Stuttgart, Univ., Fakultät Informatik, Studienarb., 1996.

Stuttgart, Univ., Fakultät Informatik, Studienarb., 1996.

Zugl.: Aachen, Techn. Hochsch., Diss., 2002.

Techn. University, Diss., 2005--München.

Zugl.: Paderborn, Universiẗat, Diplomarbeit, 2004.

Universiẗat, Diss., 2003--Tübingen.

In this exciting era of cognitive computing, conversational agents have a promising utility and are the subject of this thesis. Conversational agents aim to offer an alternative to traditional methods for humans to engage with technology. This can mean to reduce human effort to complete a task using reasoning capabilities and by exploiting context, or allow voice interaction when traditional methods are not available or inconvenient. This thesis explores technologies that power conversational applications such as virtual assistants, chatbots and conversational agents to gain a deeper understanding of the frameworks used to build them. This thesis introduces Foodie, a conversational kitchen assistant built using IBM Watson technology. The aim of Foodie is to assist families in improving their eating habits through recipe recommendations taking into account personal contexts, such as allergies and dietary goals while helping reduce food waste and managing grocery budgets. This thesis discusses Foodie's architecture and derives a design methodology for building conversational agents. This thesis explores context-aware systems and their representation in conversational applications. Through Foodie, we characterize the contextual data and define its methods of interaction with the application. Foodie reasons using IBM Watson's conversational services to recognize users' intents and understand events related to the users and their context. This thesis discusses our experiences in building conversational agents with Watson, including features that may improve the development experience for creating rich conversations. / Graduate

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-12T15:50:44Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 arquivo1986_1.pdf: 7023849 bytes, checksum: ba0e9dc1eb31198972dbb6ceaf580dba (MD5) license.txt: 1748 bytes, checksum: 8a4605be74aa9ea9d79846c1fba20a33 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008 / A engenharia de requisitos argumenta que, para o desenvolvimento de software complexo ser bem sucedido, é necessário que o processo de modelagem suporte mecanismos e ferramentas de rastreamento. Rastreabilidade de requisitos refere-se à habilidade de assegurar um alinhamento contínuo entre requisitos dos stakeholders e às várias saídas do processo de desenvolvimento de software. O processo de rastreamento de requisito descreve e segue a vida dos requisitos nas direções forward e backward (i.e. da sua origem, através do seu desenvolvimento e especificação, para sua subseqüente implementação e uso, e através de todos os períodos de refinamento e interação em qualquer uma dessas fases). Rastreamento de software é executado gerando, representando, armazenando e mantendo relações de rastreabilidade entre os artefatos de software tanto manualmente como automaticamente. Desenvolvedores de softwares têm usado agentes como uma forma de entender, modelar e desenvolver sistemas complexos mais naturalmente. Sistemas multiagentes (SMA) refletem a natureza descentralizada dos modernos sistemas distribuídos, dando suporte a situações dinâmicas e imprevisíveis nas quais se espera que o software opere atualmente, sendo apropriado para sistemas abertos nos quais seus componentes e padrões de interação mudam constantemente. O uso de agentes com uma maior dependência em conhecimento codificado, flexibilidade, adaptabilidade e autonomia, introduz novos desafios ao suporte de rastreamento de requisitos. As capacidades dos agentes e aspectos sociais devem ser consideradas. Uma contribuição neste campo é Tropos, um framework usado para modelar sistemas multiagentes. Ele faz uso das abstrações e conceitos das disciplinas organizacional e social para entender, modelar, analisar e projetar. Assim, Tropos fornece uma maior flexibilidade, e um conjunto de construtores de alto nível para tratar com um mundo operando mais nos princípios sociais do que nas regras mecanicistas. A flexibilidade, a adaptabilidade e a autonomia introduzidas pelos MAS apresentam novos desafios para as abordagens de rastreabilidade atuais. Nós advogamos que um modelo e um processo de rastreamento específico devem ser usados para tratar as necessidades específicas de um SMA de forma satisfatória. Nesta tese, nós propomos um Metamodelo de Rastreamento para facilitar a identificação das novas relações necessárias ao paradigma de agent system, the individual issues of each agent and their social aspects as well as the impact analysis when changes happen. The DBSitter-AS example will be used to illustrate how our proposal captures agent characteristics such as autonomy and cooperation

