added easily, so the system is more scalable and there may be more than one agents able to perform a task; this redundancy begets reliability.

    Agents have been used in a wide variety of scenarios: manufacturing, telecommunications, air traffic control, information gathering. There are increasingly more companies involved in non-research agent activities, for example http://www.lostwax.com/.

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