Dr Andre Meyer from TNO in Holland visits Meraka Institute

Dr Andre Meyer of TNO's Defence, Safety and Security in Holland is currently on a visit to the Meraka Institute, a national research institute managed by the CSIR. Among many other things, Meyer's section is working on applications of "distributed intelligence" (DI), which covers technologies such as multi-agent systems, bio-inspired computing and semantic networks. They develop and apply these technologies for crisis management, traffic control, compound security, network-centric warfare, intelligence, etc. The goal is to support human and automated sense- and decision-making in order to improve performance in critical situations.

Q: What is the purpose of your visit to the Meraka Institute?
A: TNO and the Meraka Institute have a shared interest in the application of sense- and decision-making technologies, albeit in different application domains. Nevertheless, we are both striving towards defining a generic framework that allows researchers all over the world to contribute to and use these technologies in an integrated way. No partner is able to cover all the aspects single-handedly, so collaboration is vital for defining a good framework and to enable its broad adoption.

Q: A year ago at the Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) Workshop held at the CSIR in Pretoria you presented a paper on Semantic Agents and Collaborative Decision-Making. Is this your area of expertise and how is it relevant to the SWE project?
A: Yes, indeed, these are my areas of interest. Both semantic agents and collaborative decision-making are important aspects of the SWE project. The explicit definition of semantics for sensor information allows software agents to support collaborative decision-making, i.e. decisions made by groups of people and agents operating together.

Q: How do you view the work done by Meraka's ICT4EO group, and how does it link with or underpin other similar initiatives?
A: The ICT4EO's work is exciting and ambitious. It is a great opportunity to stimulate the research field in such an open environment. Collaboration is required in order to achieve significant impact.

Q: Will Meraka Institute staff members be spending time at TNO?
A: We have no concrete plans yet to welcome Meraka staff to TNO, but I would enjoy such an exchange. I would like to take this opportunity to say thank you very much for the opportunity to contribute to this exciting initiative, and in particular, thanks to Andrew Terhorst for his generous support.

Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are used in many applications, although not always visible from the outside. On 31 May 2006, Meyer will give a lecture to introduce the fundamental concepts of MAS and offer an overview of various aspects related to their development, such as modelling, simulation and platforms. He will talk about how a multi-agent framework will be used in the Active Sensor Web architecture. The event takes place at the Meraka Institute. For further information, contact Chetna Parbhoo

Meyer may return to South Africa in November this year to attend an Active Sensor Web workshop.

Dr Andre Meyer from TNO with Dr Ingo Simonis of the University of Münster (acting leader of the ICT4EO research group)

News supplied by: Biffy van Rooyen