M.Sc. / Advancements in technology used in financial markets have led to substantial automation of tasks within the financial industry. Data analysis, trade execution and trade processing have been automated, reducing costs and increasing productivity. Algorithmic trading is the automated execution of trades on an electronic trading platform; it has been used to gain competitive advantage in financial markets since the early 1990s. Algorithmic trading applications, which must analyse information and determine whether to buy or sell, are well suited to the use of autonomous software agents. Multi-agent systems are better suited to the increasing complexity of algorithmic trading systems and the flexibility required by rapidly changing markets than single-agent systems. The granularity of components (agents) in multi-agent systems also promotes reuse and simplifies individual agent design. Algorithmic trading is, however, subject to challenges specifically in terms of data volume, speed of access and speed of processing. In order to utilise a multi-agent system solution the interactions between agents which allow distributed problem solving must be as efficient as possible. This dissertation investigates the use of indirect coordination to improve the efficiency of interactions between agents in multi-agent systems and to simplify agent design. Indirect coordination utilises environment abstractions known as artefacts to facilitate interaction between agents; such interaction can be simple data transfer or requests, complex coordination protocols as well as negotiation protocols. The investigation resulted in a framework that allows agents to transition between direct and indirect interaction techniques based on the specific interaction task at hand. The framework is built on two existing platforms, ii Java Agent DEvelopment Framework (JADE) and Common ARTifact Infrastructure for AGents Open environments (CARTAGO). These platforms are combined into the JADE-CARTAGO Algorithmic Trading (JCAT) framework that provides the infrastructure needed for both direct and indirect interactions. Investigations into the performance of the JCAT framework have shown that artefacts improve interaction efficiency by reducing data loss in tasks such as information publishing, and perform as well as direct communication within certain constraints for other tasks. When limiting the number of agents in an interaction to 50 agents, artefacts perform at least as well as direct communication using agent communication language messages.

L'autophagie est une voie cellulaire strictement régulée dont le but principal est la dégradation lysosomale et le recyclage ultérieur du matériel cytoplasmique afin de maintenir l'homéostasie cellulaire normale. Des défauts dans l'autophagie sont liés à une variété d'états pathologiques, dont le cancer. Le cancer est une maladie associée aux modifications des processus cellulaires fondamentaux tels que l'apoptose et l'autophagie. Le calcium régule une série de processus physiologiques et pathologiques tels que le vieillissement, la neurodégénérescence et le cancer. Si le rôle du calcium et des canaux calciques dans le cancer est bien établi, l'information sur la nature moléculaire des canaux régulant l’autophagie ainsi que les mécanismes de cette régulation reste encore limitée. Le rôle de l'autophagie dans le cancer est complexe. En effet, elle peut favoriser à la fois la prévention tumorale et la résistance aux traitements. Elle est souvent détectée dans les cellules cancéreuses en réponse aux expositions aux rayons et la chimiothérapie. Elle semble contribuer à la résistance thérapeutique de certains cancers. Il est maintenant bien établi que sa modulation peut potentiellement contribuer à la mise en œuvre des méthodes de traitement du cancer. Dans cette étude, nos travaux ont permis d’identifier le calcium intracellulaire, comme un régulateur important de l'autophagie. Ainsi, nous proposons un lien possible entre le calcium, les canaux calciques, l’autophagie et la progression du cancer. De plus, nous avons mis en évidence un nouveau modulateur de l’autophagie, le ML-9. Cet outil pourrait cibler l'autophagie et être utilise dans le traitement des cancers. / Autophagy is a tightly regulated cellular pathway the main purpose of which islysosomal degradation and subsequent recycling of cytoplasmic material to maintain normal cellular homeostasis. Defects in autophagy are linked to a variety of pathological states,including cancer. Cancer is the disease associated with abnormal tissue growth following an alteration in such fundamental cellular processes as apoptosis, proliferation, differentiation,migration and autophagy. Calcium is a ubiquitous secondary messenger which regulates plethora of physiological and pathological processes such as aging, neurodegeneration and cancer. The role of calcium and calcium-permeable channels in cancer is well-established, whereas theinformation about molecular nature of channels regulating autophagy and the mechanisms of this regulation is still limited. The role of autophagy in cancer is complex, as it can promoteboth tumor prevention and survival/treatment resistance. Elevated autophagy is often detected in cancer cells in response to radiation and chemotherapy. Furthermore, autophagy seems to contribute to the therapeutic resistance of some cancers. It's now clear that modulation of autophagy has a great potential in cancer diagnosis and treatment. Our findings identified intracellular calcium as an important regulator of autophagy. We propose a possible link between calcium, calcium permeable ion channels, autopohagy and cancer progression. Further, our results revealed a new autophagy modulator ML-9 as an attractive tool for targeting autophagy in cancer therapy.