The following section, Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Operations, provides an overview of the consolidated financial statements of Fujitsu Limited (the “Company”) and its consolidated subsidiaries (together, the “Group”) for the year ended March 31, 2008 (fiscal 2007). Forward-looking statements in this section are based on management’s understanding and best judgment as of March 31, 2008.

Annual Report 2008

We continue the work initiated in [1–3], where the acceptance logic, a modal logic for modelling individual and collective acceptances was introduced. This logic is aimed at capturing the concept of acceptance qua member of an institution as the kind of attitude that agents are committed to when they are “functioning as members of an institution”. Acceptance logic can also be used to model judgement aggregation: it deals with how a collective acceptance of the members of an institution about a certain fact φ is created from the individual acceptances of the members of the institution. The contribution of this paper is to present a tableau method for the logic of acceptance. The method automatically decides whether a formula of the logic of acceptance is satisfiable thereby providing an automated reasoning procedure for judgement aggregation in the logic of acceptance.

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Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies IV

During the past decade,social mechanisms have become one of the central issues in the philosophy of social science,and relevant research has witnessed significant advancements.However,the question of what exactly constitutes social mechanisms has not reached much consensus,and there is no shortage of conflicting views.Based on a survey of mechanism-based social science research,five characteristics of social mechanisms can be identified:(1) Social mechanisms are means for explanation.(2) Social mechanisms entail causality.(3) Social mechanisms are a response to,revision of,and refutation of covering laws in social sciences.(4) Social mechanisms have multiple levels.(5) Social mechanisms welcome conceptualizations and analyses of temporality.

What are Social Mechanisms

Developing multi-agent systems with a FIPA-compliant agent framework

Privacy has been a concern for humans long before the explosive growth of the Internet. The advances in information technologies have further increased these concerns. This is because the increasing power and sophistication of computer applications offers both tremendous opportunities for individuals, but also significant threats to personal privacy. Autonomous agents and multi-agent systems are examples of the level of sophistication of computer applications. Autonomous agents usually encapsulate personal information describing their principals, and therefore they play a crucial role in preserving privacy. Moreover, autonomous agents themselves can be used to increase the privacy of computer applications by taking advantage of the intrinsic features they provide, such as artificial intelligence, pro-activeness, autonomy, and the like. This article introduces the problem of preserving privacy in computer applications and its relation to autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. It also surveys privacy-related studies in the field of multi-agent systems and identifies open challenges to be addressed by future research.

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A survey of privacy in multi-agent systems

Agent mobility is the ability of an agent to migrate from one location to another across a network. Though conceptually relatively straightforward, in practice security of mobile agents is a challenge: from transport layer security to preservation of integrity in open environments. This paper discusses the security issues involved and proposes protocols for secure agent migration. AgentScape, an agent platform for mobile agents, is used to illustrate the feasibility of the implementation of these protocols.

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Enforcing integrity of agent migration paths by distribution of trust

Multi Agent Systems (MAS) provide a useful paradigm for accessing distributed resources in an autonomic and self-directed manner. Resources, such as web services, are increasingly becoming available in large distributed environments. Currently, numerous multi agent systems are available. However, for the multi agent paradigm to become a genuine mainstream success certain key features need to be addressed: the foremost being security. While security has been a focus of the MAS community, configuring and managing such multi agent systems typically remains non-trivial. Well defined and easily configurable security policies address this issue. A security architecture that is both flexible and featureful is prerequisite for a MAS.A novel security policy enforcement system for multi agent middleware systems is introduced. The system facilitates a set of good default configurations but also allows extensive scope for users to develop customised policies to suit their individual needs. An agent middleware, AgentScape, is used to illustrate the system.

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Enforcing security in the AgentScape middleware

Designing a secure and reliable mobile agent system is a difficult task. The agent operating system (AOS) is a building block that simplifies this task. AOS provides common primitives required by most mobile agent middleware systems, such as primitives for secure communication, secure and tamper-evident agent packaging and agent migration. Different middleware processes can use AOS at the same time; effective security mechanisms protect AOS resources owned by different middleware processes. Designed as a portable and language-neutral middleware layer residing between the mobile agent system and the operating system, AOS facilitates interoperability between agent platforms and between different implementations of AOS itself. AOS has been implemented in both C++ and Java. This paper motivates the design of AOS, describes how AOS is used in a mobile agent system, and presents performance measures for an agent transfer protocol layered upon AOS.

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Constructing secure mobile agent systems using the agent operating system

Agent platforms designed for Internet-scale, open networks need scalable and secure location services for agents and services The location service based on the Fonkey public key distribution infrastructure presented in this paper has been designed and implemented for this purpose It is scalable in the total number of published identifier---contact address pairs, the number of updates/changes, and the number of agent platforms publishing and requesting contact addresses This system also supports a signing mechanism to authenticate the publisher of an identifier---contact address pair Experimental results show that the current implementation based on the Bunshin/Free Pastry overlay network exhibits good scaling behavior

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Design of a Secure and Decentralized Location Service for Agent Platforms

The Agent Operating System (AOS) provides the basic functio ality needed for secure and reliable mobile agent platforms: s upport for secure communication, secure agent storage and migration, and min imal primitives for agent life-cycle management. Designed as a layer between lo cal operating systems and higher level agent platform middleware, it support s interoperability between agent platforms and between different implementatio ns of AOS itself. AOS has been tested on interoperability, both with regard to dif ferent higher-layer middleware platforms and interoperability between two implem entations of AOS in C++ and Java.

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Reinier Timmer

Papers

Enforcing integrity of agent migration paths by distribution of trust

Enforcing security in the AgentScape middleware

Constructing secure mobile agent systems using the agent operating system

Design of a Secure and Decentralized Location Service for Agent Platforms

A Common Base for Building Secure Mobile Agent Middleware