1. ACM Computing Reviews Best of 2013 (please see article entitled, "An augmented EDA with dynamic diversity control and local neighborhood search for coevolution of optimal negotiation strategies.")
2. Spotlight Paper in IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, article title: "Agent-based Cloud Computing".
3. No. 4 Most Popular Article in IEEE Xplore out of over 3.76 million articles. (please see article entitled, "Agent-based Cloud Computing")
4. No. 1 Most Popular Paper in IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, article title: "Agent-based Cloud Computing".
5. No. 1 Most Popular Paper in IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics (please see paper entitled, "Complex and Concurrent Negotiation for Multiple Interrelated e-Markets.")
6. No. 3 Most Popular Paper in IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing (please see paper entitled, "Agent-based Interactions and Economics Encounters in an Intelligent InterCloud.")
7. No. 5 Most Popular Paper in IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Part A (please see paper entitled, "Ant Colony Optimization for routing and load-balancing: survey and new directions.")
Senior & Notable Editorial Appointments
1. Associate Editor-in-Chief of Springer's Applied Intelligence Journal featured by Science Watch
2. Associate Editor of Three Top IEEE Transactions:
Research Interests
1. Agent-based Cloud Computing/Intelligent Cloud Computing
2. Automated Negotiation
3. Game-theoretic Analyses of Multiagent Systems
4. Agent-mediated e-Commerce and Cloud Commerce
5. Agent-based Information Retrieval and Search Engine
6. Ant Colony Optimization (Past Work)
Agent-based Cloud Computing/Intelligent Cloud Computing
Agent-based Cloud computing is a body of works involving the construction of agents for bolstering discovery, negotiation, composition, scheduling and workflow of Cloud resources.
Professor Benjamin Kwang Mong Sim is a pioneer and a leading researcher in intelligent Cloud computing. He is the first to coin the terms "Cloud intelligence", "agent-based Cloud computing", and "intelligent InterCloud".
His paper entitled "Agent-based Interactions and Economic Encounters in an Intelligent InterCloud" was the No. 3 Most Popular Paper in IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing in September 2015.
In 2009, he introduced an agent-based paradigm for constructing tools and testbeds for Cloud commerce. His article on "Agent-based Cloud Computing" has been selected as the Spotlight Paper of the October-December 2012 issue of the IEEE Transactions on Services Computing - one of the leading IEEE journals focusing on Cloud computing. In 2012, the IEEE Transactions on Services Computing was listed as one of the top IEEE Journals and ranked 5th out of 105 journals in computer science-software engineering. In addition, Professor Sim's Spotlight article was also the No. 1 Most Popular Article in the IEEE Transactions on Services Computing for 33 consecutive months since January 2013. As of October 2015, it has over 20,000 downloads and it was the 4th most popular article among over 3.76 millions articles (3,757,883 articles as of June 16, 2014) in IEEE Xplore
Professor Sim's vision of developing an intelligent InterCloud populated by a society of intelligent agents is described in his article entitled "Cloud Intelligence: Agents within an InterCloud", published in the Awareness Magazine: The official magazine for Future and Emerging Technologies Proactive Initiative, funded by the European Commission under FP7.
In 2010, his research laboratory developed the first ever proof-of-concept prototype of a Cloud service search engine and his team won the Best Student Paper Award in the 2010 IAENG International Conference on Internet Computing and Web Services.
He is the first to introduce agent-based problem solving techniques for Cloud resource allocation. His joint article with his ex-postdoctoral fellow on "A Family of Heuristics for Agent-based Elastic Cloud Bag-of-Tasks Concurrent Scheduling" ranked 19 among the top 25 hottest articles in the Future Generation Computer Systems Journal - one of the most popular forums in Cloud computing.
In 2010, he also introduced bargaining (negotiation) as an economic model for pricing Cloud resources. His team has carried out case studies comparing his work on adopting bargaining as a Cloud pricing model with Amazon EC2's pricing models which was published in the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Part B - listed as one of the top IEEE Journals. He is also the first to introduce a concurrent negotiation model for simulating trading in a Cloud resource market. which was the No. 1 Most Popular Paper in the IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics in July 2014. Furthermore, in 2013, his work on devising a unifying Cloud negotiation strategy received the Best Paper Award in the 2013 IAENG International Conference on Internet Computing and Web Services.
