Thinking Networks - the Large and Small of it
I have written one book that looks at adding Artificial Intelligence to a network-like structure. The book is titled 'Thinking Networks - the Large and Small of it'. The topics covered span from large global networks to small local neural-like networks, hence the title.
The book covers areas such as the Internet/p2p/ mobile networks, SOA, Semantic Networks (Semantic Web, Ontologies, Web Services, Grid), AI (including Autonomous systems, Intelligent, Cognitive or Neural Network-like systems, and Bio-inspired networks), XML-based languages and query processes. It is available from different online stores and is also listed on the ACM portal. The technologies that are described in this book are also strongly related to the new 'Cloud Computing' architecture that is being talked about for the Internet.
The book is mainly a research monograph, but it also contains blue sky research suggestions and also some informative or teaching sections. It tries to cover research areas that look at adding autonomous or reasoning capabilities to information networks. It would be of interest to both academic or industrial researchers looking to build intelligent networks. For example, the telecommunications sector might want to add intelligent services to the Internet or a mobile environment. However, the architecture could be used to build networks that range in size from large Internet-based networks to small local neural network-like structures, and ultimately suggests an architecture on which to build a network that might even begin to 'think'. Some of the research has been proven, while the more ambitious claims or suggestions are for future research.
There is also a related open source software package (licas) written in Java that can be used to build service-based networks. The research page gives details of this package.
Book Summary
It is clear today how much people are dependent on digital information sources, where networks are the prevalent organisational structure. As this dependency grows then so will the demand for a higher quality of information, where we are now moving into a service-based environment. This book will describe different aspects of such an environment and is both important and timely for future Internet-based or mobile information networks. This book combines the topics of Artificial Intelligence, service-based systems and distributed knowledge management. It hopes to give a broad overview and introduction to various aspects of knowledge-based networks, with respect to existing mechanisms for representing and using such systems. After reading this book the reader should have a good idea of the sort of systems and algorithms that can be used to organise and use knowledge in today’s world and where we might be going to in the future.
The second half of the book will discuss some research ideas undertaken by the author. This is in the area of self-organisation and reasoning, through the bio-inspired method of stigmergy. The research will propose different levels of reasoning that can be performed over an information network and will ultimately offer an architecture that will allow the network to ‘think’. Similar techniques could also be applied to a local neural network-like structure.
Some of this work has been tested and conclusions can be made, while some is still for the future. This will hopefully provide useful research avenues for the interested reader to follow. There is also an extensive literature review and open source code with which to build service-based networks.
Read Online
You can read an online version of the book here.
White Papers
These papers give additional information and views of the research projects that have been described.