Saskatchewan The explosion of the Internet and the development of enabling technologies such as Java have provided the opportunity for the development of exciting new types of applications which were not previously possible. One of the most exciting new technologies which is now achievable is Mobile Agents. Rather than traditional client-server architectures, Mobile Agents are autonomous software entities that can perform tasks on behalf of human users or other software entities but are also able to migrate during execution from machine to machine within a computer network. Mobile Agents may dynamically move to a machine with specialized computing resources to improve performance, move to a data source to reduce network traffic, or distribute themselves throughout the network to increase fault tolerance.
Mobility also facilitates asynchronous interaction between the user and the network.
Mobile Agents are also a valuable tool in areas such as network management and telecommunication service deployment. One very interesting aspect of Mobile Agents is to perform all these functions adaptively, changing their behaviour during execution according to the demands of their tasks and the distributed computing environment. The first day will provide a full-day tutorial on Mobile Agents. We are very pleased to have Dr. George Cybenko, a world-class researcher in the area of Mobile Agents, to present the tutorial and provide insights into the opportunities for the application Mobile Agent technologies. He joined Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering in the fall of 1992.