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CSC 791f: Advanced E-Commerce

Munindar P. Singh

Textbooks and software

The recommended books may not be of interest or need to every student. You should discuss your choice with me before purchasing unless you plan to purchase them anyway. The software to use will vary with the projects. Whatever is needed should be available on the Internet or in our labs.

Topics

This course will present advanced concepts in e-commerce from a computer science perspective. The following topics will be introduced in a tutorial early in the semester. Subsequently, there will be more detailed presentations and discussions of the topics listed as presentation topics below.

  1. Introduction
    1. Traditional information systems
    2. Open systems: distributed computing in the large
    3. Motivations for cooperation
    4. Varieties of agent applications
    5. Varieties of agents
    6. Varieties of multiagent systems
    7. Classes of abstractions
    8. Psychological abstractions, briefly
  2. Information Agents
    1. Mediators
    2. Directory services
    3. Information dissemination and gathering
  3. Heterogeneous Information Systems
    1. Legacy systems
    2. Workflows and relaxed transactions
    3. Schema and process-model integration and interoperation
    4. Ontologies and knowledge sharing
  4. Techniques and Architectures
    1. Description, decomposition, and distribution of tasks
    2. Interaction and communication among agents
    3. Distribution of control
    4. Itinerant agents
    5. Representation of system state and maintenance of consistency
    6. Formal methods
    7. User interface issues
  5. Challenge problems and issues
    1. Doing the "right" thing
    2. Shades of autonomy
    3. Conventions: emergence and maintenance
    4. Coordination
    5. Collaboration
    6. Communication: semantics and pragmatics
    7. Interaction-oriented programming
  6. Social abstractions and reasoning
    1. Commitments: social, joint, collective, ...
    2. Organizations and roles
    3. Teams and teamwork
    4. Mutual beliefs and problems
    5. Joint intentions
    6. Potential conflict with individual rationality
  7. Ethical abstractions and reasoning
    1. Utilitarianism
    2. Consequentialism
    3. Obligations
    4. Deontic logic
    5. Paradoxes
  8. Legal abstractions and reasoning
    1. Contracts
    2. Directed obligations
    3. Hohfeldian concepts: right, duty, power, liability, immunity, ...
    4. Following protocols
    5. Defining and testing compliance
  9. Status and trends
    1. Relations among the above classes
    2. Experimental work
    3. Challenges revisited
    4. Open problems
  10. Synthesis
    1. Example tools
    2. Lessons
    3. Common threads in problems and solutions
    4. Status and trends

Presentation Topics

The course will also involve presentations on assigned papers - again your suggestions are welcome - so if there is something you have been reading or are interested in reading and presenting, please let me know. These should be technical papers. Some preliminary topics are the following - there could be more than one presentation on a topic. Notice that some of the topics are general, but in this course we will emphasize the e-commerce aspects of each topic.

Grading

+/- grades will assigned. There will be a lot of work - please plan to spend about 11-13 hours for this course (outside of class) each week.
Component Points
Presentation 30%
Participation 20%
Project 50%

Prerequisites

The main prerequisite is instructor's permission, which depends on meeting several of the following criteria:

Watch the course home page http://www.cs.ncsu.edu/faculty/mpsingh/local/791f/ for updates.
singh@ncsu.edu