Software Freedom Day 2008

The 2008 Software Freedom Day event in Melbourne, Australia was held at The Hub@Docklands. The event started off with a breakfast for volunteers

Free breakfast for volunteers.

followed by the setting up of the venue itself

Setting up the venue.

A number of people from various organizations delivered talks during the day. Among them include

• Tyson Clugg from Melbourne Wireless
• Colin Jacobs from Electronic Frontiers Australia
• Kat Clancy from Deakin University on Library 2.0
• Brianna Laugher from Wikimedia Australia on “How Free Software makes Wikipedia possible”,
• Kathy Reid on “Free and open source software in education“

I gave a mini-talk on computer algebra systems in maths education

A mini-talk on computer algebra systems, in particular Sage. Thanks to Peter Baker for this shot.

More photos taken during the day can be found at Picasaweb or Flickr. James Collier has written about the event, commenting on its strengths and a number of shortcomings during the day. Overall, I think the event went pretty well for what it’s meant to do.

Multi-agent system development & framework

In developing a multi-agent system (MAS), we refer to relevant research papers for theoretical foundation. When it comes to actually implementing the MAS, we can use various frameworks to code the MAS. The Java Agent and DEvelopment Framework (JADE) is a FIPA compliant software framework implemented using the Java programming language. The source code is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) Version 2. Agents can be conceptualized in terms of the belief-desire-intention (BDI) model. The Jadex reasoning engine is a Java implementation of BDI for constructing intelligent software agents using Java and XML. Jadex can be integrated with JADE to endow software agents with artificial intelligence. Like JADE, the Jadex source code is released under the GNU LGPL. The Jadex project web site has a page containing a list of related frameworks and tools for agent construction.