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Octavio H Juarez-Espinosa
Scientific/Technological Specialist

Email address: ohjuarez412@gmail.com

Mailing address:
Carnegie Mellon University
Robotics Institute
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Jump to: Research interests | Labs & groups | Projects | Publications

My research interests lie primarily in the areas of information visualization with special focus on:

1. analysis of various domains for visualization design,
2. computer-human interaction in multiagent systems,
3. human-agents interaction,
4. configuration management of multiagent systems,
5. distributed computing,
6. pervasive computing,
7. software tools to support environmental managers.

Domain Analysis for Visualization Design

Specifically, I am interested in researching analysis of domains, such as multi-agent systems, environmental systems, etc., in order to produce user models and domain models that allow designers to create user-centered software tools.

Some of my particular research interests consist of:

1. Models to represent domains and user tasks,
2. Methods to translate domain representations into software design and graphic user interface designs,
3. Methods to design and evaluate visualization techniques based on user tasks,
4. Models to qualitatively evaluate software solutions introduced to support user tasks, comparing tasks performed with and without software solutions,
5. Representation of user tasks requiring decision-making or other knowledge that is non-procedural.

I have been working on Economic Input Output systems (EIO), introducing user-centered software tools to support environmental managers in tasks such as environmental life-cycle assessment (Life Cycle Analysis--LCA). EIO-LCA, a software tool including visualization modules to support problem formulation tasks and result analysis tasks, was developed based on the user tasks and the domain models.

Visualization of Management Information of MultiAgent Systems

My work includes designing and building graphic interfaces that make it easy to create and launch multi-agents systems. I am studying network management, distributed computing and configuration management in the context of multi-agent systems. With user models, the Retsina team will build a software tool with graphic interfaces (including information visualization) that make the job of creating and launching a multi-agent system easier to users. Some of the issues addressed with graphic interfaces, are:

1. visualization of agent communities,
2. visualization of network resources,
3. monitoring of multi-agent applications,
4. visualization of agent repositories (visualized storage of agents),
5. reconfiguration of multi-agent systems,
6. debugging of multi-agent applications.

Configuration Management of Multi-agent Systems

We are designing models that allow users to configure multi-agent applications. The models being developed include agent software consistency checking. Network manager models and agent repository models help to define the consistency of configuration models. The network model provides users information about hardware and software resources available on the network. The agent repository allows users to understand the functionality of agents and other features such as ontology and languages.

• Project LISTEN - Literacy/Language/Learning Innovation/Instruction that Speech Technology ENables

• Adaptive Interoperability of Multiple Heterogeneous Agents - To enable requester agents to find provider agents in environments with heterogeneous and dynamic information services, we have developed middle agents which serve to increase agent interoperability.
• Agent Storm - Agent Storm is a scenario where agents autonomously coordinate their team-oriented roles and actions while executing a mission.
• RETSINA Configuration Manager - We present the RETSINA Configuration Manager, RECoMa, which uses agent infrastructure to assist the multi-agent system administrator in allocating, launching, and monitoring a heterogeneous distributed agent system.
• Reusable Environment for Task Structured Intelligent Network Agents - An architecture for developing distributed intelligent software agents that cooperate asynchronously to perform goal-directed information retrieval and information integration in support of a varie

Note: This list may not be comprehensive. It contains only those publications in the RI publications database. Entries are listed in reverse chronological order.

• Configuration Management for Multi-Agent Systems
  J.A. Giampapa, O.H. Juarez-Espinosa, and K. Sycara
  The 5th International Conference on Autonomous Agents (Agents 2001), Association for Computing Machinery, 1515 Broadway, New York, NY, 10036, USA, June, 2001, pp. 230-231. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [68 KB], ps.gz [45 KB] copyrighted

• SageBook: Searching Data-Graphics by Content
  M. Chuah, S.F. Roth, J. Kolojejchick, J. Mattis, and O.H. Juarez-Espinosa
  Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, May, 1995, pp. 338-345.
  Download: pdf [0 KB], ps.gz [880 KB] copyrighted