Professor Sim has also contributed a large number of other journal and conference papers relating to intelligent Cloud computing, e.g., an agent-based Cloud BoT execution tool called "CloudAgent", a case study using agents for resource allocation in Amazon EC2, MapReduce, agent-based Cloud service composition, agent-based Cloud workflow, Cloud service discovery, etc.
Automated Negotiation
Negotiation (bargaining) denotes the process of two or more agents (with disparate interests) searching for an agreement on some issues (e.g., price and time slot), and the search process involves exchange of information, relaxation of initial goals, and mutual concessions. Automated negotiation among software agents is required in many different contexts in which conflicts and differences need to be resolved, e.g., e-commerce, supply chain management, resource allocation in Cloud computing and Grid computing, etc.
Professor Sim's research in automated negotiation involves devising optimal negotiation strategies and building software agents that can automatically resolve differences between providers (sellers) and consumers (buyers) by making concessions and reaching agreements on issues such as price and time slot. In the past decade, Professor Sim introduced many new branches of thinking in automated negotiation, including complex and concurrent negotiation (involving parallel negotiations among providers, brokers, and consumers in multiple e-markets), Cloud resource negotiation, Grid resource negotiation, relaxed-criteria negotiation, and market-driven negotiation. He also devised many novel approaches for finding optimal negotiation strategies.
Awards and Accolades
1. ACM Computing Reviews Best of 2013 (please see article entitled, "An augmented EDA with dynamic diversity control and local neighborhood search for coevolution of optimal negotiation strategies.")
2. No. 1 Most Popular Paper in IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics (please see paper entitled, "Complex and Concurrent Negotiation for Multiple Interrelated e-Markets.")
3. Best Paper Award. 2013 IAENG International Conference on Internet Computing and Web Services.
Surveys
1. K. M. Sim. Grid Resource Negotiation: Survey and New Directions. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Part C*, Vol. 40, No. 3, May 2010, pp. 245-257.
2. K. M. Sim. Unconventional Negotiation: Survey and New Directions. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Electronic Business, 2009, pp. 901-907.
3. K. M. Sim. A Survey of Bargaining Models for Grid ResourceAllocation. ACM SIGeCOM: E-commerce Exchanges, Vol. 5, No. 5, December, 2005.
Special Issues
1. Guest Editor: K. M. Sim. Special Issue on Game-theoretic Analysis and Stochastic Simulation of Negotiation Agents. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part C, Vol. 36, No. 1, Feb., 2006.
2. Guest Editor: K. M. Sim. Special issue on Learning Approaches for Negotiation Agents and Automated Negotiation. International Journal of Intelligent Systems, Vol. 21, No. 1, Jan. 2006,Wiley, USA.
3. Lead Guest Editor: K.M. Sim. Special issue on negotiation mechanisms for multiagent and Grid resource management systems. Multiagent and Grid Systems Journal, vol. 4, no. 1, 2008, IOS Press, Holland.
Game-theoretic Analyses of Multiagent Systems
Game theory is an appropriate mathematical tool for analyzing interactions of agents. Professor Sim's work on game-theoretic analyses of multiagent systems involves the mathematical analyses of interactions of agents in an intelligent InterCloud. He defined a new class of game that characterizes the formation of InterCloud coalitions, devised coalition formation protocols and strategies, and provided mathematical proofs to show that the coalition formation strategies 1) converge to a Nash equilibrium, i.e., a steady state in which each agent's action results in its best outcome and 2) enable the profit of an InterCloud coalition to be fairly divided among all members, i.e., each Cloud provider obtaining a fiar share of the profit that is equal to its Shapley value. Professor Sim's recent paper reporting these novel and significant contributions was the No. 3 Most Popular Paper in the IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing.
