The Agents Laboratory specializes in Coordination and Resource issues in Parallel and Distributed Systems.  The goal of our research is to understand resources, their relationship with what we want to do (usually computationally), their ownership, and fundamental mechanisms needed for correctly delivering them when and where they are required.  The group works on both theoretical and experimental research, with applications in areas including Cloud / Grid Computing, Multimedia, Green Computing and Multiplayer Games.  Research at the Agents Laboratory falls into four broad categories:

Foundations We develop theoretical models and abstractions for understanding and building large-scale concurrent computations executing in open spaces with owned resources. The goal is to find good compromises between openness and allowing computations to execute in environments with manageable uncertainty.

Programming Languages We design programming constructs based on the theoretical work in order to improve programmability of systems. An important objective here is to have clean separation of concerns.  We search for principles and invent mechanisms for efficient implementation of the abstractions and programming constructs. 

Experimental Work We implement proof-of-concept prototype systems to support experimental work for validating analytical results and for guiding future work.

Applications We apply the principles and approaches developed in our research to identify and address resource concerns in a variety of application areas, including Cloud / Grid Computing, Multimedia, Green Computing and Multiplayer Games.