ICINCO 2005
From Computing Project Repository
This is a very brief conference report. Mark presented a poster/short paper on cfengine as a multiagent software robot.
A full proceedings is available on CDROM.
This was a surprisingly relevant conference. I went to see what robotics can teach us about configuration management, and what we might be able to teac them. I found a lot of interest. The conference had two parts of special interest:
MARS - multi-agent robotic systems
- Here I met Keith Clark (http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~klc) of imperial college and his interesting language related work. We talked about examining the language design of cfengine, casting an expert eye over our models. He has interesting work which we should look at.
- I also met Joaquim Filipe - who works on the logics of agents, belief systems etc. He was keen to stay in touch -- he would be a great person to invite, linking together our group's work on logic and agents.
This part of the conference shows how logic and control systems fit neatly together and can contribute to system administration through agent behavioural models and language descriptions.
- There is an interesting and very friendly group at the Technion in Israel.
- Graph notions of "rigidity" and "persistence" used in metric constraint spaces mirror our work on "Promises".
Signal processing
Here there were many ideas presented that relate to anomaly detection. Signals could be digital or pseudo-continuous.
- Use of simulated annealing as a smoothing method on offline data. This is something that Hårek and Kyrre could/should collaborate on. Hårek has a lot of expertise in statistical mechanics.
- Independent component analysis, distinct from PCA. Is this a useable technique.
Open questions: people are good at doing off-line analyses, but can these techniques be translated into realtime methods?
From our side, cfengine was received with interest.
(Mark)