Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands. With an area of , Australia is the largest country by ...

, the Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute (Australian AI Institute, AAII, or A²I²) was a government-funded research and development laboratory for investigating and commercializing

Artificial Intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech ...

, specifically Intelligent Software Agents.

History

The AAII was started in 1988 as an initiative by the Hawke government and closed in 1999. It was backed by support from the Computer Power Group,

SRI International SRI International (SRI) is an American nonprofit scientific research institute and organization headquartered in Menlo Park, California. The trustees of Stanford University established SRI in 1946 as a center of innovation to support economic ...

and the

Victorian State Government The Victoria State Government, also referred to as just the Victorian Government, is the state-level authority for Victoria, Australia. Like all state governments, it is formed by three independent branches: the executive, the judicial, and th ...

. The director of the group was Michael Georgeff who came from SRI, contributing his experience with the PRS and vision in the domain of

Intelligent agents In artificial intelligence, an intelligent agent (IA) is anything which perceives its environment, takes actions autonomously in order to achieve goals, and may improve its performance with learning or may use knowledge. They may be simple or co ...

. It was located in the Melbourne suburb of Carlton before moving to more spacious premises in the city centre of

Melbourne Melbourne ( ; Boonwurrung/ Woiwurrung: ''Narrm'' or ''Naarm'') is the capital and most populous city of the Australian state of Victoria, and the second-most populous city in both Australia and Oceania. Its name generally refers to a metro ...

Victoria Victoria most commonly refers to: * Victoria (Australia), a state of the Commonwealth of Australia * Victoria, British Columbia, provincial capital of British Columbia, Canada * Victoria (mythology), Roman goddess of Victory * Victoria, Seychelle ...

. At its peak it had more than 40 staff and took up two floors of an office building on the corner of Latrobe and Russell Streets. In the late 1990s, the AAII spun out Agentis International (Agentis Business Solutions) to address the commercialization of the developed technology. Another company, Agent Oriented Software (AOS) was formed by a number of ex-AAII staff to pursue agent technology developing

JACK Intelligent Agents JACK Intelligent Agents is a framework in Java for multi-agent system development. JACK Intelligent Agents was built by Agent Oriented Software Pty. Ltd. (AOS) and is a third generation agent platform building on the experiences of the Procedura ...

. After the AAII shutdown, those staff that remained and the intellectual property were transferred to Agentis International.

Projects

This section summarizes a selection of the software and commercial projects that came out of the AAII: *

Procedural Reasoning System In artificial intelligence, a procedural reasoning system (PRS) is a framework for constructing real-time reasoning systems that can perform complex tasks in dynamic environments. It is based on the notion of a rational agent or intelligent agent u ...

(PRS) ongoing development and application of PRS in collaboration with

* Distributed Multi-Agent Reasoning System (dMARS) an agent-oriented development and implementation environment for building complex, distributed, time-critical systems. Developed as a

C++ C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...

extension to PRS. * Smart Whole AiR Mission Model (SWARMM) an agent-oriented simulation system developed by AAII in conjunction with and for the Air Operations Division (AOD) of the DSTO. * Optimal Aircraft Sequencing using Intelligent Scheduling (OASIS) an air traffic management system written in the PRS that accurately estimated aircraft arrival time, determined an optima sequence for landings and alerted operators as to the actions required to achieve the sequence. It was designed to reduce air traffic congestion and maximize the use of runways. A prototype was developed for

Sydney Airport Sydney Kingsford Smith Airport (colloquially Mascot Airport, Kingsford Smith Airport, or Sydney Airport; ; ) is an international airport in Sydney, Australia, located 8 km (5 mi) south of the Sydney central business district, in the ...

using dMARS called HORIZON. * Single Point of Contact (SPOC) was a system developed for

Optus Singtel Optus Pty Limited (commonly referred to as Optus) is an Australian telecommunications company headquartered in Macquarie Park, New South Wales, Australia. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Singaporean telecommunications company Singte ...

to assist customer service representatives to meet the objective to meet 98% of customer enquirers with a single point of contact with the company. The system was built using dMARS and involved a multilayer architecture.

Technical Notes

Over the course of its existence, the AAII released more than 75 of public technical note

This section lists an available selection of these notes. * * * * *

References

External links

AAII Website on the Internet Archive

Agent Oriented Software Pty. Ltd.

{{authority control Research institutes in Australia 1988 establishments in Australia Companies established in 1988 AI companies

History

Projects

Technical Notes

See also

References

Further reading

External links