Professor Sim’s previous contributions focus on (i) proving both the sequential equilibrium and market equilibrium of market-driven negotiation agents as well as (ii) the Nash equilibrium of partially cooperative agents.
Special Issue
Guest Editor: K. M. Sim. Special Issue on Game-theoretic Analysis and Stochastic Simulation of Negotiation Agents. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part C, Vol. 36, No. 1, Feb., 2006.
Agent-mediated e-Commerce and Cloud Commerce
In agent-mediated e-commerce, software agents are used to automate a variety of tasks involved in the buying and selling products over the Internet, including product brokering (determining what to buy), merchant brokering (determining who to buy from), and negotiation (determining the terms of the transaction). Professor Sim's contributions in agent-mediated e-commerce include designing and developing broker and recommendation agents for bolstering securities trading, negotiation and auction agents for determining the terms of transactions (e.g., mutually agreeable price and delivery date), and price-comparison shopping agents.
More recently, Professor Sim designed and developed software agents for bolstering Grid commerce and Cloud commerce. Cloud commerce agents, including Cloud negotiation agents and Cloud service discovery agents provides business support for Cloud service management by automating the discovery and pricing of Cloud resources and establishment of service level agreements between providers and consumers.
Award: Best Paper Award. 2013 IAENG International Conference on Internet Computing and Web Services.
Agent-based Information Retrieval and Search Engine
Although Web users enjoy freedom of accessing information, they also face the challenge of retrieving, filtering and monitoring the ever-increasing and ever-changing information perhaps of astronomical magnitude. Professor Sim's work on agent-based information retrieval involves designing and developing software agents for 1) browsing and filtering information in multiple websites, 2) monitoring information in multiple websites, and 3) comparing product prices from multiple websites.
The problem in Cloud service discovery is to run a query against the Cloud services registered in a search engine's database by matching consumers' functional, technical, and budgetary requirements. Professor Sim's research laboratory developed the first ever proof-of-concept prototype of a Cloud service search engine consisting of a service discovery agent that consults a Cloud ontology for determining the similarities between providers' service specifications and consumers' service requirements.
Award: Best Student Paper Award in the 2010 IAENG International Conference on Internet Computing and Web Services.
Ant Colony Optimization
In ant colony optimization, Professor Sim's contributions include: 1) publishing a highly-cited survey paper (As of December 1, 2015, it has 483 citations since its publication in Sep. 2003) and 2) devising a multiple (parallel) ant colony optimization algorithm. Professor Sim's survey paper was the No. 5 Most Popular Paper in the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Part A in May 2015.
Selected Publications
K. M. Sim. Agent-based Cloud Computing. Special Issue on Cloud Computing in IEEE Transactions on Services Computing (IEEE TSC). VOL. 5, NO. 4, OCTOBER-DECEMBER 2012, pp. 564-577. (IEEE Computer Society). Selected as the Spotlight Paper of the October-December 2012 issue of IEEE TSC and was the No. 1 Most Popular Article in the IEEE Transactions on Services Computing for 33 consecutive months. and was the No. 4 Most Popular Article in IEEE Xplore out of over 3.76 million articles.
Download the supplemental materials here or at http://www.computer.org/csdl/trans/sc/2012/04/tsc2012040564-abs.html
K. M. Sim. Agent-based Interactions and Economic Encounters in an Intelligent InterCloud. IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing (IEEE TCC). Vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 358-371, July-September, 2015. This paper was the No. 3 Most Popular Paper in IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing in September 2015.
Download the supplemental materials here or at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/abstractMultimedia.jsp?arnumber=7005451&punumber%3D6245519
K. M. Sim.Complex and Concurrent Negotiations for Multiple Interrelated e-Markets. IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, VOL. 43, NO. 1, FEBRUARY 2013, pp. 230-245.
This paper was the No. 1 Most Popular Paper in IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics in July 2014.
