4Lennie.nl

Hi All,

it has been a long time. A lot has happened in the last couple of months. Not to mention the fact that a lot has also been getting done :). I won’t share all of it here but I’ll give you the most interesting part.

A few weeks ago I gave a presentation at NASA AMES Research Center in California. This presentation would be about my bachelor thesis which I’m currently doing here at the Dutch Organization for Applied Sciences(TNO) in The Netherlands. The bachelor thesis involves helping to design a multi-agent system which will be used to support astronauts on Mars. It is called the Mission Execution Crew Assistant, or MECA. The project is still in its early stages and involves experimental research to refine the baseline requirements for such a system. In a few years they hope to have completed a basic prototype based using these requirements.

Together with two co-students I have been working on integrating an agent language called Brahms and a policy provider for multi-agent system called KAoS. As a sidestep, Brahms is a language that was being developed at AMES so coupling these two languages together was the focusing point for my presentation.

The combination of these two languages allowed for an interesting setup in which Brahms could be used to model the work practice of astronauts and other smart systems. While KAoS allowed us to specify several policies which ensured crew and equipment safety.

Currently we are working on the final stage of our project, writing up our report :(, but more importantly creating a Graphical User Interface which can be used in a human-in-the-loop experiment. This experiment will be useful to further refine the requirements of MECA.

The presentation went pretty well, it is not every day that I get to present my work to people at NASA. However nothing beats the awesome experiences that is called Google I/O, maybe more about that in some other post.

-Lennie