In
Australia, the Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute (Australian AI Institute, AAII, or A2I2) was a government-funded research and development laboratory for investigating and commercializing
artificial intelligence (AI), specifically
intelligent software agents.
History
The AAII was started in 1988 as an initiative by the
Hawke government and closed in 1999. It was backed by support from the Computer Power Group,
SRI International and the
Victorian State Government. The director of the group was
Michael Georgeff who came from SRI, contributing his experience with the
PRS and vision in the domain of
intelligent agents. It was located in the Melbourne suburb of Carlton before moving to more spacious premises in the city centre of
Melbourne,
Victoria. At its peak it had more than 40 staff and took up two floors of an office building on the corner of Latrobe and Russell Streets.
In the late 1990s, the AAII spun out Agentis International (Agentis Business Solutions) to address the commercialization of the developed technology. Another company, Agent Oriented Software (AOS) was formed by a number of ex-AAII staff to pursue agent technology developing
JACK Intelligent Agents. After the AAII shutdown, those staff that remained and the intellectual property were transferred to Agentis International.
Projects
This section summarizes a selection of the software and commercial projects that came out of the AAII:
Distributed multi-agent reasoning system (dMARS) an agent-oriented development and implementation environment for building complex, distributed, time-critical systems. Developed as a
C++ extension to PRS.
Smart Whole AiR Mission Model (SWARMM) an agent-oriented simulation system developed by AAII in conjunction with and for the Air Operations Division (AOD) of the
DSTO.
Optimal Aircraft Sequencing using Intelligent Scheduling (OASIS) an air traffic management system written in the PRS that accurately estimated aircraft arrival time, determined an optima sequence for landings and alerted operators as to the actions required to achieve the sequence. It was designed to reduce air traffic congestion and maximize the use of runways.[1] A prototype was developed for
Sydney Airport using dMARS called HORIZON.
Single Point of Contact (SPOC) was a system developed for
Optus to assist customer service representatives to meet the objective to meet 98% of customer enquirers with a single point of contact with the company. The system was built using dMARS and involved a multilayer architecture.
Technical Notes
Over the course of its existence, the AAII released more than 75 of public technical notes
[1]. This section lists an available selection of these notes.
Anand S. Rao; Michael P. Georgeff (1991). "Asymmetry Thesis and Side-Effect Problems in Linear-Time and Branching-Time Intention Logics". AAII Tech Note. 13.
CiteSeerX10.1.1.56.8036.
Anand S. Rao; Michael P. Georgeff (1991). "Modeling Rational Agents within a BDI-Architecture". AAII Tech Note. 14.
CiteSeerX10.1.1.41.3036.
Anand S. Rao; Michael P. Georgeff (1991). "Intelligent real-time network management". AAII Tech Note. 15.
CiteSeerX10.1.1.48.3297.
Michael P. Georgeff (1991). "Situated Reasoning and Rational Behaviour". AAII Tech Report. 21.
CiteSeerX10.1.1.50.789.
Current Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute
A research institute was newly named the
Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute (AAII) in August 2020. Formerly the Centre for Artificial Intelligence (CAI) which launched in March 2017, the Centre expanded into an Institute as a result of its rapid growth.[2] AAII operates at the
University of Technology Sydney, Australia. It has 35 permanent research staff, 8 research labs and 200+ PhD students. Areas of research include computational intelligence, deep learning, transfer learning, large-scale graph processing, autonomous machine learning, and brain-computer interfaces.
M. Georgeff, A. Rao, "
Rational software agents: from theory to practice", in "Agent technology: foundations, applications, and markets", pages 139-160, Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., Secaucus, NJ, 1998