I wrote this paper as a student of the course of Software Engineering at Politecnico di Milano taught by Prof. Carlo Ghezzi. The following is the abstract of the article:
Factors like the interconnection, the heterogeneity and the high dynamism characterize ICT systems like software, services or nets. The management of such systems, consequently, becomes particularly complex and expensive. The autonomic computing defines an architecture which promises to pull down costs of maintenance of ICT systems defining an architecture in which each entity can self-repair, self-configure, self-optimize and self-protect itself. This paper represents an overview of the new paradigm, in which we go through the definition of the conceptual elements of the architecture, the standards, the technologies available and some examples of applications.
Sorry this article is available only italian.

Autonomic Computing

I completed a presentation for the course of Robotics 1 at Politecnico di Milano with the Prof. Gini Giuseppina. I worked on an implementation of the Q-Learning for the Lego Mindstorms.


Download the slides in english!

Robotics 1 Cioffi

Me and my friend (Guglielmo Roelfsema) have presented a seminar for the course of Robotics II, with Prof. Gini Giuseppina at Politecnico di Milano.
In this work, we have used Lego Mindstorms to realise a robot that can stand-up using dynamic control theory, balancing the gravity force using motors. It was really cool and very funny to see that our robot moves without falling down. Anyway, this is only a prototype…

Download the slides and the video!

	Robotics Cioffi-Roelfsema
	Robotics Cioffi-Roelfsema (DivX video)

A. Omicini, A. Ricci, M. Viroli, M. Cioffi, G. Rimassa
Multi-agent Infrastructures for Objective and Subjective Coordination
Journal of Applied Artificial Intelligence 18(9/10). Taylor & Francis, October/December 2004.

Abstract:
Coordination in MAS can be conceived as either an agent activity (the subjective viewpoint) or an activity over agents (the objective viewpoint). The two viewpoints have generated two diverging and often contrasting lines of research, as well as different and non-compatible technologies: however, their integration is mandatory for modelling and engineering complex MAS. In this paper, we explore the issue of integration at both the model and the technology levels.
First, by taking FIPA agents and coordination artifacts as reference notions for subjective and objective approaches, respectively, we sketch a framework where agent interactions with coordination artifacts are modelled as physical acts, deliberated and executed by agents analogously to communicative actions. Then, we show how the JADE infrastructure for FIPA-compliant agents, and the TuCSoN infrastructure providing agents with coordination artifacts can be integrated at the technology level, allowing JADE agents to access TuCSoN tuple centres through JADE services.

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