News

• First meeting in the spring semester AY2026: TBA

• Our open lab is scheduled on March 2nd and 3rd, 2026 for new 3rd year students (project research) and  new 4th year students (lab assignments).
      10:00 ~ 12:00, 13:30-16:30 on March 2
      13:30-16:00 on March 3
  You are welcome to come to the lab (55N-0502B) during these hours. The open lab will be held in person. (announced on Dec. 29, 2025)

• First meeting in this spring semester AY2025: Master's students enrolling in the spring semester of AY2025, undergraduate seniors assigned to our lab, and undergraduate juniors who have registered for project research in our lab will meet on April 3rd at 12:30 pm for the first meeting of this fall semester. The location is 55N-0502B. (Announced on March 2025) 

Introduction

Professor: Toshiharu Sugawara

The Intelligent Software Laboratory (ISL) explores the theory, development, and analysis of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems (or Distributed Artificial Intelligence) and their applications in various domains, including Internet and/or Web applications and multi-agent simulations. Please note that our laboratory is not engineering oriented and rather focuses on academic and scientific purposes.

Research on multi-agent systems (or Distributed Artificial Intelligence)is one of the active research fields in artificial intelligence (AI). Autonomous agents are intelligent programs that are capable of perceiving local environments and taking appropriate action to move toward their goals based on independent decision-making. An multi-agent system consists of loosely-coupled autonomous, rational agents capable of coordinated/collaborative actions to achieve individual or joint goals in cooperation with other agents. Research activities include a broad range of efforts to develop and apply this type of coordinated actions.

Our research topics include:

• Multi-Agent Systems

• Distributed Artificial Intelligence

• Coordination and Cooperation in Multi-Agent Systems

• Multi-Agent Planning (such as multi-agent path planning)

• Machine Learning for Cooperative and Coordinated Activities

• Negotiation in Massively Multi-agent Systems

• Effects of organizational and inter-agent network structures

• Swarm Intelligence

• Multi-Agent Simulations

• Coexistence of and mutual effects between agents (including people)

In particular, we have addressed the issues related with large-scale multi-agent systems: Although recent advances in Internet services, sensor networks, pervasive computing, and grid computing exhibit the need for multi-agent systems, they further require more sophisticated multi-agent system technologies for large-scale and busy environments. For example, e-commerce transactions, which frequently appear in the current Internet era, consist of coordinated tasks including interactions among a variety of agents in charge of customer authentication and management, stock management, shipping control, and payment processing. These kinds of tasks simultaneously and frequently occur throughout in the world. In sensor-network applications, agents reside in many sensor and computational devices and, in grid computing, many computational entities should concurrently process the assigned sub-problems into which a large computation problem is decomposed. In these applications, many of the tasks should be allocated appropriately to maximize the entire abilities of multi-agent systems, in order to realize efficiency and high-quality services.

We also think about the coexistence with computer programs that are deployed everywhere in the Internet, smartphone, and often home appliances. They affect each other at many levels of social activities. Taking optimal actions are usually good for individuals (people and programs), but may not be good from social viewpoints due to excessive/wasteful competition. We believe that socially harmonious coexistence between people and programs will be strongly required in near future.

If you are interested in studying our lab as a master or doctor course student, please visit this page.

The Intelligent Software Laboratory is part of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Graduate School of Fundamental Science and Engineeing at Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan.