No abstract

As one of the tools for our mobile agent system, Aglets, we developed a desktop-like visual shell, called Bali, to allow natural and intuitive handling of mobile agents.By nature, however, mobile agents are autonomous programs. The speed at which an agent executes its own program is very fast in comparison with the speed at which humans operate. Therefore, it is hard for a user to control an aglet's behavior through a GUI that is extended straightforwardly from a static-object-based desktop to a dynamic-agent-based desktop. But if we renounce control of aglets, the significance of the desktop metaphor will be lost. In this paper, we propose a way of extending the desktop metaphor to an agent-based desktop, introducing, Bali as a visual shell whose design is based on two basic agent-specific concepts: hooking of agents' execution and separation of the executing environment by provision of multiple environments. As an example, we outline our GUI and its inner structure and introduce our system, Aglets.

This paper describes a way of extending the flexibility of example-based programming. The purpose of introducing such a programming style is to provide the user with a way of telling the system why and how he operates on it. This ability is achieved by introducing three mechanisms for target object specification, goal-driven execution, and parameter transfer by means of a clipboard. In the system, the user can specify the relationship between the application status, the target object, and the user operation. A flexible programming capability can be provided as a monitoring function for system support.Consequently, the user can apply the programming-by -example facility to any applications implemented on top of this system.

The concept of the interactive installation ThinkingGarden is described, in this paper. ThinkingGarden is a system to make experiences that people usually have in Japanese garden. Those experiences are provided as the cycles of awareness, thinking, and understanding.