Research activities of Pietro Baroni

Multi-agent systems

The research activity in this area has concerned the study and experimentation of innovative architectures for multi-agent systems and of applications of agent-based systems.

Architectures for multi-agent systems

Investigation in this area has mainly concerned the study and experimentation, in a robot simulation environment, of an original distributed control architecture for an autonompus agent based on the notion of active mental entities. The basic idea consists in extending at the cognitive and motivation level the distributed control approach which has been successfully applied at lower levels of agent control architectures.
Two classes of active mental entities, called intenders and attenders, have been characterized and applied to simulated robot control.

Relevant publications:

P.Baroni, G. Guida, S. Mussi, A. Vetturi, A distributed architecture for control of autonomous mobile robots, Proc. ICAR 95, 7th Int. Conference on Advanced Robotics, St. Feliu de Guixols, E, 1995, 869-877

P. Baroni, D. Fogli, G. Guida, S. Mussi, Adding active mental entities to autonomous mobile robot control architectures, Proc. of 2nd ECPD Conference on Advanced Robotics, Intelligent Automation and Active Systems, Vienna, A, 1996, 142-148

P. Baroni, D. Fogli, G. Guida, S. Mussi, An advanced control architecture for autonomous mobile robots: modeling intentions and persuasions, Proc. of 4th ICARCV International Conference on Control, Automation, Robotics and Vision, Singapore, 1996, 853-857

P. Baroni, D. Fogli, G. Guida, S. Mussi, Active mental entities: a new approach to endow multi-agent systems with intelligent behavior, Proc. of MASTA'97 Workshop on Multi-Agent Systems: Theory and Applications, Coimbra, P, 1997, 1-15.

P. Baroni, D. Fogli, G. Guida, S. Mussi, Modeling the mental activity of an autonomous agent: an implementation based on intentions and persuasions, Proc. of Cybernetics and Systems 98 14th European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research, Wien, A, 1998, 737-742

P. Baroni, D. Fogli, G. Guida, S. Mussi, Active mental entities: a new approach to building intelligent autonomous agents, ACM SIGART Bulletin, 9 (1), 1998, 10-19

P. Baroni, D. Fogli, G. Guida, Learning plan applicability through active mental entities, Proc. of CASYS '98, 2nd International Conf. on Computing Anticipatory Systems, Liege, B, 1998, 143-153

P. Baroni, D. Fogli, G. Guida, Active mental entities: a step towards achieving agent autonomy, Atti del Sesto Convegno dell' Associazione Italiana per l'Intelligenza Artificiale, Padova, 1998, 231-235

P. Baroni, D. Fogli, G. Guida, S. Mussi, A multi-agent architecture based on active mental entities, Informatica, 22 (4), 1998, 475-484

P. Baroni, D. Fogli, Modeling robot cognitive activity through active mental entities, Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 30 (4), 2000, 325-349

P. Baroni, D. Fogli, M. Giacomin, G. Guida, Distributed cognition through active mental entities: an argumentation-based approach, Cognitive Science Quarterly, 2(3/4), 2002, 385-404

Application of agent-based systems

A preliminary investigation has been carried out concerning the use of an agent-based approach to carry out  the recognition of user interaction patterns and support a user-centered development of interactive systems. The approach has been implemented in a prototype and experimented both on stand-alone and web-based interactive systems. 

A multi-agent application supporting the distributed management of agendas and meetings has been developed in the framework of the PRIN project ANEMONE cofunded by MIUR.

Relevant publications:

S. Arondi, P. Baroni, D. Fogli, P. Mussio, Supporting co-evolution of users and systems by the recognition of interaction patterns, Proc. of AVI 2002 International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces, Trento, I, 2002, 177-186

P. Baroni, D. Fogli, P. Mussio, An agent-based architecture to support knowledge management in interactive system life-cycle, Atti del Workshop WOA 2002 Dagli Oggetti agli Agenti, Milano, 2002

G. Armano, P. Baroni, G. Cerchi, M. Colombetti, A. Gerevini, M. Mari, A. Poggi,C. Santoro, E. Tramontana, M. Verdicchio, ANEMONE - A Network of Multi-Agent Platforms for Academic Communities, Atti del Workshop WOA 2005 Dagli Oggetti agli Agenti, Camerino, 2005, 120-126