J. O. Gutierrez-Garcia and K.M. Sim. A Family of Heuristics for Agent-based Elastic Cloud Bag-of-Tasks Concurrent Scheduling. Special Issue on Grid, Distributed, and Cloud Computing and e-Science, Future Generation Computer Systems, Elsevier. Volume 29, Issue 7, September 2013, Pages 1682–1699. Ranks 19 among the top 25 hottest articles in the Future Generation Computer Systems Journal.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167739X12000179
J. O. Gutierrez-Garcia and K.M. Sim. Agent-based Cloud bag-of-tasks execution. Journal of Systems and Software, Elsevier. Volume 104, June 2015, pages 17-31.
S. Son and K. M. Sim. A Price-Timeslot Negotiation for Cloud Service Reservation. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Part B. Vol. 42, No. 3, June 2012, pp. 713-728. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6108366
J. O. Gutierrez-Garcia and K. M. Sim. Agent-based Cloud Service Composition. Applied Intelligence Journal, Springer. April 2013, Volume 38, Issue 3, pp 436-464.
J. O. Gutierrez-Garcia and K. M. Sim. Agent-based Cloud Workflow Execution. Integrated Computer-Aided Engineering, IOS Press. Volume 19, Number 1 / 2012, pp. 39-56, IOS Press. DOI: 10.3233/ICA-2012-0387
J. O. Gutierrez-Garcia and K. M. Sim. Budget and Time optimization for executing bag-of-tasks applications in Cloud-computing environments. Special Issue on Advances on Intelligent Grid and Cloud Computing, Information Systems Frontier Journal, Springer. Vol. 13, No. 5, November 2011, pp. 693 - 719. Doi: 10.1007/s10796-011-9327-8.
B. An, V. R. Lesser, and K. M. Sim. Strategic Agents for Multi-Resource Negotiation. Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, Springer. Vol: 23, No. 1, July 2011, pp. 114 - 153.
K. M. Sim and B. Shi. Concurrent Negotiation and Coordination for Controlling Grid Resource Co-allocation. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Part B, Vol. 40, No. 2, Jun 2010, pp. 753-766. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=5299171
K. M. Sim. Grid Resource Negotiation: Survey and New Directions. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Part C, Vol. 40, No. 3, May 2010, pp. 245 - 257. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=5398959
K. M. Sim and B. An. Evolving Best-Response Strategies for Market-Driven Agents Using Aggregative Fitness GA. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Part C, Vol. 39, No. 3, May 2009, pp. 284-298. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=4810152
K. M. Sim, Y. Guo and B. Shi. BLGAN: Bayesian Learning and Genetic Algorithm for Supporting Negotiation with Incomplete Information. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Part B, Vol. 39, No. 1, February 2009, pp. 198-211. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=4695985
K. M. Sim. Evolving Fuzzy Rules for Relaxed-criteria Negotiation. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Part B, Vol. 38, No. 6, December 2008 , pp.1486-1500. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=4637292
K. M. Sim. G-Commerce, Market-driven G-Negotiation Agents and Grid Resource Management IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, Part B, Vol. 36, No. 6, December 2006 , pp.1381-1394.
K. M. Sim. Towards Complex Negotiation for Cloud Economy. Proc. 5th International Conference on Grid and Pervasive Computing (GPC 2010), LNCS 6104, pp. 395-406, 2010. May 10-13, Hualian, Taiwan.
K. M. Sim. Agent-based Cloud Commerce. Proc. IEEE International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management (IEEM) 2009, December 8 to 11, 2009, Hong Kong.
J. Kang and K. M. Sim. Towards Agents and Ontology for Cloud Service Discovery. Proc. International Conference on Cyber-enabled distributed computing and knowledge discovery (CyberC), Beijing, October 10-12, 2011, pp. 483-490.
J. Kang and K. M. Sim. Cloudle: A Multi-criteria Cloud Service Search Engine. Proceedings of 2010 IEEE Asia-Pacific Services Computing Conference, December 6 - 10, 2010, Hangzhou, China, pp. 339-346, available in IEEE explore, 10.1109/APSCC.2010.44
... the papers above are only a few among a very long list ...
Prof. Sim's other publications can be found in the webpages of his previous laboratories:
http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/ks472/publication.html
http://www.iis.sinica.edu.tw/~kmsim/
https://www.scholat.com/kwangmongsim
