navigator: home studies Building Intelligent Agents

General

Prof John Debenham teaches two lectures taking place at the same time: while one is called Building Intelligent Agents with a focus on postgraduate students, the other one is called Intelligent Agents In Java and is offered for undergraduates only.

There is no difference concerning the contents or marking scheme - both lectures are essentially the same.

Building Intelligent Agents

autumn semester 2004

I was allowed to develop any intelligent agent I like. Most students went for  RoboCode but I wanted to create something really helpful. So I ended up writing GnutellaWatch - a tool to monitor the  Gnutella network and an invaluable help for administrators willing to kick any peer-2-peer users in their company.

Yes, GnutellaWatch fights Gnutella.

Below are some screenshots of my program:

(click on an image to view it in its full size)

The  abstract:

In this paper, I describe an intelligent agent crawling the Gnutella peer-to-peer network in order to detect clients in a certain IP range. This tool is helpful for administrators trying to avoid wasting bandwidth due to peer-to-peer file sharing programs. Moreover, almost all files shared over the internet are illegal - like non-licensed MP3 music - which can lead to potential law suits. In the past years, security leaks are often found in various server programs. Peer-to-peer network established as one of the major sources for internet viruses and worms. On the following pages, I will evaluate the opportunities and challenges of monitoring the Gnutella network from the technical, commercial and social point of view. I describe the implementation of GnutellaWatch which is a easy-to-use Java program suitable even for personnel without a broad understanding of network technology.

The paper is available for  download.

Fair Play

Just a short reminder: these documents must not be used by current  UTS students (according to the strict rules of the university).

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