2004 Asia Broadband Symposium on Digital City Collaboration

Towards Participatory Simulation in Digital City

Toru Ishida

Professor, Department of Social Informatics, Kyoto University, Japan

The research community tackling agents and multiagent systems has studied and developed various agents. Typically, personal agents belong to humans and help their users to operate complex computer/communication systems. In the area of multiagent systems, though computational agents are designed to interact (both collaborate and compete) with each other, interaction among humans and computational agents has not been studied intensively. In this talk, I focus on social agents that can be members of a human society: social agents support human-human interactions, while personal agents support human-computer interactions. To understand the nature of social agents, we developed a research platform to play with them. A scenario description language called Q has been developed for designing interactions among a large number of agents. Q scenarios can control various types of legacy agent systems such as virtual city agents. We started working on participatory simulation where humans and agents coexist in the simulator. This new technology is particularly useful for digital city simulation such as crisis management and transportation simulations in a metropolitan area

Toru Ishida a professor of Department of Social Informatics, Kyoto University, from 1993, a research professor of NTT Communication Science Laboratories from 1998, a visiting professor of Shanghai Jiao Tong University from 2002, and IEEE fellow from 2002. He was a visiting research scientist at the Department of Computer Science, Columbia University from, a guest professor at Institut fuer Informatik, Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Le Laboratoire d'Informatique de Paris 6, Pierre et Marie Curie, and Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, University of Maryland.

He has been working for conferences on autonomous agents and multiagent systems including MACC/JAWS (Japanese Workshop), PRIMA (Asia/Pacific Workshop), ICMAS / AAMAS (International Conference). He was a program co-chair of the second ICMAS and a general co-chair of the first AAMAS. He is an associate editor of Journal on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (Kluwer) and an editor-in-chief of Journal on Web Semantics (Elsevier). He started working on community computing in 1995. He is currently leading digital cities and intercultural collaboration projects in Kyoto. Contact him at ishida@i.kyoto-u.ac.jp. His homepages is http://www.lab7.kuis.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~ishida/.