Object: Ph.D Grant at the Montpellier Informatics Laboratory (LIRMM)
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> Title: Towards an agent oriented programming language
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> Laboratory : LIRMM- www.lirmm.fr 
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> Research Team : Kayou, http://www.lirmm.fr/kayou/
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> Supervisors : Dr. Abdelkader GOUAICH, Prof. Stefano A. CERRI
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> Contacts : gouaich@lirmm.fr , cerri@lirmm.fr
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> Duration: 3 years
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> How to candidate:
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> -          Send an email to 		gouaich@lirmm.fr  
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> 				or 		cerri@lirmm.fr 
> 		with your CV.
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> Deadline for completing official application files: 30 MAI 2008
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> Thesis description:
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> The research question of this thesis is about facilitating the  
> design the implementation of flexible and autonomous embedded and  
> communicating software systems by using the multi-agent systems  
> (MAS) paradigm. In fact, as a paradigm for building flexible  
> distributed software systems, multi-agent systems (MAS) define some  
> fundamental concepts such as: autonomous agent, environment,  
> interaction and organization and this thesis suggest offering MAS  
> design and implementation frameworks through a domain specific  
> language (DSL)
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>
> The state of art of agent oriented programming languages shows that  
> few programming models specific to MAS have been proposed and most  
> of existing languages have been deeply inspired by dominant  
> programming paradigms such as logic programming and object-oriented  
> programming. By reusing existing programming paradigms, some of  
> fundamental features of MAS are neglected or challenged. For  
> instance, autonomy of agents is seriously challenged when working  
> within object oriented or active objects frameworks.
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> Besides, concepts such as environment, organization, coordination  
> and dialogues are not explicitly reified as first-class entities  
> within the programming language. These facts contribute in  
> deepening the gap between the theoretical and conceptual MAS models  
> and their implementations.
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> The approach proposed by this thesis is to explicitly reify  
> fundamental concepts of MAS in an agent programming language. The  
> programming process can then be viewed as establishing an explicit  
> dialog between a programmer, playing the role of a controller, and  
> the software agent playing the role of an autonomous system to be  
> controlled.  This process is interactive: the (human) programmer  
> instructs the (artificial) agent how to behave in different  
> situations; conversely the artificial agent reports to the human  
> supervisor about its run time experiences.
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> The first stage of the thesis will establish the state of art of  
> techniques and theories used for specification and implementation  
> of MAS. The second stage will propose an agent oriented programming  
> language including its corresponding operational semantics.  
> Finally, a third stage will present an evaluation of the proposed  
> framework through experimentation within the domain of embedded and  
> networked systems.
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> Candidates interested by this thesis are kindly invited to send an  
> email in order to submit the formal application documents and  
> engage in the selection procedure.
>