V.S.Subrahmanian

           University of Maryland


I will present an overview of the IMPACT Project that provides a
platform and environment for agent and software interoperability.
After the quick overview, I will go into details about a concept
called Agent Programs using which, the way an agent should act in
various situations can be declaratively specified by the creator of
that agent.  Agent Programs may be built on top of arbitrary pieces of
software code and may be used to specify what an agent is obliged to
do, what an agent may do, and what an agent may not do.  I will define
several successively more sophisticated and epistemically satisfying
declarative semantics for agent programs, and study the computation
price to be paid (in terms of complexity) for such epistemic
desiderata.  We further show that agent programs cleanly extend well
understood semantics for logic programs, and thus are clearly linked
to existing results on logic programming and nonmonotonic reasoning.
provide a demonstration.  I will briefly describe two major ongoing
applications --- one for the US Army's "Virtual Operations Center"
logistics effort, and the other with a leading aircraft manufacturer
 to avoid the "Controlled Flight into Terrain" phenomenen which is the
leading cause of airline fatalities.  (This talk reflects joint work
with Thomas Eiter).