Agent Neil - a computer-based creation by an NTU PhD student - scores in an international competition in Japan.

Undaunted by the fact that he was up against 14 research teams from prestigious universities and institutes at an international competition, Weng Jianshu, a PhD student from the School of Computer Engineering (SCE), gamely put his agent to work and trumped almost all his competitors.

Agent Neil was ranked second in the Agent Reputation and Trust (ART) Competition at the fifth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems (AAMAS) in Japan.

AAMAS is a leading conference in the area of agent technology and multi-agent systems, and aims to bring together expertise from international researchers in the field. The ART initiative was launched with the goal of establishing a test bed for agent reputation and trust-related technologies.

Since his second-year of PhD studies, Jianshu has been involved in trust agent research as a member of a national research project funded by the Agency for Science, Technology & Research (A*STAR). The trust and reputation evaluation metrics used by Agent Neil was proposed by Jianshu and his team comprising his supervisors, Prof Angela Goh and Asst Prof Miao Chun Yan from SCE, as well as Prof Robert Gay and Dr Shen Zhiqi from NTU's School of Electrical & Electronic Engineering.

A product of artificial intelligence and computer science, agents are autonomous problem-solving entities that can roam network infrastructures, adapt to changes in their environment, and interact with other agents.

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